History

Key personnel at Our Living Yearbook are Roger Lane, Founder and CEO, and Katy Lane, Director of Operations and Customer Support. Contract support has been provided by numerous people, but most thanks go to Rebecca Brooks who is with Liberty Christian School Technology and Support. Rodney Haire, Dedra Brynn, and many other friends and supporters at Liberty have contributed significantly to the development of this concept.

In the early days of Our Living Yearbook, we struggled to find the exact identity that we wanted for the business. What we have developed puts the school first, parents second, and us last.

The OLYB business model is based on digital photography. Digital technology enables photographs to be taken almost anywhere, by almost anyone. Because of this, photo hosting sites like Shutterfly, Picasa, Flickr, Snapfish and many more have sprung up. The #1 rated photo hosting site is SmugMug. All of these sites are good, especially for individuals to share their photos with friends and families or for professionals who want to showcase their photos to their customers. We considered simply offering marketing support for one of these sites to schools. However, what we found was that schools have a unique need for security across a comprehensive platform.

Because photos taken at school include many children, hosting photos on a site that allows random people to view the children is unacceptable. Therefore, we developed a proprietary aspx database that serves as a "gate" that restricts and allows access based on the approval of the school. Our software functions like a "log-in" that you might use when you use on-line banking. Each user has a unique user id and password. Some photo hosting sites such as Shutterfly, allow specific photo galleries to be password protected, but our business is designing AND managing security for an entire school. We use Smugmug as our on-line image hosting site, and we use our own software to control who can gain access to the images. Our member schools simply provide us with the names of the parents, faculty, staff, and any others who are permitted access to their school photos. Our operations team creates software links between our dB and Smugmug so that uploading can be done in an easy, organized, and secure manner.

In addition to our primary goal of helping schools fundraise in a new, fun, and meaningful way, the secondary benefit of having OLYB in a school is that it supports the families. First it supports parents who would like to be at school events but cannot because of work, schedule conflict, military obligation, physical separation, or other reason. If parents cannot attend school functions, other parents can take and post photos on the school website. This uploads must be coordinated through OLYB operations so that the images stay organized for easy location by visitors.

The second support to families is that it lets parents get involved with their children's class and activities more fully. For example, parents can be the class "official" photographer on field trips, during class programs, etc. For upper grades, parents can be sports photographers on the field, in the locker room, on the court, at pep rallies, etc. Our Living Yearbook is the "best excuse ever" for parents being highly involved in school activities.

The goal of Our Living Yearbook is to help schools fundraise while making parents thankful for the decision of the school to provide this program. Our compensation is kept to an absolute minimum to give the school the most profit possible. We have seen many situations where individuals try to provide an on-line site for their school activities, and none of them has lasted. They are limited in scope, difficult to manage on a full time basis, and unprofitable. Unless a parent is donating full time work to the school, we believe it is impossible to provide the services we provide for as little as $0.25 per student per month. Our business success comes from providing our dB and support services to numerous schools, thereby creating a WIN-win. We want our schools to WIN big, and for us to win enough to remain the leader in providing on-line yearbook services.