Hail — Create. Curate. Communicate.

by Tom Barnett

Don't build your house on rented land — by Pixabay

Social media platforms are amazing distribution channels that can drive serious engagement for your content, but when are you giving them too much?

View on Hail

Owned Properties vs Rented Land

The fine folks over at the Content Marketing Institute always advocate for owning your digital content…

Robert and I discuss two recent developments that clearly illustrate why you should not build your content house on rented land: LinkedIn has placed limits on your ability to download contact information about your connections, and Google Plus as a social network is no more. — Joe Pulizzi, This Old Marketing Podcast, Ep. 89

I’m often surprised by how many groups I see uploading all their photos and news items directly to Facebook. What’s more, that content often isn’t published anywhere else, not even on their own website or blogs, so they’re effectively giving the social network all their precious history.

Hail was born out of the idea that organisations need to own their content space on the web. That’s why we give you the ability to completely brand it with your name and logo and continue to ship features like the Homepage and custom domain support. Plus our API means that Hail customers can take their content anywhere they choose.

Owning your content doesn’t mean you can’t have your cake and eat it too, which is why we’ve built in omni-channel publishing also.

Omni-What?

Omni-channel publishing is when your content management system (CMS) can push content out to all your channels such as: email, website, blogs and social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Hail customers will be very familiar with this concept and our 'create once, publish everywhere' mantra.

Channels Come and Channels Go

If there's anything we've learnt about the web it's that what's hip today can quickly be surpassed by what's coming tomorrow. The likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn might feel like cornerstones of the internet, but we would've said the same about MySpace, Friendster, and Digg not so long ago — remember those?

So the best strategy is to publish your content out there so that your community has plenty of choice with how and when they engage with it, but don't focus on the platforms. At the end of the day, they get to call the shots, and they may not be around forever. Plus the ones that do stick around often have a nasty habit of changing the rules on us. So as long as your CMS is omni-channel ready now, and clever enough to roll with the punches as new publishing platforms come and go, you'll be able to rest easy in your future-proofed house and focus on what you do best — storytelling.

by Tom Barnett

Attachment to attachments — by Wiertz Sebastien

We've just added another often requested feature to Hail; the ability to attach various standard file types to your content.

The Hail team are serious about encouraging schools and businesses to adopt the the power and flexibility of web technologies. We built Hail with the adaptive web in mind in order to empower organisations to produce future-proofed content and to 'Create once, publish everywhere'.

We've written extensively about the problems with locking your content into PDFs and why responsive formats, that look and work great on all devices, are the answer to fully engaging your audience. However, we recognise there are times when you need to add extras to a piece of content that aren't imagery or text-based. What if your article requires the addition of a large Table of Products or a Permission Slip for the school camp, neither of which can be added in the body section because they won't respond well for users on mobile devices.

To address this we've added the ability to upload and attach documents to articles, which will be displayed at the bottom of your text and above any photo galleries on all published outputs. The following files types are accepted: Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDFs and MP3s.

So now you can add documents, spreadsheets, presentations and even podcasts and music to your beautiful newsletters and digital magazines. We can't wait to see your rich-media publications become even richer and more useful.

Need help with this new feature or anything else? Get in touch with our friendly team today!

by Stuart Dillon-Roberts

Student content creators — by Mark Anderson

Storytelling predates writing. Stories have been carved, etched, scratched and painted for millions of years and today a story can be created in digital form and shared for all to read.

Hail is many things, but one amazing feature is its ability to allow students to write purposefully for an audience. The platform for them to share their stories.

Many schools provide students with access to Hail and encourage students to write stories to capture their time at school, their experiences and the fun times. They write about their activities, they share their poetry and creative writing pursuits.

Hail provides governance

The advantage with Hail is that students can be set up as contributors and Teachers as curators. What this does is enable students to submit their pieces to the curator/teacher (a curator may also be a library manager/prefect/sports captain), who will then review the article, making suggestions and providing quality feedback.

Once the curator is happy with the standard of the writing and its content they will click to publish it within a publication. The student's piece may be tagged for the fortnightly newsletter publication, it may also be tagged for the term's sport publication and again for the end of year yearbook. Wow, an opportunity for every student in your school to become a published author, writing within an authentic and purposeful context!

by Stuart Dillon-Roberts

Before Hail: late night content curation — by Hail

We’ve all seen it. So many times there are crumpled up paper newsletters in the bottom of school bags that never reach parents or caregivers. We spend hours preparing school newsletters in a PDF format that we hope every parent or caregiver reads.

Producing high quality newsletters is an expensive practice.

One of the school Principals who is using Hail has broken down the costs and the savings from using Hail.

