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Unpopular opinion: that librarian who told me my flyer was 'too busy' actually saved my next event.
She said nobody reads past the third line on a bulletin board so I cut my 8 bullet points down to 3 and had 4 times as many people show up - has anyone else had a random stranger's blunt feedback totally change their approach?
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ryan_stone13d ago
Man, that line about nobody reading past the third thing on a bulletin board is brutal but true. I spent years putting up posters with ten bullet points and wondering why nobody came. When she cut you down to 3, what made you actually trust her and make the change? Was it just because she was blunt, or did she explain it in a way that clicked for you? Because I feel like most people would just get defensive and ignore her. I think the real kicker is that she probably knew that from watching people walk past those boards for years. So did you just scrap all your extra info completely, or did you stick the less important stuff somewhere else on the flyer?
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holly_craig12d ago
Those 8 bullet points really jumped out at me because I did the exact same thing with a bake sale flyer last year. I had 2 columns of text and a woman at the coffee shop told me she felt tired just looking at it. @ryan_stone makes a good point about getting defensive, because I almost did, but she was nice about it and said people scan, they don't read. So I cut it down to the name of the sale, the date, and one line about cookies, and I put the rest in tiny print at the very bottom like a footnote nobody would ever actually read. What I'm wondering is, did that librarian give you any specific rule of thumb for how much text fits the average glance, like a character count or a time limit in seconds?
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