Evolution of The Bulletin – Part 3.

The next phase in the evolution of the bulletin at CCV included a completely new shape and size that would allow us to save some money by freeing up space to print some various items for free.  My boss, Jon Edmiston, explains this process in detail on his blog.  If you have time, go take a look.  Along with the desire to save money, we also wanted to switch up the shape and size of the bulletin just to mix things up and try something different.  It was time for a change.  Here is an example of the shape and size of the next phase:

And the inside:

The size of this bulletin is 8″ x 16″ and folds down 3 ways to 8″(h) x 7″(w)  and the panel on the right side is 4″ with a perforation for people to tear off.  This size did free up and extra 3″ of paper space on our gang run sheet; however, we were still looking for ways to save money and still maintain a quality product.

The next, and current, phase of the bulletin was an even more dramatic shift in shape and size.  As mentioned in my first post, our comitment to having message notes in every bulletin helps to dictate the size and shape of the bulletin.  Keeping that in mind, we decided to try something totally different.  We moved to a landscape format instead of our traditional portrait oriented format.  The images below will help to explain that further:

And the inside:

The size of this bulletin is 6.5″ (h) x 16″ (w) and folds in directly in half for a final size of 6.5″ x 8″.  This shape allows us to insert our message notes into the horizontal fold, and also saved us a GREAT deal of money.  Let me try to explain how we cut our costs dramatically by going to this shape.  I should also mention, that during this evolution process, we decided to move to printing 2 weeks worth of bulletins at a time – this was the first step in cutting cost.  The next step occurred when our local printer came to us and said that if we can get the height of our bulletin down to 6.5″ he would be able to lay up double the amount of bulletins on each sheet that comes off the press.  The press sheet is 20″ x 26″ — we used to lay up 2 of the outside of our bulletins on the front, and 2 of the insides on the back of the sheet.   Now we’ve doubled that by decreasing our size and laying out a front and back on both sides of the press sheet.  Below is the example of how our printer now sets up the press to print our bulletins:

As you can see, we are completely maximizing the amount of printing space on our press sheets.  The red section at the top is used for printing free notepads, and communication cards – because we’re already paying for the full sheet, our printer doesn’t charge us anything extra to print there. He does charge us a very minimal cost to cut them down, somewhere in the 10-15$ range.

The key to our cost savings was MAXIMIZING space on with our local printer.  The current size and shape of the bulletin has dropped the nearly 35% below what we were paying over the last couple of years for what would I would consider phase 1 of our bulletin.  I won’t divulge too much more information, but we print approximately 7,000 bulletins per week… and we are doing the best we can to keep our cost as low as possible.

Lastly, if you are interested in the source files for any of the bulletin sizes or shapes that I’ve talked about here; send me an email and I’ll hook you up.  The only catch is, you have to tell 5 friends about my blog. (/Shameless Plug)