A Guide for Fundraising with Senior Ad Design Workshops from Tesserae, the yearbook at Corning-Painted Post High School in Corning, NY by Mike Simons, CJE
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Table of Contents Business Plan..................................................... 3 Book Sales...................................................... 3 Advertising...................................................... 3 Other Fundraisers............................................. 5 Senior Ad Design Workshops The Basics....................................................... 6 Communication............................................... 7 Schedule......................................................... 8 Appointments & Sign-ups...................................9 Parents & the Design Process............................. 10 Finishing Up, Proofs & Next Steps...................... 12 Final Notes.........................................................14
Overview Tesserae was founded in 2015 at C-PP HS after the rival East and West High Schools were consolidated to one campus. The new yearbook replaced East’s Logos and West’s Skjöld, each of which had published for 51 years and were recognized for national excellence by NSPA and CSPA.
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Tesserae, the yearbook at Corning-Painted Post High School, is in its second year of existence at a newly-merged 1,600 student 9-12 public school in rural upstate New York, just south of the Finger Lakes. Tesserae’s staff comprises just over 50 students, facilitated by an average of eight to10 editors, including a junior and senior business manager each. Tesserae is a 364-page publication comprising a 320-page, full-color, 9x12” book and a 44-page, full color, 8.5x11” spring supplement insert. The staff meets as a class in two periods of a nine-period day at C-PP HS and is advised by Michael Simons, CJE, an information technology instructor who also teaches Photojournalism, Digital Communication & Information Design, and an information technology and ethics class. Business operations are advised by Katherine Paulison-Harris, an English teacher at C-PPHS. Tesserae is produced in the C-PP Student Media Lab, which houses 30 27” Mac desktop computers running Yosemite and Adobe Creative Suite CS6; the lab also has modular open space that can be used for staff meetings and small group work, or can be reconfigured to a photography studio.
Business Plan Our Community
The Corning-Painted Post School District covers roughly 235 square miles in the Southern Tier of upstate New York. The city of Corning is home to Corning, Inc., a Fortune 500 company known for its glass and fiber optic products, and is surrounded by largely rural and agricultural villages and hamlets. The district serves approximately 5,300 students, with roughly 39% of our students qualifying for free and reduced lunch districtwide.
Book Sales
Tesserae’s staff and editors order between 900-950 books each year, and sell them to the student body in a tiered pricing plan throughout the year both in school and via our publisher’s online sales site.
Date
Price
Sept. 1 - Oct. 1
$65.00
Oct. 2 - Dec. 31
$70.00
Jan. 1 - Distribution
$80.00
An average of 25 books are held out for competitions and schoolto-school trades, and the staff typically sells out of their inventory. The $65.00 price is granted to faculty and staff for the entire year.
Advertising
Additional revenue for Tesserae’s operating budget comes from business and senior “baby ad” sales. Those full-color advertisements are available on two tiered pricing plans:
Size
Business
Senior
Full page
$500
$375
Half
$375
$210
Quarter
$210
$120
Eighth
$120
$80
Fifteenth
$80
$50
One important note: Tesserae is a large program in a 1,600-student school and operates with two advisers. The process outlined in this guide serves us well, but please do not think that there’s nothing here for you if you work with a club of five yearbook staff in a school of 600 students. There are tips and tricks here that can be useful to programs in a variety of configurations and with a wide variety of fundraising needs and experience levels. Business Ad sales average $17K-$20K, and Senior Ad sales in the first two years of C-PP HS—with approx. 350 seniors in the building—have averaged $17K.
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Tesserae’s ad costs give both business owners and parents options for every price point, with additional benefit to parents through a reduced pricing structure set one tier below the business ads.
Tesserae’s business ad campaign begins in early September and finishes by December 1. Each staff member receives four assigned businesses that they need to visit; students are assessed via their participation by either making a successful sale or bringing back evidence of having visited the business (business owners are asked to sign a “No, thank you” line on the sales contract as evidence). Each student has a goal of selling $420 in business ads (two quarter-page ads) or more, however, they are not graded on how much money they earn.
