With all these discounts, Has anyone paid full price 
I would have to check, but without doing so, I think that there has always been a discount on offer, but at very different rates. The 60 % discount is quite exceptional, and I don't expect to see it again this year (but I may be wrong!).
I do wonder how has the uptake been on these and more importantly for the very kind people behind the scenes doing all the hard work.It must have involved a lot of perhaps unnecessary extra work and also for the funds has there been the possibility to build in a donaton ?
I have kept tabs of the orders, both in Vistaprint and Lulu, and can give you various statistics. I shall try and compile a list in the course of this week. And yes, we have received quite good and generous donations; people have been inclined to round up the reimbursements to the QE2Story, for which we are very grateful.
How has Dear Lulo fared, has she been kept busy or chucked to one side as we all went for the personal touch ?
Lulu has fared well too, and orders have been coming in quietly and quite regularly. The Lulu price contains an automatic "donation" to the Forum of about 80 pence per calendar, which Lulu pays out to Forum funds on a monthly basis.
Do you think you might do the same idea or try to revert to the ordering yourself method?
Unfortunately, Vistaprint does not allow anyone other than the creator of the calendar (or other product) to place an order. I had a long "chat" with one of their staff and tried to see whether there was any way around this, but there was not. And so, the only way to make Vistaprint calendars available at all, was to place the order on behalf of the member, and to pay for it while placing the order.
Lulu was reorganised this year and initially withdrew all calendars, much to my shock when I was ready to create them. This is when I started working with Vistaprint. It is only when the Vistaprint calendars were ready that Lulu came back and offered a simple model of calendar, nothing like what we were using in previous years, but quite effective for at least accommodating 12 out of the 29 photos, provided they were in Landscape format. This is how we ended up with a Lulu option as well as three Vistaprint sizes.
I must say with Vistaprint, over the years they have ALWAYS delivered well before the expected delivery date.
But can l say thanks to the team behind the scenes for the very quick order confirmation details and all the hard work involved.
What is also quite impressive, is that they seem to print as close as possible to the final delivery address. I got some feed-back today from someone who had ordered a calendar in Japan and found that the calendar had been posted there and delivered very soon after the order was placed.
And so, apart from not being able to offer you the possibility of placing your own order, I must say that working with Vistaprint has been very rewarding and satisfying, and I have enjoyed placing the orders for everyone. And of course, we are only about to start December, so there is still plenty of time to place more orders and make sure that everyone who wants one, can have a QE2Story calendar ready for the start of 2021!
These calendars are a great way of honouring the prizewinning photographs of the past year's photo competitions -- all of them excellent in so many very different ways.
