Congratulations to Tudor

As many of you know, this past Christmas Adept launched an online game to help Santa get his Christmas presents back from those pesky penguins.

We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who played, but sadly there could only be one winner.

The winner of the game was Tudor Howell, who scored a whopping 22,456 points. His charity of choice for the donation of £100 is Hope for Latvia, which a really great cause and whose on-going efforts make a huge difference to the lives of their beneficiaries.

Thanks again everyone and if any of you see those penguins causing trouble, let us know!!!

Adept on Ice.

For a treat The Adept staff went down to the Ice Skating Rink at the Aylsham Frost Fayre.

We invaded the empty rink for an hour or so on Friday afternoon and during that time we saw some near professional manoeuvres. Pirouettes a plenty, backwards skating courtesy of Shamus, and at times Daniel even managed to stand up without the support of the wall. Nicholas also gave a perfect impersonation of Bambi trying to stand up on the ice for the first time.

We finished off with warm mulled cider and got back to work to see out the week.

Thanks to Ben and Dan from all the guys for letting us indulge in childish activities.

Increase the impact of your newsletter

Just one of the many jobs we regularly do for some of our charity clients is to design their newsletter or magazine. There has always been a stipulation that as a charity you should not be throwing money at an overly designed item when the funds could be used to further your mission. In part this should be taken into consideration, but please remember that no-one wants to read something that looks unappealing, so although you might not be spending a lot of money on your newsletter, is what you are spending on it seeing any return at all?

Here are some of our helpful tips for charities when looking at the design of your newsletter:

Don’t be afraid to ask

Remember you are a charity and the aim of the newsletter is to see a return on your investment. So if you are talking about an appeal make sure you let the reader know how they can donate.

Add some colour

Colour helps a newsletter look more appealing and something you have put thought into. If you only want to slightly increase your printing costs, it might be simply making it a two colour print job rather than one.

Change your text from being quite neutral to a more direct mail style of copy (using the word "you" a lot).

Don’t make articles too long

Try and keep your article length at a reasonable level for people who just want to skim read. This could mean the introduction of a stand first that would sum up the article but in turn entice the reader to read on.

Keep the article relevant to the charity

We see it time and again with charity magazines: lots of articles that focus on what’s going on internally in the charity. Your readers are not going to want to know it was Dawn’s birthday last week, they are going to want to know what you are doing with their donations. Our advice is, if you think an article is not relevant, don’t put it in.

I hope this helps when you are looking to produce your next newsletter. If you do want to chat through any of your ideas or see how we could help improve the return on investment, please give me a call on 01263 734 198.