Measurement The real cost of killing print
If your finance department is putting pressure on you to convert a printed publication to online only, they're probably focusing on an easy-to-capture number on their spreadsheets – the cost of printing in your budget. They mistakenly believe eliminating that item from your budget will help your organization's bottom line. Which is more important for leaders – what we say, or what we do?
Here are some facts to use when pushing back:
1. Check your web usage statistics to see how many people are printing out copies of an internal e-newsletter. Multiply that times the number of pages being printed out in total for a single edition throughout your entire organization. Find out from your purchasing department what the cost of that actually is when you add together the expensive paper stock and color cartridges being used for the one-sided printing throughout your organization. Compare that against the relatively lower cost of mass-produced publications printed on both sides of cheaper paper.
2. A recent study by The Poynter Institute shows that people learn better and faster when reading the same information on paper vs. online, partly because they don't click through to all the elements of an online article.
3. If the publication includes content that could help increase your revenue or decrease your expenses, both of those outcomes will be compromised if the publication is only available online. Not only do people read less of the information available online, they're also less likely to even open an electronic document than to skim through one that appears in their mailbox in hard copy.
Finally, you might say that you'd be happy to reconsider your point of view when all the business newspapers and magazines read avidly by Finance and IT executives eliminate their printed versions.
Further reading
How to Measure Internal Communication
Latest podcast |
Deal of the week |
New podcast on audience segmentation for internal comms
|
|
My Cart 