- Organization Name:
- Opera in the Heights
- Describe your creative piece – what is it and what has it been used for, and why is it innovative?
- We are submitting materials from our 2010-2011 Season Campaign. We flyer the city with the posters and brochures, and we snail mail the brochures to other art groups who have agreed to share their mailing lists with us.
This season we have made a decision to convert the files to Adobe pdf’s so we can make them available digitally via social media, eblasts, and the web. We plan on experimenting with adding a small webstore to our website and turning these materials into saleable items - like cups, T-shirts, and framed posters. Our goal with the webstore is to offset the costs of these materials.
- What issue or problem were you working to address with this piece?
- Opera companies across the country are cutting their repertoires or closing altogether. In this environment we are very open to anything and everything that can help us cut costs without compromising quality.
In the past we have hired a professional design firm to build all of our marketing materials, but with our budget getting tighter and tighter we decided to try something different this year.
- How has your submission successfully impacted your organization’s ability to solve this issue/problem?
- Beth, a longtime Oh! volunteer was laid off a few months ago, and she was trying to decide on whether or not to retire or maybe give freelance design a shot. She studied design a long time ago and was interested in picking it up again; however, she was unsure, because she didn't have a very good computer or any design software. Oh! agreed to buy her a new Macbook and Adobe CS4, and in return she would use these tools to design our season campaign – and, man, has she done a great job.
By moving our design in-house and focusing on digital distribution of marketing materials rather than printing and mailing, we will cut our marketing material costs by 70%, and with the addition of a webstore we might even see a small profit from this season's campaign.
Thank you Adobe and TechSoup for making these tools available to non-profits.
