Printed marketing materials can be a huge expense in any private school Admission Office’s budget. Heavier paper and odd sizes can multiply your bill at the post office. These increasing expenses may make you reconsider the wisdom of the traditional print route and opt instead for a digital viewbook experience for your prospective families. After all, everything’s electronic these days—why shouldn’t your viewbook go virtual, too?
But believing that a digital viewbook experience is a panacea for your budgetary woes can land your office in hot water, fast. Keep reading for some advantages and disadvantages of virtual viewbooks.
Less Postage, More Processing
Right off the bat, distributing digital versions of your school’s viewbook will mean a lighter load on your postage budget and even your back—you don’t have to slog piles of viewbooks to various parent meetings or events anymore! Even if you decide to trim postage by mailing a standard postcard with the viewbook’s URL or custom QR code, you’d still be reducing costs and the physical burden of traditional materials.
That said, there’s less (initial) visual appeal if you opt to go completely digital. It might not be as impactful to hand a parent a postcard or flash drive containing your digital viewbook—which they must wait to view—rather than being able to flip through it immediately.
On the flip side of this digital conundrum, having another dedicated object and link on your website can lead to more inbound inquiry opportunities. A properly formatted landing page and digital viewbook can appear in organic searches by parents inquiring about private schools in your area—something that printed viewbooks simply can’t do. Finally, the ability to record the exact number of visits, views, and downloads your viewbook receives in your website analytics suite can give you valuable information about your potential applicant pool.
Uniform or Unique?
By having a digital viewbook, you essentially “present” your brochure and school much like every other school that goes this route. (All website URLs generally look the same, after all.) Many schools choose to put up a high-resolution PDF of their viewbook on a landing page for commonly distributed materials—at which point your website takes center stage, not your marketing materials.
But there’s no need for your school to slap the viewbook PDF on your site and call it quits! The Waterford School created a clear and search-friendly URL for their viewbook landing page (waterfordschool.org/admissions/viewbook) and included both the PDF—for easy printing—and a “FlipBook” version—for easy viewing. The latter requires a moment to load, but the experience of “virtually” flipping through the book immerses readers in what could have been a static experience.
Logistics and Details
The disadvantage of a print product is that whatever goes to the printer as the final product is how that product will remain, no matter what typos and misinformation are discovered after the fact. A print viewbook can't be updated with program adjustments, either, or new statistics after mid-year reports come out.
For those going digital, though, the primary viewbook design can be just the start of the problems. Landing pages must be monitored and maintained, to make sure broken links don’t discourage searchers. Private schools can look to the higher education sector for inspiration when looking to expand their viewbooks’ capabilities. Read what Sienna College did in 2011 when they could no longer afford print products.
The end product, which went live in 2011, features 80 interactive squares designed to pull prospective students into digital stories with YouTube videos or Flickr photo sites. From there, students and parents can dive deeper into the sections of the main website that most interest them.
Sienna College’s viewbook took a ton of work, effort, and money—possibly more than the initial production of a traditional print viewbook would have cost—but the amount they saved on shipping may have made the investment pay off in the end.
Sienna College knew their audience of both students and parents would appreciate the digital effort, and you know your private school better than any anonymous survey or report tries to tell you. So, while you’re preparing for this recruitment season, keep an ear open for parents’ reactions to digital or print viewbooks, and consider adding some sort of electronic access to your traditional paper materials.
Additional ISM resources:
Private School News Vol. 9 No. 12 What 2011 Means for Marketing Your School
Monthly Update for Admission Officers Vol. 8 No. 3 How to Make Your School Newsletter Interactive
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 27 No. 11 Cyber News: Designing Your Online Newsletter
I&P Vol. 27 No. 9 E-Signatures: Striving for the Paperless Office
