Questionnaire Results.

From conducting my questionnaire I have discovered that 95% of my intended target audience do not read the college magazine. From this we can assume that the product is not working. Therefore in its current state it is not reaching its target audience.

Consequently75% of people said that they would not be prepared to pay for their copy of the college magazine. This means that if they are not prepared to pay for the magazine then the overall quality will be poor, this is because there will be no money for materials. The way to get the revenue needed to make a good quality magazine would be to advertise products in several pages of the magazine. For example you could advertise businesses local to the area, or products and businesses that will be interesting and informative to the target audience; such as driving lessons and a new product at a local fast food chain. Another way of getting the revenue would be to advertise local jobs, this would be very useful to the target audience as it would mean that they are helped in finding a job that they need.

When asked the question ‘Which of the following would you be most interested in?’ the majority of the responses was ‘upcoming events’, this piece of information is useful to me because this aspect of the magazine can feature largely on the front cover. Another popular choice was ‘competitions’ this is another article that could be featured on my front cover but it can also feature in my contents page. The least popular of the choices was history of the college and how to deal with the workload, so from this we can assume that it would be a waste of time putting this into the college magazine.

I have found out that the most important element of a college magazine is the front cover; if it looks boring and dull, then no one will buy it. If it looks bright and eye catching then it will be more likely to be recognised. So our magazine needs to grab people’s attention, and to do this I will make sure that the front cover looks very eye catching, and to do this I will make sure that lots of good pictures, bright colour, attention grabbing stories and exciting graphics are used. In order for our magazine to be recognised it needs to be publicized this is so the maximum amount of people possible will recognise it and buy it. So to do this we need to have an advertising campaign. Firstly we could send everyone in the school an email to make them slightly aware of this product. Secondly we could have big posters advertising the magazine up around the college. And lastly we could have people handing out flyers maybe so you get a discount on the first issue, that way people are more likely to buy the first issue and think it is really god, and then they will be willing to buy the next issue.

Half of the people I surveyed said that they would prefer the magazine to be released monthly, I think this would be a good Idea because then there will be the maximum amount on ‘new’ news that could be released in the new issue. But 80% of people said weekly and monthly so to compromise the magazine could be released every two weeks.

The most popular choices of what people said that they would like to see in the magazine are; upcoming gigs, jobs, cinema listings, gossip, agony aunt and Face Book news. This tells us that a classified job page is needed. This could feature in the contents page telling the audience that the jobs page is at the back of the magazine. And we could combine upcoming gigs, reviews, cinema times and reviews together to create a ‘what’s on’ guide with all of these elements together, this could be produced over a double page. The magazine could have a Face Book page, this is where everyone on Face Book can have their say about what they would like to see in the next issue, they could also give use feed back on what they thought of the previous issue.
Overall I have found out a lot of valuable information which will help create a successful magazine cover and contents page.