Tesserae’s 2016 business ad contract. Note the “Decline” portion midway down, which allows our staff to come away with evidence of effort even they don’t make a sale. There are a variety of design and payment options for business owners. Access an online PDF of this document at goo.gl/WU9aA8
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Other Fundraisers
In addition to book sales and ad revenue, Tesserae’s staff earns income from a handful of standalone fundraisers. Members of the photo staff work with adviser Mike Simons to host photo booths at both the Semi-formal in January and the Junior/Senior Prom in May. The sets are designed to match the dances’ themes, and the students use studio flashes and other equipment owned by Tesserae to light the sets. Packages for prints (ranging in size from wallets to 8x10s) range in price from $10 to $25; revenues average $600 and $1,200, in January and May respectively. Also, Tesserae holds a flower sale the weekend before Mother’s Day each May, selling 10- and 12-inch hanging baskets supplied by a wholesale greenhouse near Buffalo, New York. Baskets typically cost $9.50 and $14, and are sold at $15 and $20. The sale, now in its eighth year, earns average profits of $2,800, with proceeds split between student volunteers to help underwrite their yearbook summer camp tuition.
The flower sale runs from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon the weekend before Mother’s Day. Students staff the sale in four-hour shifts; parent volunteers help supervise throughout. Automated voicemails from school, posts to social media and coverage in the local newspaper help publicize the sale.
Members of the yearbook staff have taken couples and group portraits at the two major dances at the high school(s) for 14 years. A simple backdrop stand, a roll of seamless backdrop paper, a few decorations (balloons, sheer fabric, a pedestal with vase and flowers, etc.), a set of 2-3 studio flashes and a DSLR camera are all you need to get started!
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Given the demands of business operations for its program, Tesserae’s business team is led by a junior/senior pair of veteran staff. In 2015-16, the senior business manager, Abby Allard, and her junior partner, Olivia Palumbo, guided their team to the most successful year of fundraising ever for a C-PP yearbook. Allard shared some thoughts about our workshops, saying, “The best part of senior ad nights is watching the parents’ reactions to a great idea, and seeing our designers’ pride in making a great ad. The most challenging part is working with a parent who has a totally different design idea than you that might not follow good design rules; it makes it difficult to agree with their requests but also put your own twist on it.”
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Senior Ad Design Workshops Prior to the 2009 yearbook at West High School, senior parents submitted envelopes of original photo prints, typed or hand-written messages and a brief note to our staff about an approach to design. Our student designers had no other contact with their customers until PDF proofs were sent out, at which point we regularly received requests for significant—and frustrating—redesigns. Beginning in 2009-2010, the Skjöld staff started hosting a series of Senior Ad Design Workshops in the late fall and early winter to facilitate the sale and design of each year’s senior ads. The workshops invited parents into our lab to work elbow-to-elbow with our design staff to draft a concept and layout for each senior’s ad. Parent response was off-the-charts positive; for us advisers, the real-world customer service and on-demand design experience the workshops gave our students were a tremendously positive addition to our program. Since then, the students and advisers Skjöld, Logos and now Tesserae have refined the planning and implementation of the evening workshops, receiving enormously positive feedback from customers each year.
The Basics
In a senior class of roughly 350 students, Tesserae’s business team will have approximately 110 families buy an ad for their graduate. To accommodate those sales and the ads’ designs, our students hold four or five Senior Ad Design Workshops; here are some basic details: • The business staff holds one workshop each month from October to January. • Workshops are held in our 28-desktop Mac lab; design work is done in Adobe Photoshop CS6. • Appointments are scheduled in half-hour blocks from 4-8 p.m.; 25 minutes for work and a five-minute transition. • Parents bring prints, digital photos and a prepared message • After the design appointment, proofs are shared to parents via emailed PDFs. • Once our business managers have approval from parents, a final high-res ad is placed into our advertising spreads in InDesign.
