Making a School Yearbook business less seasonal

AhrSkidar

I run a company that designs and prints Yearbooks for Leaving Cert years in Irish schools. We had our best year last (academic) year and we're hoping it will be even more successful in 2012/2013.

The issue we have though is that basically all of the schools want their books at the same time (mid to late May). Last year we tried offering an "early bird" special hoping to tempt schools into printing a bit earlier. The Yearbooks committees are usually made up of LC students, and with mocks and general study, even those who had committed to going early ended up leaving it till the last minute.

Maybe it is just the nature of the business, and I don't want to start hassling students who have more important things to worry about, but I'm just wondering if anybody has any advice on how we could attempt to spread out the business a bit. Last year we had to turn down some small schools who were looking for too few books too late in the day (given our workload). If they had started in Jan/Feb we could have done it no problem.

Cianos

Could you have some freelancers waiting on the side in case the work load is too much? At least that way you don't have to turn down the work but don't have to commit to any long term arrangements with the workers.

AhrSkidar

Cianos wrote: »

Could you have some freelancers waiting on the side in case the work load is too much? At least that way you don't have to turn down the work but don't have to commit to any long term arrangements with the workers.

Thanks for the reply. That was something we did a couple of years ago, but there were a few problems with it.

For right or wrong, I don't think a system where you make all schools follow the same process to create a yearbook (e.g. getting them to log on to a website to upload stuff) works well here. So we're flexible, allowing people email, post or upload material, whenever they have it.

That means the books get put together simultaneously and incrementally over a period, whereas what works best with a freelancer is having all the material ready for him/her to just design the book in a day or two.

I thought an Early Bird reduction would get people to commit earlier, but it didn't work. Might try it again though, as I can't really think of anything else.

Cianos

How about 'booking in' the schools based on a final content submission deadline, with a promise of completion X amount of days after all content has been sent? You could stagger these dates to give you enough time to handle more orders.

AhrSkidar

Cianos wrote: »

How about 'booking in' the schools based on a final content submission deadline, with a promise of completion X amount of days after all content has been sent? You could stagger these dates to give you enough time to handle more orders.

That's certainly a good idea. If we know last year's schools (or the bulk of them) are going again, then maybe we can tell any new schools from the very start that they'll have a window (still a decent sized one) to get things done.

Hopefully putting some more structure on the business won't jinx it.

thecommander

I take it you can find out how many pupils are going to be in the yearbook a good bit in advance, could you have them designed and ready earlier in the year. Then it's a case of placing the photos and dropping in the names?

AhrSkidar

thecommander wrote: »

I take it you can find out how many pupils are going to be in the yearbook a good bit in advance, could you have them designed and ready earlier in the year. Then it's a case of placing the photos and dropping in the names?

We do have a fair stock of templates built up at this stage, so there is a certain amount of prep you can do. They're not the US style books though with pages of pics and names. These have questionnaires for each student and there might be 2, 4 or 6 profiles per page. Some schools want the whole year in together, others want it done by class. Some students don't want to be included... There are also a surprisingly large number of palace coups involving yearbook committees.

We have the yearbook creation fairly well down at this stage, it's just trying to think of ways of spreading it out a bit, which would allow us do more. Maybe we're trying to sell Christmas trees in October (and January).

RATM

I think there might be a quicker way of doing this using social media. I'm presuming that all you actually need from each and every student is:
a) A picture
b) A blurb about who they are
But the problem is getting the students to submit this in advance of mocks.

So you could get over that hurdle by using the same platform that 99% of students will already be on- Facebook
i.e. on (for example) March 1st every pupil changes their Facebook profile picture to the one they want in the yearbook. The blurb is written on their wall or status update.

Then you create a Facebook group 'Class of 2013 Yearbook, 'St.Joesphs Secondary School, Dublin 11'. All the students who want to be in the yearbook join the group. Then you have access to their Facebook profiles, pictures and status updates and you can just grab them from there and slot them into your template.

Of course there are always going to be students who have pictures up of them with other people but at least they are now a member of the group and you can easily send them an email to ask them to change it by X date for the purposes of the yearbook. You can also send out reminder emails to the whole group in advance of the date you're going to download the pitcures.

Finally the students would be left with a group that contains everyone in their school year so not only would they have a physical copy of the yearbook but also a kind of virtual one too. Ownership of the group could remain in your hands if you wanted to market products/services to university going students further down the line. Another idea could be organising 5 and 10 year reunions if you wanted to get into event management down the line- you have all the students in the group so it makes getting them together easier than ever without the need for asking the school principal for last known addresses.

Or if you didn't want to do this then you could simply hand over the admin passwords to the student who liases with you for whatever they want to do with it.

Either way a virtual yearbook is adding value to the physical one as your target market is very much the Facebook generation.

AhrSkidar

Very interesting post. Thanks for that.

I'm not much of a Facebook user but we are investigating advertising on Facebook at the moment as, as you say, it is where our target market is.

Had never considered integrating it so thoroughly into the business though - definitely something to consider.