By asking the question “How much would you be prepared to pay for the college magazine” it showed that 60% of people would be prepared to pay something for one, but from the previous question. It shows that only 10% of students asked would be prepared to buy one. From this I can conclude that it could be an idea to use a donation system where students only pay as much as they think the magazine should be worth. However this could lead to problems so I think that the best idea would be to make the 1st issue free in order to grip the readers interest and then encourage them to buy the next issue of the magazine.
Another issue that we needed to raise was how often people would want this magazine to be published. In our questionnaire, we gave 4 options: once a week, once a fortnight, once a month or once a term. From the results, we discovered that 90% of the people asked would either want it to be published either fortnightly or monthly. This shows that if we charged for the magazine and expected people to buy it, they wouldn’t spend the money every week so fortnightly would be a more realistic option.
Comments as to why people wouldn’t buy the college magazine that were not submitted on the written questionnaires were things like: “nothing in a college magazine would appeal to me”. Therefore in order to find out what people wanted in their magazine, we gave them a list of possible things to include and we asked them whether they would like them in the magazine (Yes) or if they did not want them in there (No). From this we found that 18 people wanted a job section, 18 people wanted an events guide, 15 people wanted college information, 14 people wanted information on their courses, 13 people wanted a problems page, 11 people wanted competitions, 11 people wanted a horoscopes page and 8 people wanted a section on sports. From this we would be able to construct our contents pages from the information on what people wanted to see in their college magazine.
Some of the suggestions we got when we asked “what would make you buy the college magazine?” were suggestions like bright colours, photography, important local news and an eye catching front page. This means that as long as the college magazine was aesthetically pleasing then students would be more inclined to pick up a copy and then buy it. However with my college magazine, I want to keep the colours quite dark in order to give the magazine a more cool and grungy look that would appeal to my target audience so I had to try and find a balance.
From this questionnaire and analysis, it is easy for me to see how I should design my magazine and what should be included in order for my target audience to buy it.
