Preparing your promotional materials. - Part One/ Documents. Bill Meyers District 27-A2 Technology Chair November 2014

Transcription

1 Preparing your promotional materials - Part One/ Documents Bill Meyers District 27-A2 Technology Chair November 2014

2 Foreword Strengthen the Pride, Ask One, Awareness. As Lions, every place we turn, we are reminded that Lions are a well kept secret. We need to change that. Our biggest headache is many Clubs are so new to Facebook that no one really knows how or what to do. Even some Clubs that have had a Facebook page for some time are missing out on new opportunities. Many times, Clubs already have existing material they want to use to promote their events. While this sounds great, we have all seen documents that, when opened, did not look as originally intended. This tutorial will show you how to make documents that are universally the same on any computer. This brief tutorial will also help your Club do a better job of preparing your promotional materials. This not only will improve your Club's success in promoting your event but will make it possible for your Zone Chair and District to promote your event. On average, over 300 new people learn about each of our events when they are promoted on the Zone calendar, District Club calendar, District Facebook page and your Club's Facebook page. The cost to your Club is zero for this service. This added promotion also means not only improved fund raising but new potential Lions. If your Club is not on Facebook, there is also a tutorial on How to make a Facebook page on our District web site in the Technology section. You may also be interested in the short tutorial How to make a Facebook event. If your Club does not have promotional material or it is time to update and replace your material, our District has a great District Marketing and Event Promotions Chair Lion Kathy Rosenkranz who is ready to help you make great promotional material. Whether you need to update your old fyers, banners, table tents, handouts or need new materials, Lion Kathy is ready to help. You can contact Lion Kathy by using the District's Contact form and selecting District Marketing and Event Promotions Lion Kathy Rosenkranz. As an active document, revisions will be made from time-to-time. These revisions are a direct result of your feedback and questions so please do contact the author.

3 Images and Text Images and text each represent distinct problems so let's start with the easiest one; text. Before we go farther, we need to identify our end goal for our text document. We want a fyer, brochure or some kind of promotional literature for our fund raising event. We want our document to be the same on different computers, be virus free and not alterable. We want a PDF fle. What's a PDF and why do I want it? What's a PDF? PDF (Portable Document Format) is a fle format that has captured all the elements of a printed document as an electronic image that you can view, navigate, print, or forward to someone else. To view the fles, you need t h e f r e e Acrobat Reader, which is easy to download and install. There are also other free readers available. Once you've downloaded the Reader, it will start automatically whenever you want to look at a PDF fle. Why do I want a PDF? PDF fles are especially useful for documents in which you want to preserve the original graphic appearance. PDFs are Universal. Editing documents in Word can be easy and useful, but if you save a Word document on a Mac, it may not visually transfer properly to a PC; whereas PDFs are viewable on any device. How do I make a PDF? In the 'olden days', a separate piece of software that cost $200-$300 dollars was necessary. Today, in the best document editors, that functionality is built-in and free. Document editors you don't want There are a variety of text fles. What type of fle you have depends upon the editor you are using. Plain text is just that, text. No headings, no images, nothing but words. When you save a text only fle, the fle extension is.txt. We want our promotional material to have formatted text such as larger font headings and images so text only based documents are of little interest. On September 1987, Microsoft unveiled MS Works. Works does have some compatibility with older versions of MS Word and is still occasionally found. The native fle extension is.wps and is nearly impossible to open with current document processing programs. Stay away from this one. Yes, it says Windows 95.

