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This page will bring you some brief technical tips and information. If you have a tech
tip that is industry related please fax it to the School Portrait Network at
800-241-9234 or e-mail mmartin@advancedphoto.com.
You will be given credit for your tip unless you tell us otherwise. It is
important to note that although most will be published not all tips can be. In
either case your submission is appreciated.
- By Robert W. Kerr
Did you ever wish you could have current information on all public schools in your area
readily accessible for planning sales and marketing or to confirm enrollments for
scheduling. Well I have the answer you were looking for. It is appropriately called the
National Public School Locator and is about as easy and thorough as it can get. You
can visit the locator on the web anytime you need it. Simply CLICK HERE to give
it a try.
The National Public School Locator can perform a search for you with a very limited
amount of known data and it will deliver to you important and useful information including
but not limited to; school address, telephone number, locale, county, student teacher
ratio, a race and ethnicity breakdown and enrollment data by grade level.
Give it a try today! I think you will agree it can be a very useful tool for any school
portrait photography company.
- By Vince Broesch
The pictures are suddenly off color. These people were born on Mars or they laid under
the sun lamp to long! What's going on! Run a process control test, run a printer test.
Process is fine; Printer is way off color. How did this happen? Last Printer test looks
fine. So we rebalance the printer while scratching our heads. A week later the lamp blows,
We install a new one and gasp at the color difference. Rebalance the printer again. Life
goes on and things run fine.........
But what happened? What caused all the machine time and material cost? This is the lamp
Blow-Short Syndrome. And lots of money could have been saved had it been recognized. The
darn little filament in the lamp will blow, open, we all know that. The lamp is out. But
on rare occasions the filament will flop around in its little simi-vacuum world and return
close to it's previous position. In just a millisecond there is an arc across the
unconnected ends and it welds back together. Now we have a filament that is somewhat
shorter than it use to be, and a lamp that has changed color. It happens so fast that no
one would be likely to see it, although I did see it happen once. A microscope will reveal
it. Sometimes you can even see it with the naked eye.
So there you have it, In my experience about 5% of lamps that "blow" have
already "blown" a week earlier and caused a lot of money to be lost, because it
wasn't recognized when it "blew" the first time.
The reasons companies loose business is surprising! Most business is
lost due to our own indifference to the customer. Our customers want us all to
better service them and to respond quickly when required. It is up to us to see that
we are adequately meeting their needs. This can best be done by properly training
your staff to respond correctly and quickly to any client requested.
| 68% |
Due to the indifference of a company's staff. |
| 14% |
Dissatisfied with the product. |
| 9% |
Taken away because of price. |
| 9% |
Other reasons. |
When you are covering a sporting event for a contract school who happens
to be playing a non-contract school, print a second set of your candid photos. Send
the extra set to your non-contract school with a short note just because you happened to
be there.
This may help you locate additional business like the school contract or
sports team photos. The cost to you is minimal and your own work makes a great
promotional piece for winning new business.
- By Chris R. Burton
- President - PhotoLynx Inc
-
- Over the past few years our PhotoLynx staff has spoken to
many studios and labs regarding the techniques they have used to solicit rosters from
schools on diskette. The advantages of receiving student information on diskette include
reduced data entry costs, speed of "name-on" product turn around and accuracy of
student names and IDs. All of which benefit both the lab as well as the schools they
serve.
-
- Here are a list of some of the most effective techniques
compiled by PhotoLynx, Inc over the past few years:
1) Do Your Homework. If a school system you have booked has a centralized district office
try approaching them first for the student rosters on disk. Some PhotoLynx clients have
approached the district office and received 10-20 schools on disk inside of 30 minutes
simply by showing them a copy of the photography contract. People at the district level
also tend to be a little more computer literate than school office staff seem to be.
2) Be Precise. Ask for a specific file format and let your contact know exactly what
information you need (such as last name, first name, teacher, grade, home room and student
ID). Saying things like "I need a text file of all the students" will produce an
amazing variety of file formats and the associated frustrations that go with each.
3) Pretend your in Missouri - Show them what you want. Send a diskette to the school
containing a file that has an example of what you are trying to get them to provide you
with. This is VERY helpful for two reasons: First, anybody who is computer literate can
look at the file you have sent in a text editor in DOS or Windows and will have a better
understanding of what needs to be achieved. Second, if you strategically put your return
address on the diskette label and a date by which you need the information it makes it
easier for a school to put the file on the disk you've provided and it also guarantees the
diskette is formatted correctly and is without error. The file we have provided you called
DATAFILE.TXT is an example of what we feel
would be good to supply to a school on diskette.
