Small Potatoes
I recently heard a story that deals more with Stewardship that it does Marketing, but it's good to keep in mind when you're planning your marketing efforts.
Centuries ago in Northern China, potato farmers there planted their field with the previous year's cut-up potatoes, rather than from seeds. Each year, they would cut some of the potato crop into small pieces and return them back to the ground. Year after year the tradition continued, until someone had an idea - let's save the choice, large potatoes for food and for market, and take the very smallest potatoes to cut up for planting. Back then, farmers were not as scientifically educated as they are today, so they didn't know that heredity plays a big part in the product. They eventually discovered that the only thing that grows from small potatoes is ... small potatoes. By keeping the large ones for themselves, they found out that their economically self-serving interests didn't allow them to continue that way for very long.
Development directors can make the correlation as they present stewardship opportunities to parents and guardians, community members, alumni and businesses. We can also learn from this to affect our own stewardship for the parishes to which we belong. But marketing?
How many of our schools put out a school newsletter that's merely words printed on a piece of paper...but the paper is a different color so when we send it home with the children, the parents will know that it's important? There are three things that are wrong with that practice - but the big error is that it's "small potatoes." First, the three wrong things:
1) It's on colored paper. It might be nice if that color is an off-white, or maybe even a gold, but I've seen newsletters on red paper (like for...oh, say, Februrary and Valentine's Day). Black print on red paper is not readable. If you want something to be read, make it readable (or, at least, "If you want something to be read, don't put it on red.").
2) It's all print. Pictures are nice, and indeed, they do say a thousand words...which will allow you to cut down on the number of words you use and utilize a larger font.
3) It's sent home with the children...which means it's crumpled up in their pocket, or in their backpack under their American History book which is two inches thick and weighs 6 pounds (who designs texts like this in this technologically advanced age in which we live? Let's have publishers carry 6 of these things back and forth from home to work for 180 and see how they like it). It could be included in an envelope of important papers...but then it's lost among 7 or 8 other items that may deserve a higher priority - like a flyer for school pictures day.
Sending something home via first class mail elicts attention. A quality publication on heavy grade paper with a color picture on the front will make the parent or guardian WANT to read the newsletter first. A well-designed eNewsletter can save on those printing and paper costs, but you'll need to constantly update the database. It's a good idea to use a service to create your newsletter, as good ones provide a "check for spam" feature so that your eNewsletter is delivered to an inbox rather than a spam file.
But that costs money, right? And you're saving money by duplicating your own black and white copies, right? Small potatoes.
© Michael V. Ziemski, SchoolAdvancement, 2007
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