In a recent meeting I was asked “How can we create a quality prospectus, on a budget?”
How can we create a quality prospectus, on a budget? This is a question I get asked quite a lot, working in the education sector has its challenges, but being specialists we have created ways to create quality products to suit any budget.
With a lot of Schools being under tight budget constraints they often find it difficult to justify the spend on a new prospectus or website for the School. But School marketing need not cost the Earth and we work hard here at Lore Creative to come up with budget saving options but not compromising the quality of product produced.
In a recent meeting, when asked just how we go about achieving this goal, I set out some samples and explained that there are various ways;
• Firstly an important question is… digital or printed, or both! Many schools are now opting for a digital/online prospectus. We happily provide our clients with prices for all options and discuss what option would suit them best. Digital artwork cuts out the print costs obviously and is a great way to keep an update version online, but lots still prefer a printed option (this is a debate for another blog).
• Print finishes; shopping around between our suppliers allows us to do all the hard work for you and search out the best priced matt, silk, gloss or recycled stock you may be wanting. We use a number of FSC ascertified printers for just this reason.
• Advice on size; different size prospectuses will go through printing presses with a number of different pages to fit per sheet. The more you can fit on a printers sheet the more you will get for your money. We can advise you particular sizes to best to economise your print run. E.g. You might be able to fit x20 210x210mm square prospectuses to one sheet, but only x13 A4 landscape.
• Another option to consider to help reduce the overall cost is whether or not to have a glued Pocket/flap on the inside of the back cover of the prospectus? It used to be that prospectuses carried so many compulsory documents that a pocket came as standard, but nowadays more schools are opting to keep the policies online and remove the pocket to save a tidy amount of cash.
• Economies of scale are an important consideration and whether you wish to update the content every year and reprint or whether you want a prospectus to last 3years before being updated. We will work with you to discuss these points and show you costs for both options. Digitally printed prospectuses can be produced in shorter runs i.e.x200-x750copies, whereas quantities over x750 copies we would suggest litho printing. Digital print has improved rapidly over the last ten years and to the untrained eye you would not notice a difference anymore between the two.
• Our expert knowledge of the field; our dedication to working in education, allows us to offer our clients reduced billing hours as less time is needed to re-iterate school nuances, nicely keeping overall costs down.
If you would like to discuss any of the above please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us – we’d love to help!