Seven years ago, I was a telephone operator and a new steward in my union.

Our union contract was about to expire. I worked with six hundred other operators, but only a few stewards seemed to be paying attention.

We needed a flyer. The other stewards asked me to make it.

I spent hours working on it. Cranking away in Word. Writing and re-writing it. Looking for the perfect clip art. I showed it to the other stewards, and we decided it was ready.

I got up early one morning, hours before my shift started. I stood outside our call center’s entrance, passing out my new flyer.

Nobody read it. At least, no one ever told me they read it. I found a bunch of copies in the bottom of the trash can.

Has this ever happened to you?

Getting Read

As radicals in the workplace, we have big ideas and want to make big changes, but it’s hard to communicate them, and hard to get people to pay attention.

When I saw my flyers in the trash, I knew I needed to become a better amateur flyer maker.

No flyer on its own is going to win your co-workers over to all of your ideas. But a good flyer is a tool that can help you as an organizer start conversations and challenge your co-workers to take action.

I’m going to look at three common mistakes, and then offer some suggestions from what I’ve learned about how to make flyers that your co-workers will read.

Mistake #1: The Wall of Text

Too much text. Too many fonts. Too many clichés.

It’s easy to make this mistake. You have a lot of ideas, and you want to tell your co-workers.

This is the mistake I made with my first flyer. I tried to cover every single issue in the upcoming contract.

But you shouldn’t try to squeeze everything in. Stick to one or two points.

One sure-fire way to do this is to cut all paragraphs down to four lines, or fewer. And limit yourself to three or four paragraphs, maximum.

Mistake #2: What Is to Be Done?

This flyer has a better design. No paragraph is longer than three lines. Bold words break up the text. Bullet points draw the reader in.

But after I read the flyer, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

Every flyer should end with a short “call to action” that tells your co-workers what they can do about the problem that you laid out at the top of your flier.

The action should be something that you can expect a big majority of your co-workers to participate in. Talk it over with the other people who are organizing with you.

After my first flyer, I talked with the other stewards about why our first flyer bombed. Another steward mentioned that we didn’t ask people to do anything.

We made a new flyer with a union sticker stapled to it. At the bottom of the flyer, we told everyone to wear the sticker that day, to send a sign of our unity to management.

Hundreds of us wore stickers that day. And I learned that my co-workers DID care about the contract. I just needed to find the right thing to ask them to do.

Mistake #3: The Report from Headquarters

What’s wrong with this flyer? It has a crisp design. A nice graphic. Good bullet points.

What’s missing? Pictures or quotes from Teamsters who are voting for Obama.

It’s easy for a member to dismiss this type of flyer as slick union PR. The union is acting like an outside third party—not presenting itself as an organization of the workers themselves.

There is a fix. Use pictures and quotes and let workers speak for themselves.

Better Design

Your flyer will wind up in the trash if you don’t keep it short and to the point. Here are some pointers for better flyer design.

Don’t use more than two fonts. Use a large font like Arial Black, Franklin Gothic, or Rockwell for your headline. Use a serif font like Times New Roman, Georgia, or Palatino for your body text—serif fonts are easier to read.

Break up your text. Use bullet points and subheads. Use a large subhead near the call to action to make it stand out.

Don’t run your text all the way across the page—it’s too hard to read. Use columns instead. Use bigger font sizes for wider columns and the call to action—I usually use 18 point or bigger for the call to action.

Use a picture of members, and make it big. Don’t be tempted to use clip art.

Better Politics

Even when I got better with my design, my message wasn’t getting across. I found a lot of cynicism among my co-workers about our union and our own ability to make change.

Here are a few pointers to try to overcome that cynicism:

Let your co-workers speak in their own voice. Make quotes and pictures of members the centerpiece of your flyer—you can use a quote as the main flyer text, or the call to action. Or think about other ways to let your co-workers speak, like an open letter.

Focus on action and issues, not process. Don’t say “Bargaining Team Wraps Up Third Meeting with Management.” That headline is heading to the trash.

Instead, use your headline to highlight members’ issues and show what members are already doing about the problem. A better headline would be “Bargaining Team Tells Management to Stop Excessive Overtime.”

(P.S. You don’t have to be cute and catchy. A longer, descriptive headline is fine.)

Be modest. Don’t overwhelm your reader with a lot of ideas. Pick one topic, and stick to it.

Be patient. It’s hard to get workers involved in workplace fights. But once people start to take on the boss, old ideas can change—especially when workers start to win even modest victories. I started to see that at my call center on the day everyone wore a sticker.

You Don’t Have to Be a Pro

I’ve learned you don’t have to be a professional designer to make decent flyers.

You need practice, and lots of feedback from your co-workers. Make a flyer. Ask other workers what they think. Learn from your mistakes. And make a better one next time.

Here are some resources to get started:

TheWorksite.org. I learned most of what I know about making flyers from this website. Check out their tips for good flyer design and the article “Bad Connections: How Labor Fails to Communicate.”

Software. Most amateur designers use InDesign or Quark. Older versions of Quark are usually easy to get used, at reasonable prices. I use the ancient but rock-steady Quark 4.0.

It’s hard to design a good flyer in Word, but the TheWorksite has an extensive tutorial on how to do it, if you dare. Steer clear of Microsoft Publisher unless your only other option is Word.

Better writing. Remember that little grey copy of Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, from your high school English class? The one you never read? Buy it and read it.

The novelist Anne Lamont tells you the secret for overcoming writer’s block in Bird by Bird. The secret is to write a shitty first draft.

George Orwell cuts through unreadable leftist jargon in his short essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Do you have a tip for good flyers, or a flyer you want to share? Write a comment and let us know.

Dan H. is a union activist and amateur flyer maker in New York.