In all the years I have been providing professional graphic design of communications and marketing tools for Good Causes and Charities across the world, I would have to say that the 1/3rd A4 (2 fold) information leaflet is the mainstay of promotions and communications in the Charity Sector.

The examples shown here span many years and have been re printed many times, evidence that they work well and include Housing Action, Religious Learning Resources, a Play and Community Network and Friends of the Laing Art Gallery.

A low cost publication that packs a big punch

Punching well above its weight makes it by far the most popular marketing tool among Design Aid beneficiaries and clients when a low cost solution like this has such a high value it’s easy to see why I’m asked to design and print so many of these. They can say so much more than a flyer can and cost a lot less than a brochure while important info sits in the pages while the cover can have the same clean design that helps posters deliver so much impact.

This is what one of Design Aid’s clients had to say about our leaflets designs.

“The services of Design Aid have been invaluable in allowing us to produce professional literature for the Highland Wildlife Park while keeping costs to a minimum.”

Advantages of the one third A4 format

Commonly used to establish and promote a good cause or deliver information to beneficiaries this format of leaflet has many advantages such as;

• Fit common leaflet dispensers
• Cover can have the impact of a poster
• Content can deliver more information than postcards or flyers
• Look great spread on tables at shows
• Fit a DL envelope
• Easily fit in the jacket or jeans pocket
• Can be design to unfold into a small poster (printing is VAT 0 rated, unlike posters)

These hardworking little publications are very affordable and have for years done an excellent job at delivering branding, information, mission statements, contact details, membership, or sponsor forms as well as advice and instruction etc.

I can help you establish your target audience, create content that works and deliver your message or instruction with informative and descriptive graphics that will establish your project or brand and relate directly to the viewer of your marketing materials.

Call me today to discuss how my skills can benefit your project and not break your budget.

Leaflet design illustrated Below left to right

• Design Aid leaflet design to support a Metro Centre event promoting Foster Care for young people in the North East
• Commercial Graphic Design solution for local small business Scott Leathers by Design Aid founder Bruce Allinson
• Use my professional Graphic Design skills for your leaflets, brochures, annual reports, newsletters and flyers (left to right: Sunflower Trust Newsletter, Community Action on Health Annual Report, Team Fostering information leaflet, Scott Leathers Flyer)

When I recently attended a Cooperatives North East event I was so impressed with the good work all the Social Enterprises in attendance I felt I should make a small effort to promote their causes.

The Photographs in this short video are just a selection of the stills I sent out live from the event across social networks in an effort to do just that.

Cooperatives North East event promoting Social Enterprise – YouTube.

I set about shooting some photographs of there stands and displays and made sure to include in the photograph, whenever I could, details like name, website and telephone numbers.

Using unusual angles and views added some interest and the use of Instagram filters allowed me to bring focus and style to the images. It must have worked because when I started to tweet the images to my followers I was getting some great comments back and as well as enquiries about some organisations. I also noticed every photo I posted was being Re tweeted (RT) and reaching many more people.

This combined use of iPhoneography and social networks proved to be a fantastic communications and promotional tool almost a mini on-line event supporting some great projects.

So the next time your in attendance at an event full of the charities, good causes, organisations or businesses and projects you love, why not get your phone out and get snapping and tweeting – volunteering can be the simplest of things.

I want to talk about the advantages of SEO and Social Networks for your project, cause or business and use some case studies to illustrate when and how to use Social Networking to best effect for you to bring spectacular results with out facing the difficulties and complexities of SEO.

SEO what and why?

SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is all about building your site the “Google” way. You first establish what people are using to search in Google and then target those specific keyphrases by adjusting your website to fit what Google thinks is a best match to that search. Get this right and anyone in the world looking for “giant pink banana suits with green trim” as their search term will find your North East banana suit shop. Get it wrong and nobody will find you unless they happen to type in the name of your shop or domain. Well that’s the basics anyway, unfortunately Google’s goal posts are on castors on a floor that tilts in different directions every week.