4 Document editors you don't want Another oldie but a goodie is WordPerfect. This was a product from Novel and was later purchased by Corel of Corel Draw fame. WordPerfect dominated the DOS market but eventually lost to MS Word and their Offce Suite. Common fle name extension of WordPerfect document fles is.wpd. Older versions of WordPerfect also used fle extensions.wp,.wp7,.wp6,.wp5. Why detail these old editors? If you are using one of these obsolete document editors, you will need to update to more current software. Today's document editors There are over 40 different document editors out there but we are going to focus on the two that dominate the market: MS Offce and Open Offce. There are other good ones like Libre Offce, even Google has their own version, too but we will stick with the two biggies. Microsoft Office/Word MS Word is not available as a standalone product. It is only available as part of the MS Offce Suite which includes Word, Excel a spreadsheet editor, powerpoint a presentation editor, onenote a notepad program and outlook an program. MS Word has been around since While this may sound great, Microsoft has not always done well in insuring compatibility between versions. MS Word uses both.doc and.docx formats but older versions have problems or just cannot open the newer.docx format.. Add to that the fact that MS-Word allows full macro-scripting, which is the most common carrier for viruses and you will soon understand the problem. Macro-scripting means embedded within a Word fle can be a program which runs silently (or otherwise) on the recipient s computer whenever they view the fle. So don't send Word documents attached to an unless you are collaborating on a project and everyone is onboard with.doc/.docx sharing. The good news is if you have a working MS Offce suite, you don't need to change or update to make good promotional materials. There are literally hundreds of free online Word to PDF converters available but since 2007, Microsoft has had a free plug-in available for the Offce Suite allowing you to save documents in the PDF format. If you are starting from scratch, Offce can be purchased for $219. Upgrade prices for older versions to more current technology vary but there is an alternative to paying hundreds of dollars.

5 Oracle Open Office Open Offce is the result of collaboration by the open source community. Unlike the MS Offce Suite, Open Offce is free. OO has been around since 2000 and is very similar in operation to MS Offce. OO is designed to be cross platform and has the built-in ability to open both.doc and.docx fle. OO has incorporated a simple PDF button to save your document in the PDF format. You will fnd a link to download OO on our District web site in the District Technology section. Creating Your Document File, New is the place to start. How and where you put headers, footers, text and images is beyond the scope of this brief tutorial but the good news is you can play around with your document but no matter what happens, you can always select Unedit (Ctrl-Z on Windows; Cmd-Z on Mac) to undo your editing. Saving Your Document as a PDF Most editors are a one-click Save As operation but some offer the user options. If your editor does not offer options, there should not be a problem but, if you do have options, two are important. High Quality Print should be used if your document will be printed. If your document's main purpose is on the web (like this tutorial), then choose Smallest File Size. The reason for this is resolution. This is actually a lengthy topic so I will refer you to a For Dummies article that explains resolution in detail. Choosing an Image Resolution. If your Save As dialog gives you an option, it will be called Compression. The best setting is the default setting: Bicubic Downsampling To: 300 pixels/inch and Compression-JPEG-Image Quality- Minimum. More on resolution and image fle formats will be covered in the next section.

6 Image Editors There are literally hundreds of editors available, both paid and free. Too many to even begin to list here. Part 2, How to Make a Facebook Event, goes into much more detail about images and image editors. Your document editing program has some basic features to add images to your document. To get better images, it is recommended you read How to Make a Facebook Event. Give it a try There is no substitute for experience so start playing around with images for your next big fund raiser. There is nothing you can break and if you try asking others Lions members about their talents, you will fnd a great untapped resource in your Club. Social media is the ideal way to expand promotion of our fund raising events and Facebook is by far the biggest. If you do not have a 'Like Us on Facebook' on your current material, and you need help, contact District Marketing and Event Promotions Chair Lion Kathy Rosenkranz. Lion Kathy is ready to help you update your promotional material to take advantage of social media. On average, over 300 new people learn about each of our events when they are promoted on the Zone calendar, District Club calendar, District Facebook page and your Club's Facebook page. The cost to your Club is zero for this service. That also means not only improved fund raising but new potential Lions. Our goal of Strengthening the Pride thru Awareness is not a diffcult one if we work together as a team.

7 Bill Meyers District 27-A2 Technology Chair December 2014 Preparing your promotional materials - Documents