Overview

The Media Development Loan Fund commissioned Dream based on its experience in working with print publishers in more than 30 countries worldwide, where it provides support to independent media in the form of financing, training and technology.

In many of these countries, print distribution is one of the biggest difficulties independent publishers face because it is tightly controlled. Many countries have print distribution monopolies or cartels, which are either politically tied to the government, corrupt or incompetent.

Dream is a tool for tracking print circulation. In a similar way to customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as Campware’s Cream software, Dream allows you to maintain a clear picture of your distribution business based on regularly entered contracts, orders, and shipment information. This is handled primarily through Dream’s Report functions. Dream is designed to look and feel like an email application. Its inbox is used for tracking inbound communications such as new customer e-mails and customer phone calls.

Because Dream works with any standard SMTP mail server, it also manages outbound customer communications and keeps records of your responses.

Dream does two things: It is a database that stores all the relevant information you supply about the publications you produce, who distributes, who sells it, and how you connect with these people.

It is also a tool for retrieving and presenting this information in several different ways. It contains utilities for tracking products, promotions, and communications.

Dream handles four types of information:

1. Information about what you produce and the people to whom you provide it. This information is entered on the Options tab of the screen and appears primarily in the menus on the Main tab’s screens. One example is a product category in which you describe a periodical you produce.
2. Information about specific products such as books or individual issues of what you produce, specific distributors and specific sellers, and tracking of these items from contract to order to shipment to return.
   
3. Communications, including records of incoming messages from various sources, outgoing emails to individuals, and newsletters.
   
4. User information including usernames, passwords, preferences and permissions.