There is a special pile of job tickets in my office, job tickets that never get filed or numbered, never looked at again and never see the inside of MYOB.
They are the love jobs. You have them too – jobs done for free over the years for cousins, friends, schools and other good causes. Wedding invites or raffle tickets, with the occasional business card or flyer thrown in from that mate who was starting out and needed a hand.
The love job isn’t something you want to encourage too much, but it is a nice part of being a printer. It is fun to play a small part in helping someone you like get their business off the ground, and printing free raffle tickets for your kids’ school is a lot easier than doing a Saturday working bee.
For all the enjoyment I get out of doing the occasional freebie, I had never done any free work to any purpose. I know many printers do donate time and money to various causes (Rod Frost from Cheque- Mates is an inspiration here) and it was itching at me that I should do more.
So when I received a solicitation from a charity seeking a printer willing to supply free print for a twelve month trial, I looked hard. They had a plan and defined range and quantity of items so I could work out the cost. They also had an impressive board and were doing work I agreed with. So I signed on and three quarters of the way through it has been great – we are saving them money and they appreciate what we do.
It was such a success that we took on some other similar projects, and that is where things started to go wrong.
One group approached us to donate the book for their major fundraising event for free and we said yes. They offered logo placement but we weren’t fussed – that was not why we were doing it. But then the artwork came in and the book had the sponsorship details in it of another printer, right next to ours and much bigger. Sure, they donated too, but it was irritating, and worse was we had to print their ads for free. We didn’t want glory, honest, but we also were not donating so some other printer could take the glory.
We offered to supply signage and printing to a local sporting event. We worked for weeks and donated a small fortune. And then on the day another printer who did $50 worth of tickets brought their own signage into the event and got their branding all over the local papers. Again, we didn’t want the glory but argh!!
But the last straw was another small charity we decided to help in a similar arrangement to the one that was working so well. They came to us for a donation but we said instead of cash that anything they wanted to print I would do for free.
We did a brand redesign and supplied a fair bit of marketing material that helped them look more professional, and it was all going well until we got a newsletter in the mail from them. An expensively produced one that we didn’t print. It turned out that one of the directors had a mate who was a printer and now they had all this extra print budget they could afford to throw him some mailing work – done at cost though, so you know, all good. So instead of donating to a charity, I was now effectively donating straight to one of my competitors. No thanks – find yourself another sucker.
I know I should have been a bigger man and said that we were donating and what they did with the money was up to them. But to have our work and effort shoved back in our faces just stuck in my craw. The irony was if they had approached me to do the newsletter I would have done it for free as part of the deal without a second thought.
Still I don’t want to put you off love jobs and I’m not trying to show how wonderful we are by doing what we have done. We could have and should have done more over the years. But I will say that just because they are not paying does not mean you should not be as careful in choosing an organisation to donate to as you would in choosing a client to give credit to – it hurts when you disagree over money, but it hurts more when you disagree over love.
Baden Kirgan is the MD of Jeffries Printing Services and Black House Comics
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