For the last few years I have found a lot of success with driving traffic using SEO and with many commercial sites with a broad customer base and a lot of competition it remains the best alternative to paying for Google ads, but if your not sure what you are doing it’s a big learning curve and very time consuming for most people. You can pay me to do it but depending on the financial return from your website, if any, SEO services and Google ads might be too costly for you. If you need a new website, every site I design and build has a solid SEO foundation to it. While it will become out dated it will help and it will support any other method you use to drive visitors to your site.

What Can Social Networks Offer?

Having recently run a hugely successful campaign to find supporters looking to prevent the closure of Bill Quay Farm, (a local community project no longer under threat) I sat back to bask in my own glorious success and reflect on what I had achieved and how.

I surprised even myself when I realised that I had done very little SEO on the new website I had developed, yet there it was, with some great quality traffic, lots of support and it moved up the rankings at a very decent rate. A brand new domain registration with hundreds of quality visitors a day all within three or four days not weeks.

While SEO can provide relatively stable and provide long standing rankings and traffic especially if you work at it on a regular basis. It can be very difficult to get instant results when you need them, (though I bet I can climb the rankings for this post for anyone searching for “giant pink banana suits with green trim”) and the traffic is not always the best quality. By quality I mean many hundreds of visitors will not be part of your “target audience” and will have little or no interest in your website.

What I have found is that when done right with an appealing cause, campaign or project a twitter account can instantly bring a huge volume of best quality traffic to your website and they will bring all their friends and followers with them.

If you don’t mind, in order to illustrate the power and effectiveness of this method I will refer back to my recent campaign for the local community farm at Bill Quay. This was how the schedule went:

• Day one: Register new domain name, set up hosting & build new website
• Day two: Set up emails and register with social networks such as twitter, FaceBook, Stumble, etc. and set up links between the website and the networks – every website post shows on the networks and tweets show on the website.
• Day three: Start the social network campaign – follows, posts, tweets, posts, repeat (of course I used my existing established accounts across all the networks to push this process along at a rapid rate.
• Day four: Check results, website receiving a few hundred unique visitors a day and increasing by a hundred or more each day, Local media including radio, TV and Newspapers have all visited the project and running news stories (not press releases but real journalism where the news comes looking for you and write their own story).
• Day five: Training, show the client how to keep it all running and what to do to drive any new campaigns or to keep the existing campaign fresh

While I did support the campaign with a few bits and pieces like poster designs for supporters to download etc. that single weeks work as illustrated above was all it took to get a brand new website established and moving up the rankings. It received thousands of local and very relevant visitors most of which took some action, from signing the petition to writing direct to the Council or visiting the Farm and putting posters up. I would have to say just about every visitor or supporter passed on to friends, both real and virtual almost all the information I could give them. You could see the genuine and active interest from site visitors.

Why do Social Networks bring traffic?

SEO has become quite difficult to keep up with, every week a client will ask me, “are my meta tags not the most important thing to get traffic?” Well not as important as they once were. Meta Tags and keywords are no longer the one defining thing that Google wants to see. Meta tags help, as everything you do correctly on your website build will, but they are no longer the holly grail of SEO. More important for your site would be one way inbound links from quality websites and regularly updated content as well as a sitemap, terms and conditions page and a policy page along with many, many more things Google is telling you to do to your site.

The first thing that Social Networks do is to negate all this by sending you quality traffic direct to you site, by referral or recommendation and not via a search engine. Traffic that has been referred by friends or people with a similar taste or outlook on the Social Networks. OK, so this traffic will not send your site statistics through the roof, but is that what you really want? While recently experimenting with SEO techniques I increased the traffic to one site from 500 visitors a day to 3,000 unique visitors a day. Sales, business and/or interest did not increase however, because the additional traffic was not of good quality, (not people with a genuine interest in that website).

Just 10 visitors looking to support your cause or access your service are better than 1,000 visitors with such little interest they won’t even tell anyone else about your site.

