Case Study: Logan Park — Hail School

Staff and students now work together using Hail to produce content as a collaborative process that enhances real learning, sharing and relationship building. Even better, Hail achieves all this using less staff time, while considerably reducing print and design costs.

About Logan Park

Logan Park High School is a co-ed, multi-cultural college often seen as Dunedin’s Performing Arts school. Logan Park is proud to cater for all individual talents and interests, working with every student to help them achieve outstanding academic results. For many years Logan Park has been the top-performing Scholarship school in Dunedin and Otago. With so many individual and group successes to celebrate, keeping in touch with parents, caregivers, students and the wider community is very important.

Keeping up regular communications with students (and alumni), families, staff and the wider community has always been a top priority for the school. So when a 2013 review of the school’s communications, including the newsletter, related publications, website and the yearbook revealed low levels of engagement and uptake they knew something had to be done.

"Students are attracted to Logan Park because of the outstanding individual results achieved and the special culture, character and overall flavour of the school and we didn’t feel our communications showcased these aspects. With the school's very real focus on communicating students’ stories and successes we were determined to find a better way."

Hail centrally manages all content & simplifies workflow

Prior to Hail, Logan Park’s content was created by individual teachers and staff throughout the year. An already difficult task was made harder as staff had to collect and make sense of content and imagery supplied via email, over shared network dropboxes and rapidly multiplying USB drives.

Compiling school newsletters and magazines from content scattered across multiples devices, and multiple programs was labour intensive and the result was unattractive, costly print publications that failed to achieve the school’s goals.

"Hail has completely revolutionized our internal content organization and external storytelling. We now have a constantly updated and centralized store for all articles, images and publications. Staff and students can effortlessly create and collaborate on our schools' content and it is archived for users."

Content in Hail is searchable so you can curate publications in a snap

Before Hail, the process of curating newsletters, magazines and even yearbooks was an overwhelming task. Now all Logan Park’s content (articles and imagery) is ‘tagged’, providing rich data about the topic. These tags allow easy sorting and filtering of all content at any future point. If they need to find images of the ‘2014 School Sports Day’ for the latest newsletter they simply search across tags, dates or keywords to get a complete list of all the relevant articles and images.

"We upload, create and tag content about our activities as they happen (on any device) and when it’s time to share it with the world we can very quickly and easily create newsletters and themed digital publications based on date ranges, tags or specific categories."

Hail reduces costs and improves reach with digital publishing

Using Hail to publish online Logan Park has already saved thousands from their annual printing budget.

An added bonus is the effortless social sharing of their content. They are now able to reach a much wider audience, both locally and internationally, than ever before.

"When it comes to the school’s end of year magazine we easily select chosen articles and photo galleries from the current year and without the constraints of print we can create and publish a much larger, richer and more engaging yearbook with full editorial control."

"Staff no longer have to struggle with emailing documents back and forth, cutting and pasting, dealing with complex software interfaces and templates, or thousands of unorganised photos across desktop and laptop computers and drives."

With Hail’s Content API your content is free to go anywhere

Embracing a new way of creating flexible content — ready for publishing anywhere and everywhere — Logan Park realised their new wealth of constantly updated content created in Hail could go even further. A website redesign and redevelopment using Hail’s Content API allowed them to automatically pull their latest and greatest content from Hail directly onto their site.

"Inspired by the engaging and adaptable nature of the publications we were producing through Hail we recently launched a brand new responsive website, custom designed and developed for maximum accessibility across all devices. It's government approved open-source Content Management System integrates with Hail’s Content API so that newly published content through Hail is automatically fed in to the school home page, producing a constantly up-to-date and ‘living’ web presence that we couldn’t be more proud of — www.lphs.school.nz"