Communication
Tesserae’s business team uses a variety of means to publicize the design workshops: • Phone: Our executive principal makes weekly phone calls home using an automated system; the business managers provide a brief 2-3 sentence script to be read in her message. • ”Save the Dates”: At the first senior class assembly of the year, we distribute a handout that includes details on our senior portrait specifications and a “Save the Date” notice on the reverse that goes home to parents, listing our workshop dates. • Direct mail/e-mail: The business staff designs multiple documents that are printed and mailed or sent home via email as PDF attachments. The fliers include details about our schedule, preparing for an appointment and pricing. Additionally, the school’s Parent-Teacher-Student Association and social media feeds will share details and links to our online sign-up page via email, Twitter and Facebook.
For Tesserae’s direct mailing postcards, we use Overnight Prints.com, where customers can order 500 5.5x8.5” cards for approximately $75. Our main office staff prints mailing labels for senior parents from our school records database.
Back and front of 5.5x8.5” postcard mailer PDF flier for email and social media Business staff members design fliers in InDesign each year; they are mailed home, sent in emails as PDFs and shared on social media sites. The fliers feature past ads as inspiration for parents, provide a link for online appointment sign-ups and give pricing and preparation tips.
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Without fail, the majority of parents wait until our December and January workshops, which makes for busy nights for all involved. One benefit is that our October night sees just six to ten families visit the lab, giving our rookie designers a less hectic introduction to the workshops.
Schedule & Staffing
Our staff has found that four or five dates are necessary for our workshops, with a goal of giving parents flexibility in scheduling. We rotate through different weeknights to better accommodate family needs, and host one night each month from October through January. History has shown us that very few parents take advantage of the early dates in October and November, while December and January’s schedules completely fill up. In 2016, we added a second night in late January to accommodate demand. Each Senior Ad Design Workshop runs from 4-8 p.m., with five slots each half hour for appointments. It has always been difficult for our designers to take a break for dinner with a full four-hour schedule, so in 2016-17, we plan to block out 5:30-6 p.m. for dinner, extending our night to 8:30 p.m. to maintain all eight halfhour appointment blocks. Our advertising and business staff comprises two business managers (editor-level positions), one a junior and one a senior. Each manager coordinates one half of our advertising campaign, either business ads or senior ads. The rest of the team is made up of four designers, with the most experienced student serving as a ‘senior designer,’ a go-to classmate who can support newer designers with art direction when the business managers are busy. On a workshop night, our business adviser and the business manager for senior ads coordinate and facilitate the night’s activities and parent hospitality while the four designers and other manager work one-on-one with parents in design appointments. Again, each appointment lasts approximately 25 minutes, with a five-minute transition for bookkeeping and a quick break for the designers.
The staffing model for Tesserae’s business team. This team is typically six students; given the program’s size, budget and the book’s page count, the business staff do not have coverage or reporting responsibilities. The business staff has its own adviser.
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Business Manager for Business Ads
Senior Designer (a skilled, veteran designer)
Art direction & support
Designer Business Manager for Senior Ads
Designer Designer
Appointments & Sign-ups
As previously mentioned, we run workshop nights on half hour blocks, with five appointment slots in each block. That gives our team 40 slots per night to accommodate parent sign-ups. We have used SignUpGenius.com to allow parents to register for appointments for the last three years, with great success. For those unfamiliar, the website is a free service that allows users to create sign-up lists for everything from parent-teacher conferences to flea markets to events like our workshops. There are tutorials available at SignUpGenius for first-time users, but the basics are: • Create an account • Create an event and define how many time blocks you want available • Specify the number of sign-up slots you need for each block • Publish the event by sharing the sign-up link with your audience
For Tesserae’s direct mailing postcards, we use OvernightPrints. com, where customers can order 500 5.5x8.5” cards for approximately $75.00. Our main office staff prints mailing labels for senior parents from our school records database.
