Obtaining Information using Fishing & Shooting Questions

Hi All

For this task we were asked to design 10 questions to discover what prospective clients wanted from a specific business. I chose to use a business model that I have been working on through a series of courses revolving around starting our own business as a small Landscaping Design company. The results are as follows: –

Preamble: – “Village Green Gardens Landscaping is a small local landscaping business that operates in your area. We use Permaculture Principals and Sustainable materials and practices to give you the garden that need and that will carry on giving you what you want. We are currently trying to expand our business in our local area and would love the opportunity to work with you to help you reach your gardening goals. We can do the work for you or show you how to add natural cycles to your garden that will give your garden staying power as well as a unique edge that is completely customised to your desires. At Village Green Gardens it’s all about our clients and we would love to hear about exactly what you want from your garden so that we can tailor our business to what you want. Please consider answering our simple survey. It should only take a moment of your time and if you complete and send it back to us in the postage paid envelope provided we would like to offer you your first consultation with us free of charge. Why not fill it in? It might be the beginning of something beautiful.”

Village Green Garden Questions to be used in a Questionnaire: –

1. Are you interested in taking your garden to the next level?

2. Would you like help to turn your garden into a fully integrated series of natural cycles that work for themselves and that require minimal input from you?

3. Do you want to grow food in your garden?

4. Do you want an ornamental easy care garden or something a bit more adventurous?

5. How do you like to use your garden?

6. Would you like someone to work with you to create the garden of your dreams?

7. If it all seems completely out of reach, would you like someone to build your dream and maintain it for you so that you are free to enjoy the benefits without all of that hard work?

8. Would you like to learn how to manage pests, diseases and weeds without the use of harsh chemicals?

9. Can you see yourself working with a small friendly team of dedicated qualified horticulturalists who are always willing to listen to what YOU want?

10. Would you like to take advantage of our completely free offer to come and talk to you about how to make your dream garden a reality?

I chose to use mostly shooting questions. I don’t have an existing relationship with the people that I am sending this survey to and so they have no loyalty to me and no reason to fill in this survey unless they can see something of value to them. I wanted to make Village Green Gardens as attractive as possible to generate initial interest and to get the reader on side so I used words like “small local landscaping business” and “it’s all about our clients” to get them on side with the business and think about it as part of their community and worth investing their time and money in. Shooting questions are to the point and require very little effort to reply where fishing questions take more time to think about and might result in someone deciding not to complete the questionnaire. I figure that a survey that is designed to attract business needs to be as attractive a lure as possible to a prospective client. Once you are able to generate enough interest for the clients to want to take it to the next level which is where you would start asking more pressing and customised questions aimed at the individual’s wants and needs at the free consultation.

This survey is all about making Village Green Gardens the most interesting, exciting and attractive alternative on the market. I chose to use emotive language to try to connect with the kind of clients that I would want to be working with. If they aren’t interested in our ethos, they won’t be interested in our service so my questions were designed to skew answers that would show me if the respondent was interested in what we offer or not.

I littered the survey with questions designed to require minimal input from the respondent but to both lure them to complete and return the survey to get a free consultation and to give me as much information as I needed about their wants and needs as I could get using open and shut questions (shooting). I tried to make the questionnaire as user friendly and enticing as I could and directed the flow towards gaining a consultation with the respondent if they were at all interested. Offering a consultation for free is valuable to both of us. It would give me a valuable foot inside their door and would allow me to sell myself and the business as well as develop a relationship with the prospective client and so it could be seen as a useful marketing tool that is completely worth the time invested. I included a stamped self-addressed envelope to ensure the best chances of getting as many responses as I could. I would also include a telephone number, a mobile number and an email address should the respondent wish to ask me any further questions or get in touch with me immediately.

Sites used to assist me with this task: –

http://www.lawnsite.com/archive/index.php/t-194317.html

 

Resubmit on questions

2. At Village Green Gardens we are fully certified Permaculture Designers and we can show you how to get your garden healthier than it has ever been using all natural methods that won’t hurt the wildlife and that will increase your health and your garden enjoyment. Would you like help to have your garden work for you, instead of you having to do everything?

4. Do you want an easy care garden with traditional shrubs, trees and perennials or would you like something a bit more adventurous using exotic species and interesting customised garden art?