How Social Networks help your SEO

If all Social Networks could offer was a small amount of direct traffic (visits by followers & friends) each time you tweet a link of interest, I would not be wasting my time writing this article.

If you have any understanding of Social Networks I’d like you to take one moment to think what might happen to that “link” in your tweet. That link, to your most important post or web page yet. Because of the very “viral” nature of social networking some will visit your link some will share or pass on your link or both, Just think what that can do for you.

For those of you who have no understanding of Social Networks here is an example of how it might work:

• You get your web designer, or take it upon your self to create a page or post about a recent achievement, service, or your most important news ever! Be sure to write it well, as interesting and exciting as you can and yes, apply any SEO knowledge you have, if you have no SEO knowledge do nothing, avoid lots of bold text and writing in caps. Get some nice eye catching photography in there as well.
• Now you tweet, digg, like, thumb up, pin, etc. Just share the link to your page on your chosen Social Network’s (be sure one of them is twitter) ask your followers to share, like or re tweet (RT) your link.
  If it’s of interest to your followers and friends on Social Networks they will visit your site and they will share your link to many like minded people. This in it’s self can bring a lot of interest and good traffic if someone shares with a celebrity or an internet marketer with 10,000 or more followers – how many of them will share your link or maybe have contacts in the media.
• Watch how you link/tweet travels through the internet. I do not have 10,000 followers but I do manage, (on other projects behalf) several accounts that do across several different social networks. So, if little old Design Aid takes a shine to your tweet/webpage I will not only share but actively ask others on almost all the social networks to do the same.
• Now look at what you have done, found some interest and supporters maybe clients. Forget all that, take a look at what you have left behind on the internet. If you get it all just right . . .  and you will! If not this time, then the next time. If you can’t, then ask someone who can. If you get it all just right, you have (and will continue to for some time) left a trail of “one way” (not reciprocal) inbound links to your website and all of them from very high ranking and well respected quality websites like FaceBook and twitter.

 When dose Social Networking Beat SEO?

Lets Face up to some facts here. If I could get the same results from twitter for a conservatory company as I did for the local community farm I’d be a very rich individual by now. The Farm has; lambs, piglets, goats and many other cute things as well as open spaces loved by all, so even without the fantastic cakes and coffee people are already drawn to it a lot more than they would like to support a boring dusty old double glazing company.

So, SEO and advertising might always be the way forward for your projects if you have a Charity, Social Enterprise or Business with an equal lack of social appeal. However, in my experience if you can bring to your project, good cause or even business any aspect that people would enjoy getting behind and supporting or seeing and being associated with then you too can beat all your best SEO efforts with a tuned in website and well run Social Network Campaign.

I hope these views and experiences prove to be of some help to you when deciding on how you and/or your website provider should promote your website. Of course Design Aid would be delighted to consider creating a website and campaign that works for your project, just give me a call for an informal chat about what you need to get started.

I would also like to hear from you if you are based in and around the North East and would be interested in attending a seminar or presentation about how you can best use twitter and other social network tools to benefit your project, good cause or business. I have already talked with potential partners who would like to help me deliver such an event. Please contact me, (Bruce Allinson) drop me a quick email or text, if this would be of interest to you and what value you would place on this kind of support and information. Some have told me they would gladly pay up to £25 to attends and gain this knowledge, please let me know if you would feel that was affordable and reasonable.

As an admirer of Ruskin and Dickens, my interpretation of a “good cause” can be something beyond “charity” and our governing bodies.

Many a business as well as charities can have a social conscience and social objectives. As such I’m delighted to support and promote social enterprise whenever I can and often turn my hand to the promotion and development of a business that will bring Social Benefits to our communities. Why would you not wish to support a business who deliberately aims to improve peoples lives in some way?

