Case Study: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is one the nation’s largest and longest-running professional non-profit theaters. In its annual 8 ½ month season, the organization presents 11 plays across three theaters. That’s a lot of actors in costume, a lot of sets, and a lot of images that have to be perfect to tell the Theater’s story to its many members and donors. The annual catalog of plays is just one of the ways the organization communicates with its publics. A very important tool, OSF’s in-house professional marketing staff had been dissatisfied with the color and quality of their signature piece. As a consequence, the department had gone through a number of printers and designers in an attempt to find just the right mix to project-manage the kind of product they could be proud of. That’s when they turned to NightHawk.
NightHawk professionals quickly diagnosed a problem with overall workflow, specifically with the color-management and pre-press processes that are necessary to guarantee quality, consistency and accurate color. Our customer service representative worked with our estimator to develop a bid for OSF. As NightHawk provides full-service project management as well as manufacturing and finishing, our bid was expanded to cover the Festival’s signage, banner, and large-format graphics needs as well as pre-press and pre-flighting for the catalog. In this manner, we were able to bring economies of scale and volume discount pricing to the table. OSF professionals, however, were still concerned about the costs of proper image and file preparation. They had never paid that kind of fee for pre-press/pre-flight services.
In our review, NightHawk’s team assured their OSF counterparts that the catalog would come in on-time and under-budget. We must have been persuasive, because we got the job. And you know what? The Festival never had as quick and simple a press-run. One contract proof was made at the printer, just one; and, no color corrections were required. The time-on-press went way down and the costs reflected those savings, as did the turnaround cycle. NightHawk has handled OSF’s work ever since. After all, what’s not to love?
