Formulating
the idea
When
questioned, many local residents complained
that they did not know who to complain to
about problems in their neighbourhood.
To tackle this issue, it
was decided to produce a fridge magnet of
important numbers, to empower the local
community to report problems in their
neighbourhood.
The design was crucial to
its effectiveness. It had to be bright,
colourful, look professional and most of
all, be something that people would want to
keep on their fridge door. In addition, a
chance encounter with the owner of our local
Pizza Hut Delivery led to him offering to
contribute 1/3rd of the cost of the project
if we included the company logo and contact
details - after all, on average the fridge
is visited over 25 times per day. What
better way to advertise, especially when the
fridge is empty!
To view a larger picture (requires
Acrobat Reader), click on the image or here.
Designing
the product
The finished magnet (opposite) was designed
by the group 's Secretary using QuarkXpress
for Windows, a desktop publishing package
more suited to magazine production. However,
QuarkXpress is a VERY expensive piece of
software and it should be noted that any
desktop publishing or graphics package such
as Corel Draw should be capable of creating
the design. If you're struggling to
design it yourself, why not ask a local
graphics designer for a quote and then add
this to the bill when asking for funding.
The
'man on the phone' clipart was sourced from www.clipart.com
and cost less than £5.
Getting
quotes
NAG searched the internet for companies
that manufactured fridge magnets and
received several quotes. However, there was
one company that stood out above all others:
KOOLPRINT (www.koolprint.co.uk).
KOOLPRINT
is a pure internet based printing company
who actually operate from Texas, USA. The
design was e-mailed over to the company who
returned a quote (within 3 hours!) which was
less than half the next quote!
Final
quotation came out at £489.99 for 1000,
equating to just 49 pence each. That
included gloss lamination and die cutting
with no VAT, no import duty and free postage
and packing to the UK.
The
best UK quote was £777 for the printing
PLUS £200-300 for the die cutting PLUS the
dreaded VAT.
Delivering
the magnets
To ensure all magnets were delivered simultaneously,
they were stuck into the November 2003 edition of
our quarterly newsletter. This was achieved
by using those little sticky glue dots as
used for sticking free CD's to the front
of magazines. Again these were sourced off
the internet from a company called SUPERDOTS
www.superdots.co.uk.
To
see the November 2003 edition (Acrobat Reader required)
click here.
