Sliding Into Your DMs Like

If you didn’t get the joke, DM refers to direct mailer. This week in my PR Publications class, I was asked to complete a second direct mailer for a stakeholder that expanded on last week’s.

Unfortunately, school closure made things a little difficult last week and I was unable to submit my first direct mailer with my research matrix. Luckily, this week I was able to complete both mailers.

For my first stakeholder, I chose high school theatre students interested in pursuing theatre at the university level. Since my second stakeholder was supposed to have some influence on the first, I chose to direct the second mailer to the parents of these students.

I had a solid idea for my first draft. I wanted a marquee in which prospective theatre students could imagine their names in lights on the front. On the back, I decided to put a little information about a theatre workshop for prospective students. I didn’t want it to be too wordy, just fun.

My second mailer was directed towards the parents. I wanted it to be much more professional with more information. The parents would likely be the ones who would read it anyways.

My first mailer was me trying to get a footing in Photoshop. I think my idea was great, but the end result wasn’t as good as I had hoped. I think with a bit more time and access to more stock image sites (where I could find a higher resolution marquee image), I could make it shine.

My second mailer really turned out the way I wanted it to. It looks clean and professional and has quite a bit of information for parents to enjoy. I even put a map in there. Parents love maps. Overall, I’m happy with both works, but very happy with the second in particular.

After this assignment I think it is safe to say that I am an InDesign kind of guy. Photoshop is cool for retouching things and making pictures pretty, but if I had to do this assignment without having to use Photoshop, I would have used InDesign. Some of the tools on the left are very similar, but I think that InDesign just has more useful features for this type of work.