Print advocacy by design

My organization publishes a quarterly print magazine called Focus on Adoption. We’ve been thinking about transitioning to a digital version, but each time we poll our community, they overwhelmingly favour the print edition. They would love both digital and print, they say, but very few say that their preference is digital only.

The magazine remains my favourite medium for communicating the particular issues, concerns, and stories of adoption. It is the one place where images, graphics, news, and narratives come together in a cohesive whole to provide a creative exhibit of BC’s adoption community. We’re not a professional shop, but I like to think we do a pretty good job of being the right amount of sensitive and provocative. We think long and hard about our imagery and our content, ensuring that it reflects the social and cultural milieu of adoption in BC. 

With so many different media to curate content for now, I often worry that the magazine will not survive. It seems like a luxury these days to be able to spend the many hours that are required in design, interviews, writing, and mailing to produce this journal. And yet, anytime I

talk to people outside of our organization they always bring up the magazine as being very valuable to their organization or to their work in child welfare. No one ever says that about our Twitter feed or our Facebook page.

We make Focus on Adoption available online on Issuu, an online platform that allows publishers to make their print content available online. Browsing Issuu the other day I became aware of The Eagle Eye, the student-run magazine of Marjory Stoneman Douglas Highschool in Parkland, Florida, where 17 students and teachers were killed in a mass shooting in February. The January 2018 issue of The Eagle Eye is smart, current, political, well-written, and exceptionally designed. And, sadly, naive to the events that were about to ravage the school and its community. But when you look at this clever publication with its
provocative story on rape culture, and its balanced reporting of protest kneeling in high school football, you begin to understand how this school, of all of the many schools who have endured mass shootings, was perhaps accidentally designed for this moment of powerful student advocacy.

Maybe the print environment is the right place to start thinking about the words and images and context of an issue. Maybe it's the right place to design a communications for development plan. Maybe, with all that's going on over at Facebook right now, the good old, semi-private print magazine will survive another day.