Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Advanced Publishing
Canadian Donor's Guide
Achieving Directory Passthrough through Digital Editions
The Canadian Donor’s Guide (Guide des
Donateurs Canadiens, www.donorsguide.ca) is an
annual directory, about 200 pages long, of
Canadian charities. It is a product of Third Sector
Publishing, based on Orillia, Ontario.
The Donor’s Guide is a controlled-circulation
publication with a highly targeted distribution of
about 17,000 copies to professional advisors of
nonprofits, such as lawyers and donor
foundations. It contains about 3,500 listings of
charities. As with many telephone company
directories, basic listings are free, and charities can
pay for enhanced listings or display ads. Third
Sector sells the guide, but 97% of its revenue
comes from advertising.


Advanced Publishing (www.advancedpublishing.com) is a premier provider of digital
edition and digital delivery solutions to the publishing world. With a strong technology
platform that is continually enhanced and broadened, Advanced Publishing is
committed to provide an ever-increasing portfolio of services and products to enhance
the relationships between our publishing customers and their subscribers and
advertisers.
The Challenge
Anderson Charters, owner and publisher of the Donor’s Guide, had a simple goal: to
double readership without boosting print circulation – that is, of achieving the
equivalent of passthrough of a print publication.
Meeting the Challenge
Charters launched the first digital edition of the Donor’s Guide in 2007. They chose
Advanced Publishing’s digital edition platform because it offered a downloadable
format (for offline reading) without unduly large file sizes for the large publication,
using the DjVu file format from LizardTech (Advanced Publishing now uses XML and
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