The workshop, which was held at Liverpool Football Club, where Konica Minolta is the official print management partner, linked conference training to a research white paper produced by the firm that APCOM will commission.
The paper will look to understand where opportunities for schools and charities exist and how best to generate new revenue from these markets.
“As part of our APCOM sponsorship we offer them consultancy, advice and workshops on a regular basis, which are all funded and hosted by us,” said Konica Minolta market development manager PPD Mark Hinder.
“Alongside Neil Falconer from Print Future, we put together a full seminar on how to transform public sector printrooms. We focused very heavily on where to look for new opportunities, bearing in mind the strict rules and frameworks of the public sector.”
The initial phase of the white paper is to survey schools and charities to understand what their issues are when it comes to fundraising and look at the role of communication in print when it comes to fundraising activities.
“We want to find out how schools and charities can communicate fundraising events like fetes effectively to ensure that they’ve got people coming along and attending,” said Hinder.
“We also need to find out what applications public sector printrooms can create that people will potentially purchase to support these fundraising activities. On the back of the research we’ll look to produce application kits that schools, colleges and charities can then use to promote their events to raise money from.”
By allowing schools and charities to have access to online tools such as cross media marketing, photo publishing and web-to-print, they will be able to develop these fundraising activities using printed communications including direct mail, newsletters, photobooks, greeting cards and posters.
“Schools and charities are often unaware that these services are available, and that their local government sector printrooms have these tools and abilities to produce what they need for fundraising activities,” said Hinder.
“Or they’re not 100% sure from a creative concept point of view on what types of promotions they can produce to generate income to invest in new technology. Things like photobooks and greetings cards are all allowed to be produced through the government procurement services framework.”
Konica Minolta is looking to run a follow-up session at the APCOM conference in September.
