SPECIAL SECTIONS Share your SPECIAL SECTION ideas with other IFPA publishers. To post your idea follow the log in instructions below. Be sure to include your contact info and publications name. If you are uploading an image, be sure to convert it to either a GIF or JPG (300kb max). INSTRUCTIONS TO ENTER YOUR IDEA: CLICK HERE to LOG IN user name login: publisher password: ifpa Then click on the green NEW button. To add a PHOTO you must enter your text, then hit SAVE and then click the UPLOAD box Community Guide Our community guide is a publication that is printed with the village and chamber of commerce. Most of the advertisers listed are chamber members, but others were not excluded from participating. The finished product is mailed to every home in the village separate from our newspaper. It includes all the village phone numbers, a message from the mayor and the chamber president, and the village ordinances. Also included is a list of parks and what each park offers. The back of the book includes a school listing, church list, and a complete business list with phone numbers. We sell the advertising as well as the local chamber and we bill all the clients for the ads. The books are printed in house. Halloween Discount Our Christmas section is traditonally one of the largest of the year: It comes out the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. In order to accomplish getting this out on time, we need to start selling before Halloween. To help you get in the christmas mood, we are offering a Halloween discount if we recieve your ad before Halloween. 47 percent of our ads came in by tuesday ; 62 percent by the following Friday, a full week before our deadline. We sold more ads. We sold more dollars with less production time. We were done by noon Friday, when typically we would work Friday night or saturday afternoon and we had no stress. Gary Hawken, Flashes Shopping Guide, Stuart, FL Lifesaver guide This guide is a special section, a free-standing insert, and a mini-tab. In our content, we tried to do 50 percent news and 50 percent ads. With all the emergency preparedness and the homeland security, there is a real need and some fears out there about some basic problems. In our content, we talked about wildfires, swimming safety, West Nile Virus, what to do in a poisoning emergency, how to recognize a stroke etc. It took us into some new venues we haven't been into before, like hospitals and doctors. We made $10,000 in gross sales and we were put in a postion where we could come back in two years. In addition to being a profit center, it was a public service. This is a worthwhile thing and could be taken to another level. Emergency preparedness and homeland security is certainley important. Triad News Publishing, Lewiston,ID Prime Magazine PRIME is our monthly publication delivered through 400+ store locations in our area. Each month PRIME includes sections on: Mind and Body, Legal, Dining and Entertainment, Home Improvement, Finance, Travel, Technology and more. It is sold primarily by one, separate PRIME Rep. Although my weekly Reps can also sell into it. The mature and active adult market represents the wealthiest and fastest growing market segment in the United States. People age 40+ control 75% of the nation's financial assets. Their discretionary income is twice that of the under 35 age group. Recipe For A Successful Cookbook We add recipes from Premier Holiday Cookbook. Our readers, our advertiser, and our staff...we used 117 recipes! This really makes your cookbook rise to the top. Nothing guarantees readership like input from the readers and advertisers themselves! Next you want to take all your potential advertisers and flavor their ads for this piece. With art, borders, and special headlines and copy, all our ads blend in nicely. We made this dish extra appetizing by addig a really sweet index to bring out the flavor of the recipes. Now top it all with a colorful, well-designed cover and you have.. A HOLIDAY COOKBOOK! This recipe was an absoulte crowd pleasure and yielded $13,393. Debbie Colubiale and Jean Barraclough Herald Newspaper, Rio Grande, NJ Savvy After 55 This is an annual directory that we publish as a special separate guide. It has generated $20,000+ every year that we have published it. The guide is filled primarily with local non-profit agency listings for ELDER SERVICES, FINANCIAL SERVICES, HOSPITALS, SUPPORT GROUPS, etc. The first year was the toughest to gather all of the listings, etc. But once that info is compiled you can reuse it every year. We print 20,000 copies and deliver it through store locations, senior centers, retirement communities, etc. We sell it with the idea that we will be restocking our store drops every month throughout the year. Reminder Publications Terry O'Donnell 413-525-6661 x147 Special Sections as Fill Instead of running a small or diminishing special section once, sell it as a recurring page or two, published once a month. The key is the advertiser doesn't know or care when it runs, so you can run it as filler. When you're 2 pages over you run the "special" pages and your 2 pages of filler just became paid advertising. With 2 page promotions you occasionally have to print over to get it in that month, but 11 of 12 months those filler pages would be non-revenue. A one page promotion will always print at no extra cost to you. Most advertisers don't even change the ad. We rotate each advertiser and give make their ad a quarter page once during the promotion and we almost always run free color, again on an open spot color plate. Advertiser love it and so do we! Bill Jones, Moneysaver Advertising, Inc., 585-928-2470 Thank you "Berry" Much I really didn't want to present this idea because its so hard to believe how successful it was. The story starts with me eating something.I walked into a grocery store and was slammed by the smell of fresh-picked strawberries...first-time native strawberries. I figured it was good for lunch. I didn't get to eat my lunch because my cell phone kept ringing. I had to go into the account, and i figured i would bring them in. I tried to do my business with this car dealer, each of the people came and took a little red berry word started getting out.We decided to have each salesperson deliever strawberries, with a little sign that said, "Thank you berry much for your business".They went in with a quart of strawberries. The key is that they were picked that morning. When we brought them into the office, the smell was there, the fresh strawberries... they really felt good bringing them in to their customers. Maybe there are no strawberries, but we will look for something different at a