JULY 1 WILL MARK THE START of the new budget year in most institutions across the country. Nothing new, as that’s the regular budget cycle of higher education. But new this year are the deep cuts some budgets have undergone due to the economic situation.
For many publication officers and magazine editors working for colleges and universities, this budget year is going to bring drastic changes and big challenges. With increasing paper, printing, and postage costs combined with big circulations, print publications have become the biggest budget lines on most balance sheets—the type of lines that will get noticed by any financially concerned eye.
Consult the recipients of
your publications about
their preferences in terms
of formats.
At the same time, as individuals and as professionals we are becoming ever more deeply immersed in new technologies and digital media. With so much time spent in front of screens, it’s easy to wonder if printing anything on paper still makes sense, especially when sustainability efforts are targeting any wasteful use of natural resources.
Are college publications going to follow the tragic lead of the newspaper industry? It’s probably too early to tell, but current budget levels are definitely worrying, as proven by some of the results of an online survey of 148 editors conducted in March 2009 on the CASECUE listserv, an online community mainly composed of higher ed magazine editors that’s managed by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Some highlights:
• Only about one-third of survey respondents haven’t been advised to review or reduce costs related to their flagship publication, while the same percentage has been expressly asked to produce their magazine at a lower cost.
• Nearly 18 percent have been instructed to review the lineup of all their marketing publications, including their magazine.
• Last spring, more than half (54.5 percent) of the surveyed editors expected a decrease in budget and staffing levels for 2010.
While this survey wasn’t scientific in nature, it confirmed the trends uncovered by another recent survey, which I conducted from January 29 to February 17, 2009, about the state of print and electronic publications in higher education. This was an updated version of a previous survey I reported about in the University Business column “Demand Print or Print on Demand?” (October 2007).
Completed by 199 institutions on a voluntary basis, this year’s survey isn’t statistically representative, but it definitely sheds some light on the current move from print to electronic on many campuses. Full survey results from “The State of Print and Electronic Publications in Higher Ed, 2009” can be found here: www.higheredexperts.com/2009surveys.
According to the results, no less than 65 percent of respondents reported that their print budget had been frozen or had decreased over the past two years—as opposed to only 48 percent in the 2007 survey. To reduce the budget of print publications, 82 percent have started to rely more on electronic publications, a five-point increase compared to 2007. More and more news-oriented publications such as newsletters, those covering campus news, and event calendars are now only available in an electronic format (see above chart). While this fate is reserved to a small fraction of magazines—4 percent—this share has doubled in less than two years.
So what should you do if you have been asked to come up with a plan to revisit your institution’s marketing and news publication budget?
1. DON’T PANIC: Get the facts straight about existing publications.
Even if your institution produces only a handful of publications, start with a quick audit to get a good grasp of the costs related to printed pieces. Talk to the person in charge of approving the invoices and get the annual dollar amounts paid for designing, printing, and mailing each publication. At this stage, it’s also a good idea to identify the names of any outside vendors (designers, photographers, printers, etc.) used. Obviously, it makes sense to perform this audit at the institutional level. At big universities, this will mean working with several publication officers.
