Oh boy… it’s late Spring and you haven’t started working on your yearbook! Now WHAT!!!
Alright, let’s all relax—there is a solution.
There are four issues you need to consider:
- Collecting and collating the material that is going to go into the yearbook
- Putting it together in a format the printer can interface with
- The time it will take the printer to print the yearbook
- The time it will take to ship the completed books to you
At the end of this article, I’ll have a solution that will eliminate three of the above four concerns.
Collecting Content
If nobody has been collecting material all year, your situation is going to be complicated. The good news is that almost everyone in the school has a cellphone, which means almost everyone in the school has a camera. There is a very good chance there are going to be photographs of the Fall/Winter sports and activities and events. You are just going to have to ask for them.
Get the word out to the class, set up a Dropbox, then sit back and watch the material pour in.
What If You Don’t Have Senior Portraits?
If you haven’t had your senior’s portrait pictures taken, you still have options. The first is to make a panicked phone call to a local school portrait studio and beg them to come in, photograph the seniors, and then do a rush job to get the photos to you.
There is a fallback position that is a little unorthodox but may just be more fun than using classic portrait photographs: ask the seniors to give you a selfie.
There’s a really good chance that they each have several thousand selfies already on their phones. If they don’t, have them do so NOW—and then drum them out of Gen Z. There are rules about things like that!
The good news about substituting selfies for portraits is that they are WAY more personal and expressive. Push them into taking a picture that expresses who they are rather than a boring portrait photo. We suspect that selfies will REPLACE portraits in a few years!
Finding a Fast Print Yearbook Company
Now, make another panicked phone call—this time to a print yearbook publisher. All the legacy companies, the old guard large companies (Balfour, Jostens, Herff-Jones, Walsworth) need six weeks PLUS another week for shipping to get you a yearbook. This may be a terminal issue.
However, there are several small print yearbook companies that will turn around your yearbook in 10 days to 2 weeks.
- Remember Me (remembermeyearbooks.com) will print a yearbook in two weeks or less
- Simply Yearbook (simplyyearbook.com) will do it in around 10 days
- Shutterfly (shutterfly.com) can not only get your yearbook out in under 2 weeks but will print on demand so you don’t have to commit to a specific number of yearbooks
- Want to guess how long it will take 48 Hour Books to ship your yearbook? They are claiming to be the “fastest printer in the world!”
Don’t forget to factor in the time it will take to ship the yearbooks to your school. Depending on how far you are from the plant, that could be 3 to 7 days.
Design Takes Time (Even When Rushed)
Once the above issues have been addressed, the real work must begin. You are going to need to design your yearbook, create the layouts, and then place the pictures in the layouts… ALL OF THEM. This is why schools try to start the process in September!
The process can be made easier using templates. Templates are pre-designed layouts, and all the yearbook companies will have a nice selection of templates for various sections available in their build software.
Of course, you still need to decide which of the 26 pictures you have of the Fall Harvest Dance to put in the yearbook. Why is that so hard? Because you only have space for five of them!
Getting photographs collected is not all that difficult—choosing which ones will NOT appear can be emotionally straining.
Anyway you look at it, squishing several months of work into several weeks is simply not going to be fun AND is going to be stressful as you HOPE 48 Hour Book really can BE 48 Hour Book!
The High-Tech (and Best) Alternative: YearBoxx
But… what if I could tell you, “Don’t worry, even though it is May 28th and your students are graduating on June 7th, you still have plenty of time!”
Yes—it is technology to the rescue.
There is a company called YearBoxx (yearboxx.com) who can cut your turnaround time to seven minutes. No, that is not a typo. You see, YearBoxx is the first cloud-based, digital, interactive yearbook.
I’m not going to go over all the incredibly cool features in this article—look at their website for that. I am just going to focus on how YearBoxx can save your beacon.
How YearBoxx Simplifies Everything
With a print yearbook, you are facing two huge hurdles: preparation of the book and the time needed to get it delivered.
Preparation with YearBoxx is truly SIMPLE. It is drag-and-drop simple.
Let’s focus on the Fall Harvest Dance. In YearBoxxCreate, you will create a section called… yes, Fall Harvest Dance. This will take the better part of 12 seconds.
Next, you will select ALL the 26 pictures you have and drag and drop them into a box that says: “Drag & Drop your pictures here.” DONE! That took another 12 seconds. If you have videos of the event (you know that half the seniors have videos of the dance), drop them in too.
Once you have your material organized, the actual process of building YearBoxx would be in the two-hour range.
Post-Distribution Perks
Even after you’ve created and sent it to the students (each student downloads it directly to their phone—you, as the advisor, have nothing to do there. If you’ve ever distributed a yearbook, you will know why this is such a big deal!), you can continue updating it.
For example, even though the class already has their yearbook, your yearbook staff can still create a Graduation Section in minutes and push it right into everyone’s yearbook.
The same goes for Prom—or really, anything else that happened post-distribution… AND… anything you just didn’t have time to put into YearBoxx before you wanted to get it to the class. YearBoxx can be updated pretty much forever.
YearBoxx Is Not a Compromise—It’s an Upgrade
YearBoxx is not JUST the next-generation yearbook. YearBoxx makes EVERYTHING not just a little easier, but dramatically easier for you, the Yearbook Advisor, and for your staff.
It eliminates stress:
- No deadlines
- No complicated software to learn
- No money to collect
- No squeezing into a finite number of pages
- No distribution hassles
- No problems fixing mistakes (they can be fixed anytime instantly in YearBoxxCreate)
Seniors can update their MY PAGE (their personal yearbook portal) to share with classmates forever!
YearBoxx is a stand-alone yearbook. It is NOT a compromise. It can have exponentially more memories than a print yearbook ever could.
Yearbooks are about preserving memories of a very special year. YearBoxx does that better… and YearBoxx will be easily accessible to classmates forever, not stored in a box never to be seen again!
Oh… and YearBoxx costs $6.99. Think of the issues THAT solves!
Final Thoughts
So, there are options to get a yearbook for your students even if time is short.
There are traditional options that can be used if you have two weeks, and a high-tech solution if you are really against the wall.
One of these options will surely save your beacon!
-Tom Kehoe, CEO Idiom Publishing
