Make your Yearbook Committee meetings productive by creating a structured plan of items to cover each time you meet up. This will not only keep everyone on time for other commitments during the day, it’ll also keep your yearbook project moving at the perfect pace.
Whether you’re a student heading up the project with support from a teacher, a parent working with other parents, or a teacher working directly with the students our guide below will help you get the most out of your team huddle time!
Follow our meeting schedule guide below based on a real-life school’s yearbook story…
Meeting 1 – Establish ‘Team Yearbook!’ *high ten*
- Get all involved in your yearbook together (and a sweet treat to celebrate the start of an exciting project together).
- Take along some examples of previous yearbooks made at the school if you have them.
- Assign a Head of Committee (preferably a teacher or parent to sign off the yearbook when it’s ready to print).
Thoughts for the next meeting… which roles would each team member like to take? Ask each team member to bring along three yearbook page ideas for discussion.
Meeting 2 – Page planning
- Assign the rest of the team roles: Editors, Staff and Photographers
- Review the yearbook page ideas and start brainstorming your own page ideas. Use our Yearbook Ideas section for inspiration and write down all of the events and subjects you would like your yearbook to cover. Don’t forget to plan how many pages you’ll need for staff and student profile pages.
- Decide how to divide up the task of gathering photos and text for your yearbook – will the ‘owner’ of each yearbook section collect content, or will a couple of team members be solely in charge of gathering the goods to pass onto Editors working on the page designs?
Meeting 3 – The Master Plan
- Divide the yearbook flat plan into sections and assign each section to a team member to work on (you can do this online using Yearbook Hub).
- Are you looking for local sponsorship to help fund your yearbook? If so, assign the role of contacting companies about advertising. Check out our yearbook fundraising ideas.
- Task your photographer with snapping school staff and each student for your profile pages. Agree a format to use for your photos, such as Year 7 and Year 11, head and shoulders, etc.
Meeting 4 – Pick a theme
- Gather your group of Editors (who’ll be working on the design of the book) and review your favourite backgrounds and layouts. Yearbook Hub has a ton of pre-designed artwork to use, so have a peek at a free trial account.
- Review photos and any other content you’ve collected so far. Catch up on which content is still needed and plan steps for the upcoming fortnight collect the rest.
Meeting 5 – Design time!
- Hopefully you’ve all had a play with a Yearbook Hub trial account. Next, run a quick training session by watching a few Yearbook Hub tutorials.
- Set all Editors to work on designing their section of pages and adding the collected content. Aim to have backgrounds, titles and layouts added to each page ready for group review at the next meeting.
Meeting 6 – First design review
- Export a PDF proof of the yearbook to see how it’s shaping up! Are you happy with the order of the sections/pages? Are you happy with the planned design so far? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘no’ now is the time to make any changes.
- Ask your Photographer to upload all photos (in separate folders, to keep everything neat and organised) ready to drop into your page layouts.
After these initial six meetings you’ll be well on your way to a truly rewarding project. Once you reach the point of designing the yearbook you can reduce the frequency of the meetings. Concentrate on reviewing progress on the book itself and what content (if any) is still required.
The school on which we’ve based the guide above used an online chat tool to communicate while collaborating on the design online at home. Try Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Skype to keep in touch, stay motivated and keep your yearbook moving!