What is Social Enterprise

Social Enterprise is a wider reaching term than most understand. While some Social Enterprises are registered Charities or Not for Profit organisations and companies, (as indeed Design Aid has been) others such as the CO-OP or John Lewis seek alternative ways to satisfy their social objectives. Ruskin showed industrialists that providing education and health and better homes for their workers would give them a better workforce and in turn bring profit, fortunately some companies still remember this lesson and more each day are looking to see how their power and money can be used to support communities. For me that attitude alone can be seen as a Social Enterprise.

Case Study for a Brochure Design

The Following example illustrates what my graphic design and other innovating skills can bring to your project when I develop and design your promotional materials and marketing tools. It also shows how well I understand Social Enterprise in all of its forms.

Team Fostering Annual Report

Brochure Design Front Cover

When Team Fostering approached me and asked for a Annual Report complete with a full specification for print requirements, I did what I almost always do and questioned their brief. Following a series of straight forward questions I had established the following:

• They had a need to communicate in detail “what they do and how they do it” to staff clients councils and beneficiaries.
• They needed to explain in detail the structure or format of the company and exactly how it was defined as a Social Enterprise.
• The Target Audience of staff, supporters, beneficiaries and clients had to understand the advantages being a Social Enterprise brought over other foster care agencies or businesses.
• They had a legal obligation to present annual reports and accounts in a professional manner to a handful of directors, clients and governing organisations or bodies.

As you may have realised by now the original brief for an A4 full colour Annual Report was not able to fulfil these requirements particularly well and would have proven an expensive option that would only have been suitable for maybe 1 percent of the target audience.

It’s not that clients can not set out a good brief, many do, but few ask themselves the right questions to develop a good brief, (often a case of being to close to something I think). I set about establishing a new brief for Team Fostering.

Brochure Design Back Cover

Design Aid establishes a Brief that works

My new brief was to Design and produce:

1. A Durable A4 12pp 4 colour  document with a quality cover and a pocket on the inside back cover to hold further documentation*.
2. A series of Branded template *documents in Word that can be amened each year for Annual Report variables such as Accounts and progress reports

The copy for the document was to be re written by myself with a view to creating a document that had equal value to each audience and would be timeless so it could be used year after year without change (i.e. in place of “last year we established . . .” it would say “in 20?? we established . . . “). The document was broken down into six simple chapters; Our Values and Beliefs;  The Children; Foster Carers; Social Enterprise and finally a page of Strategy and Policy.

The last two chapters are static information that would be required every year in the Annual Report. This and the other chapters where written in such a way as to be of interest to all the target audiences. In addition this new format with the addition of a pocket helped self enabled the client to produce a professional looking short run Annual Report using their templates every year.

This was the basics of the new brief I’d established with the client and the additional benefits it brought.

Finding Additional Benefits

I often find that once I start re writing or developing a brief the client will start to see many things differently themselves and begin to find many more uses for the same single tool and budget.

So, While budgets remained tight the client immediately began to see other benefits in having such a durable and flexible document. Not only did they increased the original print run to cover the next few years Annual Reports and Brochures but also  looked to using this fantastic marketing tool to present many other documents such as their home grown training and induction packs to Foster Carers as well as many bid and tender documents.

The Highlights

While I designed and produced this brochure a few years ago it continues to stand the test of time. With no money for photography I turned to stock photographs and used them big and bold along with good use of negative space to give a professional look and feel to short clear and concise messages.

A very deliberate effort was made to make every detail of this document as timeless as possible combine the long shelf life of the design with the multiple uses and you begin to get a lot of value from your design, photography and copy costs year after year.

Despite some of my best graphic design work and some very innovative thinking going into developing a fantastic brochure, I’m perhaps most proud of my fresh and concise copy that explained this particular Social Enterprise and its values.

While the Company Directors of course new exactly what their organisation was there had been some difficulty conveying this message to others. After putting a lot of work and my own knowledge of Social Enterprise into the copy, I was delighted to be told that my fresh look not only made it clear what Team Fostering was but it also gave many staff a new insight into the core structure. purpose and objectives behind the Business.

