WRC Publishing

WRC Publishing is a new advice tool provided by WRC. With the assistance of Katy Ladbrook, who has kindly volunteered her time for women's organisations, we are offering the free resources below for organisations keen to develop their publishing and campaigning materials.

On this page you will find:

• Hints and tips on developing and printing publishing materials
  
• Useful sites and companies to use
  
• Advice on how to develop the best materials
• Advice on web publishing

Our aim is to help your organisation to produce print and web publications which look great and make a big impact without taking a big chunk out of your time and budget.

Within this page we will give guidance and build up a stock of templates for leaflets, brochures, postcards, presentations etc. which you can just download and customise for your own needs. We hope that this will help you to save time to focus your energies on other business.

WRC Publishing will use simple solutions which won’t require specialist skills or software. We want to support women's groups to become more self-sufficient by providing sustainable publishing resources which can be passed from volunteer to volunteer and be used on basic office computers.

By collaborating we can benefit from shared costs and workloads. For example, one print job of 10,000 newsletters split between two designs is cheaper than two runs of 5,000. If several member organisations intend to produce a postcard on International Women’s Day they could all benefit from a bulk order and shared distribution. If you are planning a print job let us know and we will see if you could split costs with someone else.

A limited amount of volunteer time is available to meet the needs of member organisations requiring help with their web and print projects. A small charge will be made to organisations with a turn-over of more than £100k per annum.

For more information please contact our head of communications, Sarah Brown: sarahbrown@wrc.org.uk

Space and time is limited for this service so please be patient.

Print Publishing

Traditional, printed media is still effective and important but these days your publication has to compete much harder to stand out from the mass of marketing material out there.

You may already have your publications licked – some of the most exciting design is from the third sector, but if your leaflets still have a whiff of 1990s clip art about them, then it’s time for a re-vamp! Help your organisation make a great impression and create some tasty new designs for your communications materials.

Included below are some templates for creating basic documents and estimated print costs based on quotes from Stress Free Print. If you know of any better deals on printing or have more templates you would be happy to share on this page please let us know so that we can develop this resource for all our members.

• Reports and presentations - To wow your workshop, pep-up your PowerPoint or attract to your AGM, an accessible, well-designed document will show off your organisation's achievements and focus your readers whether they be service users or potential funders.
Estimated print costs:
100 A4 full colour presentation folders £115
100 A4 full colour 8-page brochures £100
500 A4 full colour double-sided inserts £65

• Newsletters - A regular newsletter (or e-newsletter) helps organisations to connect with their membership by keeping supporters up to date with news, calls for action and support on featured campaigns. A good newsletter makes readers feel linked in and valued. E-newsletters are cheaper and easier, but if you can afford it produce a paper copy too and don’t neglect your hardcopy readership!
Estimated print costs:
500 A4 8-page black & white news letter £150
500 A4 8-page full colour news letter £300

• Booklets and brochures – Consider whether you will produce your brochures, booklets and leaflets as individual, one-off print projects or launch a range or on-going series for more continuity.
Estimated print costs:
100 A4 full colour 8-page brochures £100
500 A5 full colour 8-page booklets £170

• Postcards and Flyers – Publishing at its most quick and dirty, but not to be under-rated. To promote an event or campaign you need original and arresting designs to catch the eye. Keep it simple and bold.
Estimated print costs:
2500 A6 full colour postcards £85
5000 A5 full colour double-sided flyers £100 

A4 Flyer dummy design (feel free to use and amend)
A4 Flyer dummy design version 2 (feel free to use and amend)

• Banners and Posters – To promote events and campaigns, to also use as certificates, placards and to send the loudest, larges message possible think big and print some posters.
Estimated print costs:
1000 A4 full colour posters £140
500 A3 full colour posters £90
5 banners 4.3 x 1.2m £35

Web Publishing

Your website is your shop window, open all hours and working for you full time. It can attract new supporters and keep you in touch with your current members and volunteers. It will enable you to raise awareness and achieve goals. An essential!

If your organisation does not yet have a website, we want to support you to publish one. WRC Publishing can offer to create and publish a basic website for you at low cost. Ideally we would train you to be able to update and maintain this yourself, but can also offer more support if you do not have the resources to do so.

There are some very friendly and easy tools for creating websites and you can publish them for free or buy a domain for a few quid a year. See the Publishing Tools section below for suggestions.

Whether you are taking the plunge by publishing your first website, or just want to give your existing website a good spring clean, check out some of the suggestions below.

• Hot Home Page: This is your chance to deliver your message. Your home page will likely be the most visited page on your site and within seconds those visitors will decide whether to read on or click back. Get your main point across clearly and briefly. A large area of text leads to TLDR (too long; didn’t read), you can go into detail on other pages, but this one has to be snappy. Use compelling copy and arresting artwork to grab interest and a couple of “Latest News/Events” headlines linking to other pages.

• Calendar of Events: Looking forward and looking back, an active events calendar shows that you are alive and kicking. Google calendars are really easy and effective. You can create a public calendar which anyone can use to plug their events, or a private one which only you can edit. Just copy and paste the code into your site and it updates automatically.