They used to print 300 copies of their fortnightly school newsletter, one per family, in black and white and on average it was 8 pages long, double sided. Each run cost them: 0.025c (printing in b/w and paper costs) x 8 x 300 = $60. $60 x 5 = $300 per term and $1200 per year to print their newsletter.

The Principal commented that this is a low estimate as other newsletters and school publications are produced throughout the year. On occasions colour was used, adding to the expense.

Now, let’s look at the time it takes to prepare a school newsletter.

Our example school spent on average, 6 hours of school secretary time compiling the newsletter and chasing staff for their contributions. There was also Principal and Teacher time taken to create contributions but this has not been included in the calculations. School Secretary time cost the school $3000 per year, based on the hourly rate of $25.00, $150.00 per fortnight, $750 per term and $3000 per year. Total for the school per year (on the conservative side) = $4200

Comparing that with the cost of Hail is simple.

With Hail a Regular plan costs $79.00 per month or $948.00 per year. With Hails templates and shared responsibility to create content it now takes the school less than 30 mins to collate their newsletter per fortnight or $25, $100 per term, $400 per year. Total for the school year when using Hail is $1348. 

That's a saving of nearly $3000 per year that the school has taken from administration costs and added to their teaching and learning budget.

Not to mention the thousands, or often tens of thousands, of dollars saved by using Hail to produce beautiful, self-published digital yearbooks.

by Principal Merrin School

Create once, publish everywhere — by Tom Barnett

It's no longer news to anyone that technology has and continues to transform our lives. It seems that as one great device or piece of software is launched into our worlds, another falls off into the abyss of non-popularity.

But one thing remains constant, our need to create, present and curate content. This is where Hail has proven to be a valuable service in our school.

We all create content; it’s written and stored on our phones, on our laptops, and increasingly in the cloud — blogs, Facebook, twitter, YouTube, the list is endless. The issue from my perspective, both professionally and personally, is that we simply do not have the time to put valuable, high quality content on a number of different platforms.

At school we find it increasingly frustrating to create content over and over again. For example, we create content on our classroom blogs, but then require similar content for our school newsletter, we then want the same content to be part of our leaver’s magazine and again on an individual basis via CD for leavers, all the time spending hours recreating it.

Create once, publish everywhere

At school we have been thinking about this issue for some time. Recently, we have launched ‘Hail’ into our school. This system allows us, via ‘tags’, to manipulate the same content as many times as we wish and publish it to a number of different locations. We now create high quality content once and publish it everywhere. The presentation quality is high-end and the time it saves us makes it well worth the investment.

We now have students, student council members, teachers and staff all creating content on Hail. It is stored in the cloud and clearly referenced through tags. It takes us a fraction of the time to find articles, pictures and collate publications.

Hail has completely transformed how we create and find content in our school.

by Tom Barnett

Multi-device content creation and consumption — by Duncan Hills

With Hail you'll create content experiences that your audience will love — with no design or web expertise required.

Truly modern content formats

By creating PDF newsletters schools are firmly stuck between the old days of print and the digital revolution. The problem is that PDFs are neither here nor there:

they're formatted like physical newsletters, but can't be easily held and read like an actual printed page;

they are uploaded online, but aren't formatted for the web, so aren't readable like the best webpages with graphics and type that resizes for the device you're using.

It's time schools stopped wrapping their best stories and student successes in content formats that are fiddly and difficult to read on desktop computers and practically unusable on mobile devices.

"Please, allow me to make one thing clear before I go on: Nobody is reading your PDF." — Karen McGrane

Your unique content and student successes deserve to be served up for your audience of parents and caregivers in truly engaging and unforgettable content experiences, not barely tolerable, fiddly PDF formats.

Hail's unique structure produces content experiences your community will love, share and return to again and again — all without you having to do any design or laying-out of text and photography. You get to concentrate on the most important part — telling your school's stories and celebrating success. Hail takes care of the rest; wrapping up your articles and photos in beautiful digital formats, perfectly formatted for all channels and devices.

Plus, because your content is no longer restricted by the physical limitations of word processor software and the PDF format, you don't have to worry about page size or the amount of imagery. With Hail you're free to create stories as long as needed, with as many full-resolution photos as you like, producing a depth of content that your community can really sink their teeth into.

Don't just take our word for it

There's been an overwhelming positive response to our trial schools' transition from PDF newsletters to brilliant storytelling with Hail. Explore the rest of this magazine for staff and community feedback from Merrin and Gore Main schools as well as an in-depth case study from Logan Park High School.

Create once, publish everywhere

The smartphone revolution had given us audiences that want control over when and how they consume your content. If all your school's content only gets published to your website or as mobile-unfriendly PDFs you're going to miss out on a lot of eyeballs. The solution is to create and collaborate on all your content in one central software package and then publish to everywhere you're sure to reach your audience, such as email, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

As a busy mum I love being able to catch up on all the latest school news on my phone while waiting outside the school for pickup. — Melissa, Logan Park High School parent

With Hail, multi-channel publishing couldn't be easier, click one button and your content is shared immediately across the web and email:

no more copying and pasting or uploading to each site and social media channel separately;

no more dealing with all the different interfaces, templates and formatting requirements.

