This year Swaledale Festival has a completely  new programme binder design. For several years now we have added a colourful printed binder to the printed programme notes, which we produce ourselves as we only know very late in the day how many programmes we are likely to need for each concert and often even the content arrives fairly late.

Previous binders have been glossy paper with a design closely based on the brochure. This has caused many people to refuse to buy a programme as they assumed it was the same as the brochure they already had even though the sizes of the two were quite different. The old binders also had a number of weak points, one of which being that all programmes looked the same from the outside so on at least one occasion several of the wrong ones got taken to an event and this was not discovered until a number of people had bought their programme. Red faces all around.

The new ones, as you will see from the photo, are very definitely Swaledale Festival being very much in tune with our new branding but they also have a space in which we can print the event name making it much harder for us to load the wrong ones into the van to go to your concert.

We’d be interested in any comments you have about them which you can make via our audience survey which will be principally on-line this year.

We would also ask you to give your support to the many businesses in the programmes who have given their support to us this year.