Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by jakethorn on August 21, 2007 - 12:05pm

Tags:

• activism

(here's what I wrote for the prospective how-to-make-fliers page.)

Fliers are a cheap way to raise awareness about an issue. Anybody can make them. You don’t have to be part of a group. All you need is a cause.

You can make perfectly good fliers using Microsoft Word. You can make better ones with other programs, but I’m most familiar with Word, so that’s the one I’ll be referencing throughout.

Most fliers you see promote an event. This isn’t necessary, though. In fact, with how big Facebook has gotten, you can make your event attendance bigger if you focus your effort there instead of on fliers. In my opinion, you’re best served doing both. There’s a statistic I heard a long time ago that says that people have to see your message 7 times before they remember it. Well, that means you should hit from as many angles as possible. So whereas 10 years ago fliers would be a primary way of promoting events, now they play more of a supporting role.

But what I for one would like to see more of are fliers that DON’T promote events. I’d like to see fliers that just raise awareness. As people see them, it’s a chance to broadcast your voice out into public and change minds. Despite Bush’s best efforts, we still live in a democracy, and power flows from the people, so posting information where the people can see it is an important part of the process. If you care about Darfur, why not make a page of information and post it out in public? Likewise, civil liberties, or net neutrality, or the war. It’s not hard. And NOBODY seems to do it nowadays. It’s a lost art.

What you need:

• Google
• MS Word
• Printer
• A few bucks for copies
• Tape

Now, I’m going to split up between 2 types of fliers --- the Event Promotion flier and the Issue Awareness flier. The second is simpler, so I’ll start with that one.

ISSUE AWARENESS FLIERS

There are two main parts of the basic issue flier.

Information --- You already know about your cause. THe point of the flier is to tell others why it’s important. You’ll need to prove it. You only have a page to work with and people don’t like to read, so get the most relevant facts you can. Time for Google searches. If you can find statistics, good --- any Iraq flier is incomplete without casualty figures.

Graphics --- An attention grabbing picture or icon is how you hook a reader. If you’re making a flier about civil liberties, get a picture of the Statue of Liberty.

TIP: It’s nice to provide websites to look up. Maybe consider listing some URLs where viewers can find more information. If you feel strongly about one, consider making a tear off section at the bottom (which I’ll describe at the end).

The headline of your flier should include a word or words that immediately tell the reader what the flier is about. If you’re making a flier about the war, the words “Iraq” and “Bush” are appropriate. Some headlines try to be witty and mysterious. These fliers suck because a lot of people who might be interested in the issue presented just stop reading at the headline.

The graphic should follow a similar protocol.

TIP: Photoshopping pictures to make someone/something look bad make people take your flier less seriously. You decide.

EVENT PROMOTION FLIERS

The flier should include the following items:

• Headline
• Title of the event
• Time and place of the event
• Name of your group
• Group logo (if you have one)
• Graphic or picture
• Information about the issue

Start off with a strong headline in bold font, bigger than the rest of the text you’ll be using on the page. If you have a good event title, you can just use that.

It’s also good to have your graphic near the top. If you have multiple graphics, definitely have one at the top.

TIP: In MS Word, if you’re having trouble fitting text around the graphic, right click it and select “Format picture” and then select “Layout” and then select “Square”. Background graphics are cool, but sometimes they look really bad when you try to make copies later.

Next, you’re going to want to have an attention grabbing sentence. It doesn’t have to explain everything. It just has to hook people and make them keep reading. It can be cryptic, or controversial. It can even be a question.

TIP: If you make it a question about your issue, you easily segue into providing a few stats or bits of key information in the next section of the flier.

The next portion is either going to be a few bits of info about the flier or maybe, if you have a lot of stuff going on at your event, or several events to promote (like if you’re doing a “week of action” kind of thing), you might want to forget about it. Or maybe you can work the information in somewhere else, like below the headline. It’s hard to summarize most issues in 2 or 3 sentences, but if you don’t have much space, you’re screwed, so prioritize and edit the best you can. 

TIP: For most of the text, complete sentences are unnecessary and inappropriate.

TIP: It’s good to use bullets.

TIP: Make the text telling the time and place of the event BIG. Even consider CAPS. Don’t make it as big as the headline, but almost. You want people to be able to immediately think if they can make it to your event or not.