While Team Fostering already had their great logo before I started this project and there was no need to change it, they did not have a brand or any brand values, (there is more to a brand than just a logo). My design process behind the new brochure helped develop and establish a whole brand around the existing logo. Another great saving as branding can be a time consuming and costly process. This brand has successfully gone on to be used across all media and made it easier for anyone to establish Team Fostering at events in advertising and in new documentation.

The Voluntary Action History Society VAHS aims to advance the historical understanding and analysis of voluntary action. VAHS is run by a committee of volunteers and has a membership of individuals. We are based in the UK but have members from across the world and work closely with international colleagues. A registered charity since 1995, VAHS carries out a number of activities including: Voluntary Action Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London. New Researchers’ workshops held throughout the UK. Biennial research conferences. Occasional conferences and symposia. Edited blog on topics of interest to historians of voluntary action.For more information about VAHS via About Us | Voluntary Action History Society.

I came a cross the North East Hub a couple of weeks ago when I was fortunate enough to win a small publicity competition where as a prize they helped promote Design Aid for a week on the Social Networks, (A great Idea that I might pinch for the wider Charity Sector).

The North East Hub is a New Online Organisation to help promote the North East of England. They help promote business, charity, news, events and more!

If you are in the North East the First thing you should do as a Club, Charity, business or individual is follow them on twitter @thenortheastHUB and like their FaceBook page for regular shoutouts and news.

While still a very new enterprise if you have a good cause, business or event, (in fact almost any project) you need to take a very serious look at what the North East HUB can do to help you. It is very easy to accesses if you already use social networking, (If you are not then ask Design Aid how) and you will not find a more supportive group for your business or project.

Four Great Features we offered by the North East Hub for FREE:

1. Free “shoutouts” across our social networking sites Links are on the right of our home page – Just send us the message you want us to post.
2. Free Online Daily Newspaper – the northeast HUB daily  Dedicated to the North East! Subscribe to it for free!
3. Photographers of the North East please join our group on Flickr. Add your photos to our pool and we will promote them!
4. Get added to our twitter lists: Reply on twitter to us @thenortheastHUB with hashtag # of which list you wish to be added, e.g. #nebusiness

Find out more about this great North east Project via About » the northeast HUB blog.

See this great video and news report from Sky News

Staff and volunteers at a popular community farm in Gateshead are waiting to hear if it will be shut down.

Bill Quay Community Farm, which is home to a number of rare breed animals, faces possible closure following a council spending review.

With £70m less in Government funding this year, Gateshead council are considering scrapping the farm to help reduce their outgoings.

Campaigners have started an online petition to prevent the closure of the farm, which already has over 500 signatures.

Gateshead council’s Ann Borthwick said they are still debating the farm’s future.

Read the rest of this item via Bill Quay Farm in Gateshead Threatened With Closure - Tyne and Wear.

When David from Lighting the Landscape introduced Design Aid to Bill Quay Farm I could not believe that without some serious support they could be closing.

I set to work assessing what would be needed to get the Farm noticed and promote the Bill Quay Community Farm with vital and immediate short term results supporting the campaign and petition. I also looked to use solutions that would keep peoples interest and continue to raise awareness for the project in the longer term.

I could see we needed to get a mass of people and media personalities behind the project and raise awareness of the Farm and this new threat that it faced.

The Farm’s current website looked fine but was not easy to find unless that very site was exactly what you were looking for. No casual visitors here, no one just passing by that might be attracted to the Farm and what they do.

Having explained that what they had was a little like printing some fantastic posters and keeping them in a draw for only your best friends to see, Design Aid was asked to make things happen. At the same time Lighting the Landscape stepped forward with some financial support to get the ball rolling.

Design Aid went into Action

Here is how I got Bill Quay Farm noticed and in the News Media spotlight.

Day one: we had a new domain name an “org.uk” as it always should have been not a “co.uk” this is a UK Registered Charity not a business, people need to see at a glance before they even click a link that they are – “org” or “org.uk” tells people you are a charity, not for profit or for the community in some way. The Website template was designed with accessibility in mind as specified and approved by the accessibility auditor at the Sponsors project “Lighting the Landscape”.

