Make the yearbook room fun
Everyone likes to work in a fun environment. Creating that for your yearbook staff at the beginning of the year will be one of your most important jobs.
August 6, 2009
Everyone likes to work in a fun environment. Creating that for your yearbook staff at the beginning of the year will be one of your most important jobs.
Dear Applicant and Parent/Guardian,
Welcome to Olympia High School Publications. As we finish up the 2004 Torch yearbook and continue working on the next edition of The Oracle newspaper, I am excited about selecting the 2004-2005 publications staffs.
Motivate your photographers by supplying them with the necessary tools to assist them in creating memorable visual images.
A variety of distribution methods exist – from simple to flashy – no matter whether yearbooks are handed out in the spring, summer or fall. Advisers and administrators opposed to summer/fall delivery cite obstacles to distributing yearbooks, especially to seniors, for staying with spring delivery.
Nothing is quite as frantic as a badly organized yearbook room at deadline. Usually, most advisers have more than enough staff and more than enough time to make deadlines manageable. However, advisers’ main problem seems to be not having time to sit down and develop a plan for optimum staff efficiency. Therefore, with apologies to David Letterman, I would like to share my top 10 ways to improve staff development.
When people work together as a team, it shows in the finished product. Without a yearbook “team,” it would be impossible to produce a book. However, it is up to you how tight your team is. The tighter the team, the better the book. Below are some suggestions for bringing your staff together, and creating a family atmosphere inside (and outside) the yearbook room.
The staff could not contain their excitement. They showed me their cover design and said it would look “really cool” in neon orange with a bright green alligator holding our school mascot protruding from the wide open jaws. Such is the life of a South Florida yearbook adviser. When I awoke from this nightmare, I thought again about who actually controls the book. While some advisers control every step of the process, from cover to endsheets and everything in between, others hold to the philosophy that this is a student production and decisions should be made by the editor and editorial staff members.
“When a tool is used efficiently, you conserve time and energy. When meetings are run efficiently, you conserve all the resources available to management: time, energy, money, facilities, materials and human effort.”
They say that good work is its own reward, and when a yearbook staff begins pulling the first yearbooks from the box, you know this is true. However, by the time they begin unpacking books, they have been waiting for their reward for nearly a year. Because yearbook is such a long-term project, a series of small rewards along the way can keep a staff on track and motivated.
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