I have been contacted by Ritchie Hulks who is a member of the Dover Athletic Supporters Trust board recently. He has asked me if it would be possible to design a monthly newsletter for the trust because the trust feel at the moment that some of their members are not receiving enough information as they should be. I have been informed that the trust has over 500 members and only about 50 of them are being regularly informed as to what is going on, so the trust feel that a newsletter produced monthly would keep everyone who is a member up to date with what is happening.
The DAST help run the club and organise many events, they feel that if these were better published then the club could make more money, the DAST is made up of supporters who have paid money to have a say in their football club. One of the things that the trust promised was that all members would be informed as to what is happening at the club. I have been asked to design this newsletter because the people who run=n the DAST have very limited computer knowledge.
They would supply me with all the information and what they want from me is a professional looking design, which all the members will read. They have told me that the newsletter will need to be 2 sides of A4 and that I can decided how it should be laid out. I have also been supplied the logo of the DAST and they would like that to appear someone on the newsletter. As the newsletter is free and 500 copies have to be produced I will need to make sure that the design is cost effective, if when I have completed the design the DAST thing it will be too expensive to produce I will have to modify it.
The trust also has a website which contains some of the information however not all members can access this and it is not always updated. Although it was suggested I did a newsletter I was given a chance to present any better ideas to the board so I decided to look at what solutions there were to this problem:A hand-produced letter could be produced and photocopied and then sent out to each member, giving him or her information on what is happening. This would be very time consuming and would look very unprofessional.
The DAST we-site could be updated more regularly and more features could be added so that people are better informed. Although this is a good idea as previously mentioned not everybody has access to the site so some people will be missing out. This could be suggested to run alongside the newsletter. * An e-mail system, this could be used but no everyone has access to email. This could be used though to send the newsletter to people’s email addresses so that money is saved on printing and posting. This will not affect the design of the newsletter though.
A word-processed newsletter could be produced, this is an ok idea but it would not look as professional as if it was produced on publisher. A newsletter produced on publisher than can then be sent by email or post. I am going to use MS publisher because it will give the best look, it is easy to import pictures and things can be changed quickly. I can also incorporate publisher with the email system and a copy of the newsletter could also be posted on the website easily. These are things that can be discussed by the DAST when I have produced the newsletter.
