Posters and QR codes

Most of what a branch does happens offline: a stall at the markets, a poster in a shopfront window, a stack of flyers for a doorknock. The hard part has never been making the poster. It’s knowing whether any of it worked.

A Cobber poster carries a QR code that belongs to your organisation, so when someone scans it and RSVPs, that RSVP is traced back to the poster that earned it. You find out that the flyers at the markets brought in nineteen people and the one at the library brought in none — and next month you spend your Saturday somewhere better.

Making one

Open the event and choose Poster & QR code from the actions menu beside View Public Page. Pages work the same way, from the page editor.

Screenshot to come

There’s no setup step. The editor opens on a finished poster, filled in from the event itself — name, date, venue, your colours, your logo — and you can download it as it stands. Everything on the right is optional.

Screenshot to come

The preview is the real thing, not an approximation. What you see is what comes out of the printer.

The words

The headline is the only field worth thinking hard about. A poster is read from across a room, and long titles have to shrink to fit — Cobber will warn you when yours is getting there. “Rally for Renewables” reads at ten paces. “Community Forum on Renewable Energy Transition and Local Jobs” does not.

Details carries the date, time and venue. The call to action is what sits under the code: Scan to RSVP, Scan to sign, Scan to donate, depending on what you’re pointing at.

The style

Three designs, all using your organisation’s colours and logo:

• Bold — headline in a colour band with a big code underneath. The default, and the one that holds up best on a crowded noticeboard.
• Stencil — full-bleed colour with the code on a white card. The loudest of the three; good for rallies and campaigns.
• Civic — quiet and typographic. For AGMs, branch meetings and anything going up in a library or council foyer, where protest styling reads as out of place.

Choosing where it’s going

Rather than picking a paper size, pick a destination.

Destination	What you get	Use it for
Social	A square image	Facebook and Instagram posts
Poster	A4, one page	Noticeboards, shopfronts, hall walls
Handouts	Four flyers on one A4 sheet, with cut lines	Market stalls, doorknocking

A4 is worth defending. It comes out of any printer, and it’s the size community noticeboards are built around. Cut the handout sheet into four with a guillotine or scissors and you have a stack of flyers in about a minute.

Screenshot to come

Using your own artwork

Plenty of groups already have a designer, a newsletter template, or a printer they’ve used for years. Under Making your own artwork? you can download just the code:

• SVG — vector, transparent, scales to any size. Best for print.
• PNG — a standard image, with a white background.

The white background on the PNG is deliberate. A code needs light behind it or phones can’t read it, and black-on-transparent looks perfectly fine in a design tool right up until it lands on a dark photo and stops working. If you need to place it over something, use the SVG.

Either way the code is still yours, and scans and sign-ups are counted exactly as they are on a Cobber poster.

Knowing what worked

Every poster carries a short web address like yourparty.org.au/q/K7M2QX4. When someone scans it, Cobber counts the scan, sends them to the right page, and — if they RSVP, sign, join or donate — records that as coming from that code.

One code is enough for most things. If you want to tell two places apart, add a second under Where you’ve put it and name it after where it’s going:

Screenshot to come

The scan count tells you people noticed. The sign-up count tells you it worked. They’re very different numbers, and the gap between them is the useful part: a Facebook post might get two hundred scans and seven RSVPs, while forty flyers at a stall get nineteen. High reach and low intent is normal for social — it just means you shouldn’t judge the noticeboard by the same yardstick.

Downloaded files are named after the event and the place, so rally-for-renewables-annerley-shopfront.pdf is still obvious three weeks later.

Before you print a hundred of them

Check it’s published. Cobber won’t let you download a poster for a draft or cancelled event, because a printed code that leads nowhere can’t be recalled. That’s the one thing on this page that’s genuinely unrecoverable.

Print one and scan it yourself. From about a metre away, the distance someone reads a noticeboard from. It takes thirty seconds and it’s the only real test.

Photocopies are fine. The designs are built to survive black and white, which is how most flyers actually get reproduced.

Bigger is better. A code needs to be roughly a tenth as wide as the distance you want it read from — a metre away means about ten centimetres across. That’s why the code takes up so much of the page: a small tasteful one in the corner is decoration, not a working link.

The authorisation statement

Australian electoral law requires an authorisation on electoral matter, and printed material is the highest-risk category. If you’ve set one in your organisation’s settings, Cobber prints it at the foot of every poster automatically.

There’s a tick box to leave it off, for things that genuinely aren’t electoral matter — a social BBQ, a volunteer thank-you. If you’re not sure, leave it on. It’s a line of small type, and the cost of leaving it off when it was needed is much higher than the cost of including it when it wasn’t.

What happens afterwards

Posters outlive the events they advertise; one will still be on a pole a month later. A scan after the event has finished lands on the event page showing that it’s over, alongside what’s coming up next and a way to hear about it — so a late scan still has somewhere useful to go.

And because the code points at the event rather than at its web address, renaming the event or moving the date doesn’t break anything already printed.