-
- 4) Make your request as simple as possible. Try not to be
too complicated with your request. In many cases office staff know enough about their
computer systems to do their job, and little beyond that. If you are dealing with a person
over 15, the computer they are using might not be their friend. What you are asking them
to do could seem a little scary until they actually do it and see how easy it is. KISS.
- 5) Know what you are asking for. Be able to describe to
the school how to verify the file they are sending you is in the correct format. It is not
always possible to know what exact steps a school will need to take to create the file you
have requested, but it is fairly easy to describe a "comma-delimited" file
format in a few quick sentences like: "Each student is on his own line and has the
same number of fields", "There are commas between each piece of
information", "There are no blank lines or special 'funny-looking' characters
are the beginning of the file", "It does NOT matter what order the fields are
in". If you are familiar with the Windows text editor, it would help to send them a
step-by-step procedure for loading the DATAFILE.TXT
file from the diskette you send them to demonstrate how to look at a text file.
-
- 6) Choose one key person to deal with. It is best to
precede sending anything to a school with a phone call to the school office in order to
locate a single individual who will be you key contact. Sometimes speaking to the
principal and having he/she recommend a person in the office to work with is the best way
to find your key person. Other times, speaking with the office manager or head secretary
is more productive. One way or another, speak with a real person who agrees to be
responsible to get the file you need sent to you. Even if that person will not do the
actual work, sending the information to a particular person is by far the best way to
assure that your request will get the attention it deserves.
7) Send a cover letter with the diskette addressed to your key person. The text of the
attached file, called DATAFILE.TXT, is also a
good template for a cover letter to your key person. Address the package including the
cover letter it to that person. Enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope in the package
also helps.
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- 8) Follow up 3-4 days after the package has been sent.
Call your key person back and make sure the package was received. Try and get a firm day
when the disk will be made and shipped back to you. Confirm the receipt of the diskette
and return envelope to draw attention to them. Remember: The squeaky wheel gets the
grease. Squeak.
9) Learn from your key contacts. If a school has a guru in the office who plays with
computers like toys and loves details, make use of that by getting that person to fax you
a step-by-step procedure for exporting the file information from the system they are
using. You might be able to use that procedure to help another one of your schools using
the same software. Keep that information on file for the subsequent year. If the guru is
all that good, the private sector will suck him/her out of the school system fairly
quickly and you will need that information to help the person you have to deal with the
next year.
10) Don't wait too close to picture day. If you are unsure as to whether you will get the
file
you need in time, ask for the file a month or more prior to picture day. If it gets down
to a week and you haven't seen the file yet, don't hesitate to ask them to immediately fax
you a printed list. It's better to type the names in by hand than to hand write camera
cards.
11) Rent a Guru. If you have somebody in house who is good at picking up software quickly,
consider sending them to schools who are struggling for an hour one afternoon to help the
school create the file you need. Remember to have them document their work creating the
file.
-
- 12) Extol the virtues of receiving the roster on
diskette. If you meet with resistance from the school promote the following items: 1)
Receiving school data on disk will make the services supplied back to the school more
accurate. 2) School data will help reduce parent complaints caused by inaccurate spelling.
3) School data will make the picture day flow smoother since it will eliminate many
hand-written camera cards. Focus on the positive aspects of automation.
13) Share your techniques with PhotoLynx. Remember to call, email or fax any ideas or
techniques you have found useful to PhotoLynx at the email address: Info@PhotoLynx.com or fax them to PhotoLynx on (760)
782-9293. We promise to share any new ideas from our many other clients with you. We are
looking at automating this process even further, and any input you can give us, including
contacts at your schools or, even better, the software name and contact person of business
that created the product, would be greatly appreciated!
This list is not complete, but you probably got at least a few good techniques that will
help you this coming season.
- As you are all aware it is sometimes difficult to focus long roll cameras, so here is a
tip to help.
-
- Most portrait lighting equipment ships with a 150 w quartz modeling light as standard.
We have found it a big help to order equipment with or immediately replace our
modeling lights with 250 w quartz bulbs. This seems like a small thing but these
bulbs will make it measurably easier to focus your long roll cameras. This is
especially true in low light situations or when using umbrellas.
The cost to change over is minimal and there is no noticeable increase in discomfort
from the heat while working with the higher watt bulbs.
Give it a try and give those eyes a rest.
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