(Note that the URL provided by SignUpGenius is long and doesn’t lend itself to easy typing. Instead, copy that link to a shortening service like goo.gl or tinyurl.com, shorten the link, and distribute the shortened link.)
Shortened link Example long link http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0f4baaae2fa3fe3-senior1 http://goo.gl/AW9Bt6
SignUpGenius.com is a tool that gives staffs the means to have parents sign up for appointment slots. Parents see the view at left and can sign up by clicking on the black buttons, if an open slot is available. A URL shortener like goo.gl allows you to take the ungainly URL from SignUpGenius and make it much more easily sharable.
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Before parents arrive, our business team tidies the room, puts out signs in the halls to direct clients to the lab, prepares blank contracts, and cleans the flatbed scanner. Additionally, we gather some past books so parents can peruse them for inspiration. Sometimes, we’ll set out some light refreshments of juice and cookies for the parents, as well. Hospitality is one key to our ongoing success!
Parents & the Design Process
The stage is set, and parents are arriving at the school for their appointments. What’s next? For us, it’s hospitality first, and that starts with signs posted at both main entrances and in our hallways to help parents find our lab. Our business adviser and business manager for senior ads are the workshops’ facilitators—they greet parents at the door and take care of all of the ‘people management’ of the night. When parents arrive, our staff signs them in on a clipboard, noting the parent’s name, time of arrival, and the name of the student for whom the parent is creating an ad. While waiting, the parent fills out a contract and looks over past books for design inspiration. If the parent brings original prints of photos, our business manager scans them on our flatbed scanner and saves the files to our networked server. Each ad’s materials are saved to a separate folder on the server; each folder is named for the student to which it corresponds. While it is not the goal of this workshop guidebook to teach graphic design and how our students design each ad, each appointment follows this general outline:
In Tesserae’s lab, junior business manager Olivia Palumbo checks in with senior Abby Allard, a three-year veteran on the business staff, while Allard color-corrects a scanned image in Photoshop during a workshop. Allard served as the business manager for business ads, coordinating sales visits and calls by Tesserae’s 54 staff members in the local business community and subsequent art direction for ads purchased by local businesses.
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Palumbo offers two quick tips for success: “Make sure your scanner is functioning
At a Senior Ad Design Workshop in January 2016, junior Olivia Palumbo meets with a parent at check-in, referring to the Tesserae senior ad contract for pricing information. Palumbo was a second-year staff member and served as the business manager for senior ads in the 2015-16 school year.
• When a designer is ready, the business manager or adviser takes the next parent to that designer’s workstation. • After introductions, the designer uses a Photoshop action to create the blank ad template based on the size requested by the parent. Photoshop actions are easy to create (with many tutorials available online) and can be installed throughout a lab; using actions ensures consistency in sizing. At the press of a button, we have a blank 4.25x5.5” quarter-page ad ready to go. • At this point, the designer does a “Save As” immediately, in case of power outage or anything else. We use a structure of “StudentastnameFirstname-Size-Working.PSD” for the files. • Our student designer accesses the networked server and opens the pre-scanned photos in Photoshop. Parents often (and increasingly) bring USB flash drives, as well, so we move those photos onto the server and open them as well. • Together, the designer and parent draft a layout, taking care to use good design fundamentals in use of color, typography and layout; it is most common for our ads to include a dominant photo and a number of smaller accessory images. • Ads typically include messages from parent to senior, as well. We ensure that the parent triple-checks spelling as the messages are typed into Photoshop and encourage a close read of the artwork we send them on proof, as well.
and clean before a workshop begins—a crash can waste time and dirty glass ruins scans of photos. Also, it’s important to have a veteran staff member not designing on hand for design advice and troubleshooting throughout the night.” Two common design issues at the workshop are parents with no message prepared or parents with a message that is far, far longer than can be fit into a sensible design in the space allowed. We find our most popular sizes are quarter- and halfpage ads, which can typically allow plenty of latitude for featuring a number of photos and a message of moderate length.