different time of the year.I got more voice mails from my salespeople saying they thought it was a stupid idea and then realized it was great.Some even got whipped cream and some of those cakes and brought them in , too. Reminder Community Newspapers, Doug Fabian Home Improvement Centerspread We run this 2-page spread from March through October. Advertisers must run all 8 months. Then we run a one page version in the winter. We got this idea at an IFPA conference abouyt 10 years ago and we've been running ever since! It also gets good results for advertisers. Submitted by: Dan Buendo, Publisher Reminder Publications 12-inch Thank you We shifted the time of gift-giving from Christmas to Valentines Day. The day before Valentines Day, I had a baker cook many dozens of 12 inch heart-shaped chocolate chip cookies for us. A baker's helper artfully decorated the cookies with whipped toppings, candies, and a variety of messages such as "Heartfelt THANKS", or for some customers, "We Love You". We found out that we were the only business delivering business gifts on Valentines Day. We made a doubly good impression. We found, in past times, to make or buy an impressive Christmas gift, we generally spent $25 or $50. It got great results at our office. We had more response from a $2 gift than we did at Christmas from a $50 gift. Ron Pilger Camrose Booster, Camrose, Alberta, Canada Because We care Free papers in most communities are leaders. Through our sheer numbers, we have the opportunity to inform our readers about a variety of topics. Some of these topics are uncomfortable to talk about like death and dying., but who wants to hear about that? When i suggested doing this special promotion, my sales staff thought i had lost my mind. You want us to sell advertising about funerals? Cemeteries? Cremation? Nobody wants to talk about death! Thats why this promotion sold out in three days. Nobody talks about it, but everybody needs to know. Sympahy and Understanding has information about planning a funeral, coping with terminally ill family members, flowers and their significance, hospice, suicide, cremation, monuments and dealing with grief.. basic information that everybody is going to need someday. We printed 5,000 copies and delievered at hospitals, clincs, drug stores, florists, through hospice counselors, lawyers, financial planners, and funeral homes. Nothing like this has ever been done in our market and it was obvious from the response that the need was there. We'll be doing this promotion every fall. We have taken a leadership role in our community and have provided a much-needed service. Mary Nelson Midweek Publications, West Fargo, ND Business Family Album Timing was everything. It was the turn of the century, the new Millennium, and the Barre Home coming celebration. They would open the time capsule they had buried at the Heritage Festival 25 years before. It was the perfect time to do the Barre Family album. It was full of local business and their history. The phone started ringing as soon as they got the flyer in the mail. It was a wonderful section, but I realized I couldn't sell it to Barre for the next 25 years, but I have 34 other towns in our area that I can sell this to. It was fun to sell. The whole community loved it. Kay Roberts The World, Barre, VT Special Bingo Section Idea Vicky Ellie Blue Line Media Holdings, Green Bay Sun Wisconsin Community Papers Special Bingo Section Idea This past July we did a special section called 'Summer Bingo' It increased our revenue, created an additional 20+ pages for our paper and was a fun event for our readers, clients and sales team. Advertisers We sold quarter, half and full pages at reduced rates into the special Bingo section. If the advertiser wanted to 'donate' a prize for the section, the cost of the prize would be reduced from the cost of the ad up to a certain percent. (the percentage varried from sales rep to sales rep up to 30%) Example: An advertiser wanted to purchase a full page ad for $1200 and had a lawn mower for $200, his ad cost would be $1000. We tried to target the larger clients for larger prizes. The advertisers who ran in this special Bingo section would have a 'bingo chip' placed into their ad. Small circle chips with summer theme pictures on them. Sailing, a grill, the sun, a beach, flip flops... Readers Readers would receive the paper and look for the ads that had the special bingo chip in the ad, cut it out and place it on a house ad which included a bingo board that ran the week prior and the current week with the advertisers running the bingo ads. After they cut out the chips, taped/glued them to the bingo board, they dropped it off, or mailed it to our office for the drawing of prizes. Sales team After receiving the bingo cards we picked winners who won the prizes from our advertisers. The number of winners would be determined on how many prizes we received from our advertisers. The winners came to the office to pick up their prizes, eliminating us sending prizes out. Thoughts This was a huge success with a great amount of fun for the sales team, the advertisers and our readers. We received thousands of cards. It ran very smooth generating more revenue for the advertisers and our paper. Great concept. Thank you, Vicky Ellie 920-405-0200 office 920-572-0350 cell Blue Line Media Holdings, Green Bay Sun Wisconsin Community Papers Special Section, Really! When you're doing a special section make it different from the paper, make it special. We print on a 16.5" page but our special sections are 12.5" tall. The two reasons for this is it makes the section different from the paper. It also is easier to sell the page when it is smaller. We sell by the inch in our paper, we sell modular in the special sections. This keeps the customer from debating, inch by inch, how many he is buying usually making the ad too small. It makes it harder to compare the price to our paper or our competition. It makes the customer look at the value for the cost rather than if it is cheaper per inch to something else. We have four papers a customer can buy. Many of our special sections are spit into two areas combining two paper per area. A couple zip codes are even moved to make a balanced quantity. The pricing is better for the section then the combination rate for the two papers. We are only producing two sections instead of four and we make two press runs versus four. We also have a higher advertising percentage to text ratio. It has really increased our dollar sales, improved the demand to participate and made it easier to sell by making it unique special section. Joe Green, Publisher, Green Banner Publications, Pekin, IN 812-967-3176