Start the New Year with our Top 10 favorite New Year(book) Resolutions

Updated by Walsworth Yearbooks

Happy New Year! The start of a new year is the perfect time to look back and evaluate what you and your yearbook staff have accomplished so far this school year.

Yearbook can be challenging, but it’s also very rewarding. Take a moment to pat yourself on the back. You’ve made it this far – you’re doing great! However, even the most seasoned yearbook adviser will tell you that when it comes to fine tuning the yearbook process, there is always room for improvement and there are new goals to be made.

Defining what you want to accomplish this year is the first step to reaching your goals. Let us help kickstart your New Year(book) Resolutions by offering some of our favorite goals. We provide the tools you need to crush them.

1. We will meet all of our deadlines.

Don’t let the deadline crunch get the best of you! In our webinar, Don’t Get Spooked by the First Big Deadline, we offer strategies to help you and your staff meet your deadlines.

• Check out Systems of Success – First Deadline Considerations. These tips from Jim Jordan can also be applied to finishing the year off strong by planning your deadlines.
• Remember to set mini deadlines as well to help you plan ahead. Reward your staff when these are met.

Check out more great tips and articles on deadlines on our blog.

2. We will do more creative marketing and sell more books.

Boosting your yearbook’s sales doesn’t have to be as hard as you think! We have a multitude of tools that can help you get creative and have some fun with it.

• Our Dawn of a New Marketing Age webinar offers strategies and tools to help promote your yearbook in today’s digital age.
• Check out the Marketing Your Book  You will find plenty of resources to help you get the word out about the yearbook to parents, students and even businesses.
• Remind parents to buy the yearbook with our Parent Email Program.
• Elevate your social media presence with our Social Media Calendar. Our daily posts help you engage with your school community while promoting yearbook sales.

3. We will write better captions.

Photos are the most-seen element of any yearbook, which makes the blocks of text that accompany them – the captions – perhaps the most important text written in the book.

• The Writing Yearbook Captions That Will Captivate eBook will help your yearbook staff give captions the attention they deserve.
• Another great resource to help your staff learn to write better captions is the Completing your Copy with Captions and Headlines unit of the Yearbook Suite curriculum.

4. We will include more students in the yearbook.

Would you buy a yearbook if you weren’t in it? Probably not. Make it a resolution to increase coverage throughout your entire student body. Get each student in the book more than once.

• Check out the We’ve Got You Covered webinar for coverage ideas. Mike Taylor, CJE and Jim Jordan share 50 examples of schools doing a phenomenal job.
• Increase coverage by adding more pictures to your index.
• Need more ideas on how to increase coverage throughout your school? The Coverage: The Heart of the Yearbook unit of the Yearbook Suite curriculum can help.
• Encourage your school community to send in their own photos through Yearbook Snap. Be sure to provide the school code for them.
• Encourage diversity in your yearbook. To learn the best ways to do so, read Erica Brockmoller’s article from Idea File magazine, All In: Creating Intentional Diversity in Your Yearbook, on our blog.

5. We will take better photos.

Great photos help tell the story of the year in a way your readers will always remember. Up your photography game with help from these great resources.

• Beautiful, eye-catching photos are what makes a yearbook. Take a look at the amazing images in 101+ Great Yearbook Photos That Captured Our Attention, and read what we thought made them stand out.
• In 2022, everyone can be a photographer! Your yearbook staffers are walking around every day with a state-of-the-art digital camera right in their pocket – their smartphones. In the eBook Using Your Smartphone to Capture Great Photos, learn how your staff can start using their smartphones and a few simple apps to take yearbook-quality pictures.
• Learn how to take quality photos by reviewing the “Photojournalism: Telling Stories with Images”unit of the Yearbook Suite curriculum.

6. We will spice up our index.

The index is one of the most viewed sections of your yearbook. Don’t let it be boring. It deserves the same attention as the rest of your masterpiece. If you want to add a little zest to your index, all it takes is a little time and energy. Here are six creative ideas on how to spice up your index.

Be sure to also check out our blog, Help Your Yearbook Readers with an Index, for more tips and tricks to including the perfect index for your school.

7. We will find interesting story ideas and facts.

Every person has a story to tell, and with each new year comes the opportunity to get creative. Always look for the most interesting stories and facts possible to capture your readers. The Yearbook Suite curriculum has great units to help you in this process.

• Check out the Getting the Next Big Story webinar to go above and beyond with your coverage ideas.
• Before your yearbook staff can begin writing stories, they need to acquire the right information. The Art of the Interview will help your staff learn how to interview sources and get the information they need to write interesting stories.
• Find unique angles and kick-start the creative process with the Writing: Tell Me a Story unit of Yearbook Suite.
• The Walsworth blog is another great resource for finding interesting and unique story ideas. Check out our articles on interesting story ideas here.

8. We will recruit a great staff for next year.

Believe it or not, the time to recruit next year’s staff is already upon us! We have some tools that will help you recruit an incredible yearbook staff!

• Download the Recruiting Primer to find tips and information for the entire recruiting process. Everything from interviewing potential staffers to selecting the applicants is included.
• Don’t just wish upon a star for the best staff ever, attend a replay of our Radical Recruiting webinar. In the recording of this webinar, you will learn where to look for the best students in your school, what mix of personality types make up a great yearbook team, techniques and materials to use in the recruiting process and how to run an efficient application, interviewing and selection process.
• Check out Systems of Success – The Recruiting Process by Jim Jordan. In this blog, you will learn how to identify potential candidates to join your staff next year.
• Recruit a great staff by downloading these fun, professionally designed, free marketing tools located on our Recruit a Great Staff page.

9. We will celebrate our successes.

So much hard work goes into creating the yearbook. Remember to take some time to celebrate all you’ve done! From creating spreads, to keeping your theme running throughout the book, to meeting individual deadlines and finally to submitting your masterpiece, you’ve worked hard and deserve a pat on the back! Have a pizza party, bring in donuts, hand out staff awards, go bowling – whatever ritual it is that you have. You all did amazing work, so remember to always celebrate a job well done!

• After the well-deserved festivities of finishing your yearbook, check out Jim Jordan’s 40 Things to do After the Yearbook is Done  eBook. It never hurts to have a plan to finish out the school year!

10. We will plan the best distribution day ever.

The smell of freshly printed yearbooks has to go down as one of the simplest pleasures in the yearbook world. Don’t hog it all to yourself! Share it with the school by hosting the a distribution day event everyone will be talking about! Here are some tips and tricks on how to make your event one to remember.

• If you’ve never done it before, distribution day can be stressful – but it doesn’t have to be. Preparation is the key to success! We’ve put together a Distribution Day Guide for you to stay on track throughout the process!
• Watch a replay of the webinar,  Yearbook Distribution: Distributing your love letter to the school, hosted by Lisa Wallace, yearbook adviser at Fort Worth Country Day School in Fort Worth, Texas, and Walsworth’s Mike Taylor, CJE. They tell you how to prepare for distribution day, how to promote the big event and other important tips to keep in mind to make sure your book distribution goes smoothly.
• Utilize our Distribution Day Flow Chart as a reference and if safety protocols will allow for a traditional distribution celebration.
• Get great ideas from this Idea File article, Distribution Parties – Party Like You’re Done with the Yearbook, by adviser Erica King from Silver Creek High School in San Jose, California. She shared on our blog and in the magazine what her staff did to make their event a success.