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• The adviser and business manager for senior ads monitor the door for new check-ins, but also make themselves available for consultation and assistance. About 20 minutes into an appointment, they’ll give the designer and parent a quick reminder that the meeting needs to wrap up in about five minutes. • If there is significant work left to be done, our designers use a “Sketch it Out” paper to take down notes for reference to use when our class is back in session and work continues on the ad at hand. • After one last save in Photoshop, our designers escort their clients back to our check-in table, at which point our business manager or adviser takes payment, double-checks contact information on the contract, and answers any last-minute questions for parents. • Once the night is over, our business manager(s) update our sales database in Google Sheets and the designers continue editing ads during our daily class time. When an ad has a final draft, it is proofed via JPG to the parent’s email; if the parent requests changes, our team makes edits and sends an additional proof until the client is satisfied with the artwork.
A parent points out a typo to senior Jordan Meteer at a design workshop in January 2016. “The first time I worked with a parent, I was nervous. Some of them come in thinking they know exactly what they want, but once the parents sit down with us, and they see that we know what we’re doing in Photoshop and with design, that impresses them and makes them more confident in our abilities. Then they are comfortable letting us take the lead,” Meteer said. “I think having the parents there makes it easier for them to figure out what they want, and for me to make changes for them then and there, rather than the old design process when we wouldn’t meet with them.“
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Finishing Up, Proofs & Next Steps After a design workshop, there are quite a few loose ends that our business managers and adviser need to attend to. After documenting all payments to our Google Sheet, money collected the previous night needs to be taken from our lockup to the central treasurer for deposit to our account. As mentioned, our designers continue their work until they have a complete draft, at which point a JPG proof is generated and sent to the parent for approval. The business manager for senior ads is the contact person for all correspondence with parents via email; we use tesserae.yearbook@ gmail.com for email. Once we receive approval from parent clients, the business managers update our database to note which page the ad will be placed on, and the final artwork goes into a spread for printing and shipment to our plant on deadline.
We use a system of labels in GMail to color-code and tag emails in our inbox. That lets our business managers and adviser know at a glance which emails need responses or other follow-up, and which accounts need attention, as well as from which manager. (see picture at right)
Google Sheets has given the Tesserae business team an collaborative tool to use in handling our business and senior ad accounts. This screenshot (top) shows a portion of our senior ad tracking spreadsheet, including notations for current status in the righthand columns. We also use GMail in daily correspondence with parents, including the embedded labeling system, which allows us to flag messages needing attention.
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Example ads from Tesserae 2016 at C-PPHS.
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Final Notes The students and advisers of the Tesserae yearbook at CorningPainted Post High School are proud to share the Senior Ad Design Workshop model outlined in this guidebook with you. We hope that regardless of your staff or school’s size, your financial needs or the computer hardware and software resources available to you, you have found the information in the guidebook useful. If you would like to learn more, please feel free to contact the Tesserae business staff at tesserae.yearbook@gmail.com, or their adviser Katie Paulison-Harris at kharris@cppmail.com. You can contact the author of this guidebook, Mike Simons, CJE, at michael.c.simons@gmail. com. Follow the staff of Tesserae online at @tesseraeybk on Twitter and Instagram.
About the Author
Mike Simons, CJE, is the coadviser of Tesserae, the yearbook at Corning-Painted Post High School in Corning, NY. He has advised in the C-PP school district since 2001; his C-PP staffs have been recognized with both CSPA Crown and NSPA Pacemaker awards. The vice president of the Columbia Scholastic Press Advisers’ Association, Simons was named a Distinguished Adviser by the Journalism Education Association in January 2016. Simons teaches regularly at workshops and camps as well as national conventions. At C-PPHS, he also teaches Photojournalism I & II, Digital Communication & Information Design and IB Information Technology in the Global Society, as well as directing a 100-student basketball pep band. Simons lives in Corning, NY, with his wife Laurelyn and their four young children. This guidebook is the project for his MJE certification.
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