When we came up with this flyer idea last January, we decided that on balance it was perhaps edging a wee bit on the aggressive side. But in the light of today’s comments from Eddie Bone and the deputy leader of UKIP, and the findings of the recent Future Of England survey, it seems suddenly more appropriate. What do we think, folks?
Help. We’ve been absolutely swamped in demand for The Wee Blue Book. (We’re not ignoring emails, just using them to put together a database for distribution.) We’ve used the proceeds of our mindbogglingly successful fundraiser to get 250,000 copies thundering through the print presses as we speak, but an order that size takes quite a while, and the full run probably won’t be in our depots across the country until the end of the month, though we should have a preliminary batch of 20,000 out before that.
But we’ve also been deluged with requests from people and local groups looking for sources and advice on how to print some of their own, so if you just can’t wait, an alert reader has tracked down what we think must be an unbeatable price.
StuPrint.com (no relation, honest) will knock up 6,000 copies from our print-ready PDF file, turned round in a speedy 4-5 days, for an exceptionally reasonable £1,590 all in – there’s no VAT on books. You can contact them for a quote on smaller orders.
If that’s more than you need, there are other options to get going right away.
In March this year, Wings Over Scotland ran a breathtakingly successful fundraiser. We asked for £50,000 in a month and achieved it in eight hours, going on to raise over £110,000 in total, despite the bitterness and cynicism of the mainstream media.
The money has been used for various projects – we’ve already spent many thousands of pounds on site running costs, conducting opinion polls, taking out adverts and distributing hundreds of thousands of leaflets and posters and postcards and badges.
Click here to go to fundraising site.
But the main thing we wanted to fund was The Wee Blue Book – a pocket-sized guide to independence, fully-sourced and referenced and covering every important aspect of the debate, but which can be read in about an hour. We budgeted £15,000 for it, with the intention of producing perhaps 20,000 copies. But we’ve got four million voters to reach, and we need to scale that up a bit.
We’ve been absolutely blown away by the response to The Wee Blue Book, readers. As we write this it’s about to pass an astonishing 200,000 downloads in just two days, and we’re besieged by enquiries about the print edition, which should be rolling off the presses any time now.
But it’s no use just sitting around patting ourselves on the back about how much Yes supporters seem to like it. The most exciting and encouraging responses have come from No and undecided voters, and we need to get the book into as many people’s hands as possible in the next five weeks. Let’s get to work.
The referendum is now just two months away, and things are starting to get serious. Yesterday we received notification from the Electoral Commission of the procedure and deadline for appointing “referendum agents”. These are people who can:
– attend the receipt and opening of postal ballot papers and/or appoint postal ballot agents to do so on their behalf.
– attend polling stations on polling day for the purpose of detecting personation and/or appoint polling agents to do so on their behalf.
– attend the counting of votes and/or appoint counting agents to do so on their behalf.
There are 32 local counting areas, and we’d like to have a Wings representative at each one to keep an eye out for any shenanigans. This is too important to be another Glenrothes, so please only put your name forward if you’re sure you’ll be able to do it.
If you’d like to volunteer, see below.
Our ever-attentive readers will already have noticed that since the weekend there’s been a new link on the centre column, called “CAMPAIGN MATERIALS”. Over the next 100 days it’s going to be key to getting our message out to the people of Scotland, and it’s your chance to take it directly to your own neighbourhood.
Because even with quarter of a million readers, it’s no good just sitting here preaching to the already-converted. We need to go on the road.
After our series of massively successful fundraisers, and the many others we’ve helped push over the line from various distances, as you might imagine we get a lot of people asking us to plug theirs. We can’t do them all, because otherwise we’d be constantly nagging readers for money day after day and that would get really annoying, but for some time now we’ve been keeping a list of those we know about on our Donate page.
As everyone just got paid, though, here’s a special roundup of current ones.
Ever since our insanely successful fundraiser we’ve been pondering on the best way to get printed materials and promotional stuff spread across Scotland without spending hours every day lugging boxes of stuff down to the post office, what with us still being an inconvenient distance from the action.
We may have just solved the problem.
We already know that we have the most awesome and creative readers in the land, but this morning we’re going to give you a chance to demonstrate it yet again.
(Don’t worry, you won’t need your credit cards.)
As alert readers will know, we’re slacking off a bit over the holiday weekend, although today we’re hoping to combine pleasure with business – more on that later.
But we’d also like to have a go at getting you to do some work for us.
The one on the left is for these guys, the one on the right is for these guys.
We particularly like the Scotsman’s use of the word “error”, as in “Whoops, we totally accidentally rewrote this story three times in 24 hours, with four different headlines, in order to make it more and more pejorative and sneery. Tch, clumsy old us, eh?”
Just to remind readers who haven’t already seen it on Twitter or Facebook – Wings has been under a heavy spam-flood attack for most of today, and we’re having ongoing technical issues with commenting due to security measures while we try to get it all sorted out. Most comments are being treated as first-time users, which means they have to be manually approved, and we’re not sitting up all night doing it.
That means that if you post on the poll story that’s going up at 1am, you might have to wait until daylight hours to see your comment, so please don’t post the same one 40 times trying to make it appear, or a string of increasingly grumpy “Where’s my comment gone?” messages, which won’t appear either.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
