Recently, a well-known healthcare charity has been experiencing a tremendous uptick in public interest, support and donations. This has come about since transitioning to web-to-print automation with the goal of extending community outreach and securing its long-term financial goals.  Beginning in the 1960s, this charity has been helping patients and their families to navigate the complex and challenging path to recovery. It does so by providing low or no-cost access to its world-class healthcare and medical research facilities.  However, as technologies have grown and changed, this organization found itself facing a variety of challenges that no one could have imagined six decades earlier.

The challenge: dramatically improving printed outreach and fundraising materials, while preserving brand compliance and core principles

As technology and social media have evolved, public awareness and enthusiasm for the charity and its mission have also seen substantial growth.  Third-party businesses, churches, and other philanthropic organizations became anxious to throw their support behind its core mission of saving lives and supporting families in crisis.  They do so by hosting and promoting fund-raising and public outreach events. The range of these events has grown and diversified over the years, ranging today from bake sales at local schools, to professional golf tournaments sponsored by Fortune 100 corporations.  Such a diverse palette of events requires  a wide range of differing marketing materials, including:

  • Targeted flyers & mailers
  • Personalized letters
  • Posters & banners
  • Stickers & buttons
  • Event signage

In the past, the charity required its third-party promoters to submit proposed marketing materials for manual review by their event specialists or marketing team.  However, as the scope and scale of these fundraising activities grew, the need for direct involvement with these third parties made it increasingly challenging for staff to manage the ever-increasing number of print-related tasks.

The charity needed a better path forward, one using creative printing automation to accelerate the review and approval processes—or potentially lose millions of dollars in financial contributions crucial to its core mission of serving patients and their families.

Their vision of a next generation web-to-print solution focused on cost-effectiveness and versatility, as it would be called upon to produce hundreds of types of printed materials of the highest quality, while simultaneously addressing many significant challenges, including:

  • Enforcing brand compliance across all web-to-print marketing materials.
  • Delivering optimal content quality, including support for high-resolution graphic formats.
  • Offering an easy-to-use interface, regardless of the end user’s level of design expertise or previous experience with printed products.
  • Supporting easily-accessible creative printing automation from any geographic location.
  • Integrating smoothly with existing workflow systems, via customizable and responsive automation.
  • Using the best in web-to-print technologies to automatically scale and adapt to changes in end-user traffic and output requirements.
  • And finally, it had to respect the legal protections surrounding each patients’ personal and family information, as well as their pictorial images and associated licensing agreements.

The solution:  Web-to-print automation for streamlining events marketing

By selecting Silicon Designer by Silicon Publishing, this highly technically-savvy charity chose to build its solution upon the most easily-customizable web-to-print automation platform. This decision lead to a  completely modernization of its entire process of creating, reviewing, approving and producing third-party marketing materials. The result was a dramatic improvement in the ease of collaboration with event sponsors around the globe, as well as the promotion of the fundraising events they hosted.

They weren’t alone in enjoying these benefits. Silicon Designer boasts an extensive portfolio of corporate clients, including household names and Fortune 100 companies. The Silicon Designer platform provides these organizations with total control over all aspects of content creation, including imagery selection, simplified editing capabilities, the design of pre-approved templates and alternate layouts, and even the inclusion capabilities of custom fonts.

What is automated web-to-print technology?

Once the charity’s marketing group approves a prospective event sponsor internally—itself an exhaustive and careful process—it then provides them with access to its automated web-to-print tools.  This sophisticated toolset includes a suite of online templates, each easily editable by the Designer platform. Libraries of pre-approved templates are immediately available online, and often include families of theme-related letters, flyers, posters, event signage, and mailers.

The charity’s creative team takes great pains in designing each family of related templates carefully, including specifically-customizable elements to deliver an impactful and consistent message.  These customizable template elements offer data fields for event dates and names, a variety of editable headline banners, custom font selections, and an array of creative graphical resources, such as location maps and pre-approved imagery. Carefully-vetted images of minor patients, for example, involve special licensing legal considerations, requiring the charity to carefully monitor and track their inclusion in third-party marketing materials.

Once the third-party event sponsor has completed a draft of a marketing package, they then send the materials directly from the platform via Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to the charity for final approval. Depending on the content and event types, multiple actors within the charity might be involved in the final approval process, including the legal department as well as the creative marketing team. These individuals and departments may iterate on edits, or simply approve the drafted materials as-is, before releasing them in a print-ready PDF format for output at the highest levels of quality.

The results: Charity events drive surging donations, thanks to the best in web-to-print technology

Because the charity put so much care and effort into developing its templates and their supporting imagery prior to the rollout of its web-to-print automation solutions, adoption by third-party sponsors has been smooth and relatively problem-free.  Meanwhile, sponsor satisfaction levels have soared right along with the charity’s internal productivity rates.  The charity has optimized its outlays, while approving more promotional events on a faster timeline, resulting in a tremendous increase in overall fundraising effectiveness.

Additional benefits of adopting Silicon Designer’s creative printing automation include:

Optimized brand management: web-to-print technology automates the content approval process, allowing for greater flexibility in supporting promotional events that multiple organizations might host simultaneously. This streamlined approach to web design and brand management also ensures that materials adhere to branding guidelines, including key aspects such as logo use, color schemes, font types, imagery selection, and spelling and grammar, as well as other brand-specific protocols.

Marketing materials on demand: web-to-print automation also eliminates the need for excessive stockpiles of hardcopy marketing materials, which can easily become outdated. As a result, this technology enables the charity’s staff to spend less time tracking down lost flyers and brochures—and more time pursuing activities that directly support their fund-raising efforts.

Increased web presence: with web-based marketing solutions rapidly eclipsing conventional print media, Designer’s web-to-print technology allows the charity to promote its brand (via multiple web portals) to a wider audience of prospective sponsors, without incurring additional costs. The web portal also provides an online venue for reviewing all promotional events—whether approved or pending—ensuring easy visibility for all stakeholders.

Legal liability mitigation: the web-to-print solution also minimizes potential legal liabilities involving third-party marketing materials. These include those related to full compliance with copyright, fair use guidelines, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provisions, to say nothing of other intellectual property rights, licensing agreements, image licensing considerations, and state or national compliance.

Fun and easy editing experience: with Silicon Designer, there is no longer a need to install specialized hardware or software on the desktop. This is because the web-based editing experience occurs directly within the web portal, which is compatible with most modern web browsers.  Third-party event sponsors can even print marketing materials from any location without any additional equipment.  The online editing experience eliminates the need for special training or knowledge of proprietary graphics or layout applications beyond those commonly used in business today.

Increased revenue potential: automated web-to-print technology enables third parties to promote fundraising events online via multiple web portals that are linked to the charity’s website. With the new streamlined approval process, third-party event planners require significantly less lead time to plan, implement, and market a new event.

Conclusion

Silicon Publishing is understandably proud of our ongoing partnership with this world-class healthcare charity.  Their transformation from a manual process to online creativity and printing automation has dramatically enhanced the effectiveness and quality of its fundraising partnerships, web presence, and marketing campaigns.

As web-to-print capabilities continue to offer crucial advantages to organizations across all categories, Silicon Designer—the world’s leading platform for print automation—blazes the trail with web-based solutions for the toughest document and print challenges. For more information about how our web-to-print automation solutions can help you, feel free to contact Silicon Publishing today.

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