Day two: Content was copy and pasted into the new site and work went on to optimise the site for search engines. I Created Twitter and FaceBook accounts and pages and linked all these together so when we post a Blog entry on the site it is tweeted and all the tweets are posted on FaceBook and so it go’s on. We started to post on the Blog and Tweet and tapped into all of Design Aid’s own social network resources and followers on Twitter, FaceBook, Stumble, Digg, etc. to get the news out there.

Day Three: Bill Quay Farm has arrived, the new site is already ranking better than the old one and some keywords are starting to show on page one and two. The site has well over 1oo unique visitors before anyone even gets home from work and every hour sees more follows on Twitter.

Twitter has worked so well that by lunch time on day three the Bill Quay Community Farm has had local newspapers, BBC radio and Sky in touch and running stories.

Day Four: As I hand the details and access of the social network accounts over to staff at the Farm, the first tweets they make are “listen to us on the Radio” while more and more followers are tweeting that they read about them in the Paper.

While the very generous sponsorship/donation that funded my work on this project kind of ran out days ago, I’m still happily working on the site and social network accounts for Bill Quay Farm. I will finish the project with a Poster Design for them, (supporters have asked for them – just a PDF to download, so people can print it and post it up at work etc.). I do However, look forward to an imminent visit to the Bill Quay Farm when I can further support this fantastic organisation with the training they will need to manage the web site content and keep the social networking active.

It has been an absolute delight to support this brilliant project and organisation and I hope I get to work with them again.

Could your Cause use a Design Hero?

If you have a Good Cause or Charitable Project that could benefit from the skills and services Design Aid has to offer I’d love to hear from you and help out in anyway that I can. Get in touch, I’d love to help and helping with creative skills is what I do best.

The team is currently looking at possible donations from organizations across the North East including opportunities to sponsor the Pride Stage and March. There are also opportunities for volunteers to help raise funds through collections through the city’s Tuesday night gay scene.

Volunteers are also currently being recruited for their involvement on the day on Sunday 23rd September and roles include Stage Hands, to help with the running of the Pride Stage, and Stewards, who are needed throughout the day.

Sunderland Pride 2011

Last year’s event saw thousands of people flood Sunderland city centre to celebrate LGBT life in the city and organisers hope to make this year’s event even bigger with the support from the community.

Volunteer for Sunderland Pride 2012

Anyone wishing to get involved in volunteering can request an application form via the following ways:
Email – Info@sunderlandpride.co.uk
Call – 0191 447 2131
Follow on Twitter; @SunderlandPride

Like on FaceBook

The North East Motorcycle Racing Club (NEMCRC) a Non Profit company and members club that has brought top class club racing to the North East for 50 years. So here it is the very first Poster design of 2012 from the Design Aid project.

These posters are used extensively by volunteers, supporters, members and riders. A short print run of A3 posters are put up in local motorcycle dealers and biker cafes etc. by volunteers while others print out a poster or two on their own inkjet printers at home to put up on notice boards at work etc. And of course, many supporters and kind individuals will re-post, tweet, like, share, email or post on forums and blogs this and other digital versions of the poster.

Please do get in touch if your project or organisation would benefit from a professionally designed poster or flyer to promote it’s events or cause. We would love to Design, help or advise in a professional capacity to support your Good Cause.

Click on the image to see full size A4 poster design.

If you are local or in the Scottish borders please do download and distribute the poster on local notice boards, shops, motorcycle dealers or just across your online forums and social networks. These really are top class club race meetings, put on by a dedicated group of volunteers and they will appreciate any additional support that helps to promote and back these spectacular motorcycle race meetings.

More details about the NEMCRC can be found on their website at www.nemcrc.co.uk (also designed and hosted by Design Aid) and you can follow them on Twitter or like them on FaceBook.