6. Are you on a tight budget? We can show you how to make impressive changes to your garden with minimal cost

9. We are a husband and wife team of qualified horticulturalists who live in your local area and understand the local conditions. Would you like to talk to us about any particular problems that you trying to solve in your garden?

10. Would you like to take advantage of our completely free offer for a phone consultation to talk to you about how to make your dream garden a reality?

 

Assessment Task 2 Hero Shots

This is the second assessment of three Photoshop assessments. It involves using predesigned wireframe templates for various business entities that we needed to take an appropriate original image and use with the site. We then had to amend the existing text to reflect the tone and the colour of the website. Here are my attempts to fill the brief

1.   Real Estate

I wanted to make sure that I used a text as close to that in the web site as possible. I also used the picker tool and chose the red of the “buy” button and the body text in the webpage in an effort to create harmony. I had to crop my image considerably and straighten it up along with removing a pipe in the middle of the image where I wanted to place my text.

2.   Golf Course

I used the picker tool to find the colours that I wanted for the text. I used a stroke around the text to make sure that the text was visible but chose a lighter blue to make the text stand out against the grey sky. I also attempted to find a masculine, yet elegant font to reflect the niche market for the Golf Club. Please note this isn’t the Weymouth Golf Club, it’s a shot of the Riverside Golf Club, I don’t know where Weymouth is.

3.   Tourism Tasmania

This image was taken at Cradle Mountain. I chose it because I felt the body of water and the sky balanced and gave me enough room to insert the text. I chose the text colour with the picker tool from the selection in the image and chose to use a stroke in the same colour as the yellow header to give the text a bit of presence.

4.   A chocolatier

 

I couldn’t get a shot of a chocolatier’s and used a free image from Morgue File Free Photos at http://www.morguefile.com/archive . I liked the colours and shapes represented in this image and chose colours from the wireframe background to link the image to the website with the picker tool. I chose an exotic font to reflect the exotic message being relayed in the text.

5.   A local Council Building

I couldn’t get an image of the Launceston City Council building so chose our nearest council building in Beaconsfield. I figured that the text would need to be very sedate and chose a very standardised font that could be reproduced easily. I had a lot of trouble finding a colour that worked with this image and ended up choosing a darker colour from the windows in the image with the picker tool

I have changed 2 of the images above to deliver a more appropriate message in both the Council and the Real Estate wireframe template shots. In the Real Estate shot, I hunted for a home that anyone would want to live in and race home to luxuriate in. This home is actually a “holiday home” and you can only begin to wonder at what the owners daily home must look like! I decided to stay with the text because I think that it really works with this image.

As my lecturer so rightly pointed out regarding my council shot “this building looks deserted!” To “sell” a local council you would most probably have to bypass Beaconsfield council building and go straight to the top. I used an aerial image of Launceston to showcase how beautiful it is and to show that Launceston City Council (at least in their minds…) is doing an amazing job at selling and maintaining Launceston as a wonderful place to live. I kept Arial text but changed the colour with the picker tool to give more of a reflection of the colours in the new image. I used a hint of stroke to give the text a bit of clarity and hopefully my new image reflects/sells Launceston City Council a bit better. Here is my new take on Launceston City Council…

Learning Task 6

Today’s Activity involves isolating and collating examples of white space in advertising. I chose the following examples of white space to illustrate my understanding of the concept in the following genre

1. Print publishing, magazines or newspapers
2. Street advertising or shop frontage
3. A Billboard
4. A Website
5. Broadcast TV

1. This advertisment came from a Donna Hay magazine (I took the photograph) and I chose it because I like how the red of the tomatoes is balanced out with the green of the leaves and the white space surrounding the images and behind the text mellows out the bright colours and makes this advertisment very inviting to look at

2. This photo of Shop Front advertising uses the paintwork on the building and the sides of the lettering as white space to ensure that the lettering stands out and is very visible from all angles.

3. I chose this example of a billboard where the predominate colour used is white. The white space surrounds the image and text/logo and is reflected in the colour of the cars to give a very homogenous seamless look to the shot

4. This screen shot comes from http://www.examiner.com.au/. I chose it because it illustrates how text and images increase in visual impact against a white space background. A small amount of colour goes a long way when a large expanse of white space has been used

5. The white space in this photo surrounds the image of the large perfume bottle and the model and highlights the product.