• Campaign Actions: Give your supporters something to do right here, right now with a bit of “one-click activism” linking to an online petition or appeal. People want participate and to feel that they are contributing. Promote your latest projects and campaigns alongside keeping your supporters up to date with the progress of established or past projects to create a sense of purpose and effectiveness.

• Contact: Clearly publish your contact details on every page. Consider a contact page with access details, opening hours, a map and directions, a feedback form etc. Invite contact and participation with an online poll, survey or comments section. Warmly encourage visitors to get in touch.

• Resources: Store and share your material on your website so that visitors and colleagues can access your videos, photos, reports, minutes, model letters, petitions, e-cards, newsletters... basically anything you have taken the time to produce should up there, not stuck on your C:drive. Instead of attaching files to emails you can link to them on your website and increase traffic and sharing. Make printer-friendly and lo-res, email-friendly versions of your publicity material so it is easier to distribute.

• Links Pages: Help to reinforce networks and increase traffic by linking to sister sites. Collaborate by promoting campaigns which mutually benefit your organisations. Increase networking and site traffic by linking to other pages, articles and resources. Exchange adverts promoting each other’s events and campaigns to increase referrals.

• Donations. Create a “Donate Now” button on your website and make it as easy as possible for visitors to contribute to your appeals. JustGiving enables online donations and fundraising events. PayPal provides not-for-profit-accounts with cheaper rates and to allow donations online.

• Social networks. Make sure that your Facebook, blog and Twitter page are all showcased on your website and vice versa. You can make content go a long way by synchronising updates across all platforms and then using it again for your news page or events calendar.

• Discussion Forums, Bulletin Boards and Comments: A great way of raising awareness, encouraging debate and getting feedback… but not for the faint hearted! Armchair activists just love to argue and differing opinions seem to be much more vitriolic when not made face-to-face so an online forum requires careful moderation.

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Publishing Tools

Save your money, don’t buy software if a free alternative could do instead! Open source software is free, is updated for free, is compatible with the mainstream commercial versions and is often designed to work with low spec computers.

As a volunteer I would struggle to afford the professional software on the market for designing publications. Instead I have come to rely on open source/free software, tools and operating systems as an alternative to buying the commercial equivalents.

Listed below are a few open source/free software packages that I use for publishing projects, but there is loads of free software out there for financial, multimedia, healthcare, security, scheduling etc applications. Could you switch to one of these and save your organisation some money?

Check out Wikipedia (the biggest free, user-led encyclopedia) for a comprehensive list of free software, tools and applications:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_software_packages

Free and affordable resources for publishing projects

1. Open Office – A free, friendly alternative to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. The help and training functions are particularly usable and in good plain English. Free.
http://www.openoffice.org/

2. GIMP – Open source image editor very similar to Photoshop. Can read, create and edit most image file types. Free.
http://www.gimp.org

3. Picasa – Free, easy to use image editing software to help organize, edit, and share your photos. Free.
http://picasa.google.com/

4. Scribus – Open source desktop publisher allowing professional standard page layout design. More similar to InDesign than Quark. Free.
http://www.scribus.net/

5. WordPress – Web publishing platform for creating blogs and websites. Hugely popular and well-supported. Can host your website for free or has recommended web hosts. Free.
http://wordpress.org/

6. Weebly – Very, very easy website and blog creator and host. Friendly interface allows you design, register and publish your own website and guides you through the process of buying a domain name (if required). Free, but pro-account is £30/year
http://www.weebly.com/

7. Free Forums – Create your own free online discussion forum. Can be administrated to be a public forum or a members/invite only forum. Free.
http://www.freeforums.org

8. Free image libraries - Many image stockists have a selection of images which are free as long as you attribute the artist. I like:
• http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
• http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/
• http://www.stockvault.net/

You can also filter Google Image searches to show only images which are available for reuse, check the “Usage Rights” setting under advanced search options.

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Other useful office items:

1. Doodle - Meeting scheduler. Makes arranging meetings between loads of people much easier. Free.
www.doodle.ch

2. FireFox – Open source web browser. Faster, safer, more stable than Internet Explorer. Free.
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

3. Ubuntu – Linux operating system. If you want to take it a step further and say good bye to Windows. The system is usable, stable and offers a complete package of programs. A new version is released every 6 months, but you may want to install one of the lite systems designed for older computers – why not revive an old machine? Free.
http://www.ubuntu.com/

4. DropBox – For online back-up and file sharing. Automatically backs up your work, shares it with groups of your choice and synchronises documents which several people work on. Can be accessed remotely and you can share between your home and office computers, between teams, clients etc. Free, but pro-account is £74/year.
http://www.dropbox.com/

5. Prezi – New, dynamic, great-looking presentation software which blows the cobwebs off PowerPoint – in fact you can now “prezify” your PowerPoint presentation by importing the files to Prezi. Your presentation can be hosted online or downloaded. Free, but content must be shared.
http://prezi.com/

6. TheyWorkForYou.com – Register to get an alert whenever your keyword is mentioned in Parliament. Help your supporters to keep tabs on their MPs and promote votes, committees, consultations, Early Day Motions etc which are relevant to your area.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com

7. Campaign Monitor – Manages subscriber/membership lists. Helps you to create and dispatch e-letters, appeals and other communications and monitors usage and donations. Charges from £10/month.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

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