Procurement proposal

Regional newsletter scheme

East of England Liberal Democrats are seeking someone who will project manage the creation and dispatch of quarterly newsletters for Local Parties around the region

East of England Liberal Democrats are seeking someone who will project manage the creation and dispatch of quarterly newsletters for Local Parties around the region (Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk).

Please read the information below carefully and submit expressions of interest to Chris White at chair@eastlibdems.org.uk

Your expression of interest should explain any relevant experience you have, and a brief outline of how you would approach the task. Examples of newsletters or other publications you have produced would be helpful.

Design

Each newsletter will be A3 folded to A5. You will draft template stories for page 1 and 4 (front and back) and drop them into a pre-agreed template that is used for each Local Party for every edition. Local Parties will be given a deadline by which they must supply their own content to replace the template stories. If they don’t, their newsletter will have the template stories. Pages 2 and 3 (inside) will have a mix of national, regional and county content co-ordinated by you and Local Parties will not be able to edit it.

Print

Your first job is to secure quotes from two or three printers to carry out the print (and probably postage).

One option is: Charles Glover, Election Workshop, 3 Sheffield Street, Manchester. M1 2ND. 0161 272 6216 www.electionworkshop.co.uk enquiries@electionworkshop.co.uk

Dispatch

You will arrange for postage via OnePost or similar bulk mailing operator. It may be that the printer can also dispatch. (NB as each LP has its own version and the print run is not huge, there cannot be postage discounts for sorting by postcode. OnePost calls this “Unsorted Mail”.)

Distribution data: you will obtain address data for each member in the relevant local parties from the East Lib Dems Regional Support Officer and supply to the printer/dispatcher in a secure, GDPR compliant manner.

Process to sign up customers from the Local Parties

You will draft an email to be sent to all local parties in late January 2025 (and then each December thereafter) (re)launching the scheme. You can see below the kind of email that could be sent to all LP Officers shortly and thereafter once a year to get them to sign up for a year.

At the moment, there are four or five local parties (with a total membership / newsletter circulation of around 1500) that have been taking part in the previous scheme. Hopefully, we can push that up to between 4000 and 5000 i.e. around two thirds of all members, if not more.

Either you will be responsible for drafting emails to Local Party officers during the year to persuade them to sign up or staff will promote it.

Process to create a newsletter

You will create

a rough draft of pages 2 and 3 (inside). This will have a story about something happening in each county, plus national and regional. It does not have to be final at this stage, but should give local parties a broad idea
a template for pages 1 and 4 that local parties can accept or send in their replacement copy. To make it as easy as possible for the Local Parties, you should indicate something like “Story A: 150 words plus picture; Story B: 60 words plus picture or 100 words no picture; Story C [similar]; Story D [similar].

You then send the template to each participating Local Party. While they are writing their stories, you finalise the inside pages.

Resources

The examples are a guide to expected output