Creating content for your independent school website isn’t hard. Creating a lot of fresh content can be challenging, however. For many independent schools, the job of creating all this content, editing it and publishing it on the web falls to … Continue reading
Our communications office realized a couple years ago that we needed to find a solution for making our alumni magazine available online, so that alumni anywhere in the world could access it at any time. After much searching, I came across Flipdocs, a service that turns your PDFs into interactive flipbooks, and I haven’t looked back since.
Customization – You can give your flipbook a title, add a table of contents, and customize the background. If needed, you can add password protection. They also give you a variety of options for linking to your flipbook, including embedding it seamlessly into your site.
Easy to use – Flipdocs is not only easy for me to use, but also for our site visitors. When viewing a flipbook, you can turn through the pages, navigate through the table of contents, or view thumbnails of each page. Viewers can also print pages, download the PDF and e-mail to a friend.
Video – One of the top reasons we chose Flipdocs as opposed to other flipbook services was the ability to easily add video into the interactive flipbook. Using the link editor, you just add the URL of your YouTube video. You can also add Flash.
Analytics – Beyond just giving me the total number of views for each flipbook, Flipdocs also provides analytics for total views per day and total clicks per link.
SEO – The content of your flipbook is SEO juice. Search engines can read the text of your publication, which can boost your visibility in search engine results pages.
Pro plan – $350/year. You can pay a flat fee and convert as many PDFs as you want. This is a great cost-effective plan if you plan to upload many publications. Our top reason for choosing the Pro plan was the ability to replace flipbooks at no additional cost when corrections are needed. This is really beneficial for our summer school catalog, so that we can add classes or note which classes are full.
Pay as you go – $30 for 20 pages + $1 per additional page. This is a great plan if you plan to use it only for a few publications, such as your alumni magazine that only comes out 3 or 4 times a year.
Have you ever had someone tell you that something you wrote was pretty much a piece of junk? Maybe they didn’t quite use such harsh words, but we’ve all been subject to a little criticism of our written work, right? In school, we were always being graded on how well we conveyed a message and yet also infused some of our own personal flair into a story. In the professional world, we don’t get grades for our work, but we are always being “graded” by our readers.
I was writing an article for the summer issue of our magazine about an alumnus who recently received a prestigious award for computer science. I knew it wasn’t going to be a simple task – the topic was computer science and mobile technology, and I somehow had to translate the story into words that anyone could understand. And I was working on a tight deadline that also coincided with the end of the school year, which is perhaps one of the busiest times of the year for the communications office.
I wanted to write the best article that I possibly could, but with all the end-of-the-year stress bearing down on me, I simply gave it a good effort and sent the draft off to the subject of the article for him to fact-check.
His response was thoughtfully critical of my writing, and I have to thank him for that. His words were, “The article itself feels a little disjointed.” I read it as, “The article’s all out of whack; it needs to be re-organized and re-written.”
I knew he was right. When I had written the article, my main goal was my deadline. But I should have been focused on my readers. It didn’t matter if I made my deadline or not if no one was going to be interested enough to read the article. I filled up my coffee mug and got back to work on the article. It didn’t take much work, just some re-arranging paragraphs and clarifying a few items, and all of a sudden, it started to sound like a cohesive story.
I sent the revised version off to my interviewee, and he responded, “I like this a lot better.”
Because I was open to taking some criticism from my interviewee, I wrote a much more interesting story that I’m proud to have published in our school magazine.
Here are some tips I learned from my experience:
Rethink Edu Communications 