What exactly does it cost to produce an agenda?
Well, it depends…
Agendas come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they consist of a dozen agenda items and maybe 100 to 200 pages of supporting documents. Other times they may have 80+ items and over 2000 pages of documents.
But they all share common characteristics and we can calculate a fairly reliable rule of thumb based on a few assumptions.
To begin, paper & copying costs will average about $.05 per page. That’s a nickel for every single sheet of paper used in your packets.
You’ll also need to factor in the time for copying and collating the packets. Depending upon who is actually standing at the copy machine and doing the collating, this cost could vary dramatically. Often, this is an all-day event for one person.
Distribution costs go into the mix as well. Who actually delivers the packets, how many are mailed and how the packet is delivered to the local media all must be considered and calculated. Even if you use your patrol officers to deliver packets to council members and others, the time and cost of this service should be figured.
Alright already, so how much does it cost?
Generally, you can figure that if you produce 2-3 agendas per month, your annual costs will equal $1,000 times the average number of packets you produce each meeting. In other words, if your city or county meets 2 to 3 times per month and you produce an average of 25 packets for each meeting, your annual costs would be about $25,000.
If you meet weekly, you can use $1,500 per packet and if you meet once a month, $500 works out to be about right.
One of the larger cities in the South we spoke with recently spent over $90,000 last year producing the 60 packets for their weekly meetings. A mid-sized city in the Northwest producing 18 packets every other week spent about $19,000. As rules go, we’d have to give this one a big “thumbs up”!