Talk to us
Bring the email chain about the senior portraits
There is no form on this site, no trial to start and nothing to buy. What there is, is a conversation with people who have been on both ends of that email chain, and it is worth more if you bring the real one.
Bring one of these
The studio that would not send the file. Or the one that did, and now you are not sure what you agreed to. This is the fault line of the band and the fastest way to find out whether we are any use to you.
Your adviser’s deadline week. Not the job description — the week. If a system does not survive a class period two days before a print deadline, nothing else about it matters.
The Saturday request from the paper. How did you answer it last time, and could you still account for that answer in March? If the honest answer is a shared folder, say so; almost everybody’s is.
The team photograph you could not use. One family said no and somebody suggested cropping. That conversation tells us what your school actually believes, which is more useful than a requirements list.
Three things we will say before you ask
One. Your student editors cannot send imagery outside the school, however senior and however trusted. Not adjustable.
Two. Giving a studio or a paper access takes longer than sending a folder. That is the trade, and if speed on a Saturday is the binding constraint you should know it now.
Three. Nothing can be bought today. Live payment is not turned on, so there is no checkout and no price anywhere.
Any of the three is a legitimate reason to stop, and stopping in ten minutes beats stopping in November.
What we would need, if it goes further
Your roster and your activity rosters. Athletics and clubs are where the volume is in this band, and a system reading a copy of your rosters rather than the live ones will be wrong by October.
Your publication permission as it actually reads. Whether it expires, whether it is per student, and what happens to a family who never answered. Ours defaults closed and treats silence as no.
The adviser, in the room. Advisers are the sharpest critics of anything in this category and they will find in twenty minutes what a procurement process misses in a term. That is useful to us and it should be useful to you.
What a second conversation usually is
Not a demonstration. A working session against a copy of your own rosters and one real week, because your deadline week is the only environment that tells either of us anything.
Two questions decide it, and neither is a feature. Can an editor do a real spread in a forty-minute period without the adviser hovering? And when the paper asks on a Saturday, how long does it take an adult on your staff to answer properly rather than quickly?
If either answer is bad we would rather find out in a session than after you have told a principal this is the plan. A yearbook programme that adopts something and abandons it in February has lost a year it cannot get back, and advisers talk to each other.
About the conversation itself
Is there a trial?
Not a self-serve one. Setting this up against real rosters is work rather than a signup, and a demonstration that is not against your own activities would tell you nothing about the only thing that matters here, which is whether it survives your deadline week.
Can our student editors be part of it?
From the second conversation, if you want them to be, and it is usually a good idea -- they will find the awkward parts an adult reviewer will not. That is your judgement about your own students rather than something we would ask for.
We are locked into a yearbook contract. Is this pointless?
Not necessarily, because printing and imagery are two separate arrangements. What changes here is where the pictures live and what governs them before they reach a page. Who prints the book can stay exactly where it is.
Do we have to decide anything at the end?
There is nothing to decide about money because there is nothing to buy. The only decision at the end of a first conversation is whether there is a second one.
Where it happens
Through the platform’s own front door at homeroom.software, where a person at Stanley Studios picks it up. This site collects nothing from you: no form, no address to hand over before you can read anything.
What follows is a conversation rather than a sequence, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it. That is the actual state of the product, not a soft close.