Another key feature to ensure you reach and fully engage your audience is that all of Hail's outputs, are fully responsive. This means that whether you publish your content as email campaigns, standalone stories or the various publication styles (digital newsletters, magazines and yearbooks) they will all adapt and be fully usable on any current device, such as desktop computers, laptops, iPads and smartphones. Hail's future-proof content structure means that you'll also be ready for the next wave of web-capable devices, such as smartwatches, tvs, fridges and car dashes.

See for yourself

Check out the following examples from our trial schools and see for yourself how deep and engaging your school's communications can be:

Logan Park High School's 2014 Magazine — an example of Hail's Yearbook publication type. With its rich, tag-based structure, the Yearbook can handle hundreds of articles in an easily navigable and searchable publication. It's unlimitedly deep without blowing the budget, and it's infinitely sharable to anyone on any device. It's about as far away from the dusty, old, printed yearbook as you can get.

Logan Park High School's Park Press May 2014 — an example of Hail's Magazine publication type. With a focus on large, engaging photography, the Magazine is ideal for creating an impression with brochure-like communications.

Merrin Primary School's October Newsletter — an example of Hail's Newsletter publication type. Ideal for weekly, monthly and other short-term periodicals, the Newsletter is perfect for scannable content with prominent notices.

by Regan McEntyre

Hail adds OAuth 2 — by Chris Christian

Today we are introducing OAuth 2 support for the Hail API, paving the way for third-party developers to build great applications on our platform.

If you've ever linked your Twitter account to another service, or used Facebook to log in to a website (like Hail), you've probably used OAuth. It's a way for applications to gain secure, delegated access to your account, as well as verify who you are.

The motivation for supporting OAuth 2 is simple really. The value of Hail is that your content is future-proofed and able to be reused and 'go anywhere'. To achieve that goal, we need to make it easy for developers to build great applications that leverage our platform. OAuth 2 does exactly that, by allowing developers to request secure, delegated access to any Hail user's account and organisations.

Users can now see a concise list of exactly which applications have current sessions for their account, and revoke their access if they wish. Users now also have more control over what resources they allow applications to access. For applications that are only interested in viewing content in your organisations but not editing or deleting, can request just access to read your content.

If you're a developer and raring to go, check out our documentation over in the Developer Centre and then create your first app.

We can't wait to see what great applications our developers build.

by Tom Barnett

Turn your yearbook into a yeah!-book

With it's rich, tag-based structure, the Hail Yearbook can handle hundreds of articles in a vibrant, easily-browsed and searchable publication.

One of the biggest advantages of digital publishing is being able to provide a wealth of deep content to our audiences without having to worry about blowing the print budget and cramming content into predefined page sizes. Over a year of producing fortnightly or monthly newsletters, digital info packs and magazines, a school or organisation can easily end up with hundreds of content pieces containing potentially thousands of rich, full-screen, colour photography.

With Hail, all that content can very quickly and easily be curated into a full overview of the year. That’s what made the Hail Yearbook such a unique challenge — how do we provide an engaging, visually attractive publication, while maintaining a simple and highly usable interface to all that content? Once again Tags, with their ability to organise content in the Hail backend as well as the publications, were the obvious path.

The tricky part was bringing the content to the forefront in such a way that a reader landing on the Yearbook's cover would gain immediate insight into the depth of material available. Attracted to key areas and based on their individual interests, they could begin their own pathway through the publication.

Plus, as with everything you publish with Hail, it had to work across every device type and size our audiences are using — that's the sort of challenge that gets the Hail team really cooing.

Bigger, brighter, smarter

With Hail you get to concentrate all your efforts on creating great, well-formatted and organised content. With our publications there’s no need to worry about design templates or resizing imagery, just select your articles and publication style, give it a title and Hail does the rest — with no design expertise required. We’re sure you’ll be impressed by your very own beautiful, responsive publications.

Now, with the Hail Yearbook style we've taken it one step further to make it out smartest publication type yet:

The Yearbook analyses all your featured photography, extracting it’s background and highlight colours for branding the cover, tag and article views — automagically creating a bright, colourful design to provide a unique, customised reading experience that’ll be sure to be shared far and wide.

With so much material in one publication we wanted to ensure your most important and best presented content wasn't lost. That’s why we designed the cover blocks with various sizes and shapes; the larger ones reserved for tags with the most content and articles with the highest rating. These visual cues are automatically generated by the Yearbook, which is the first Hail publication to make use of the backend rating system. We’re sure you’ll find it to be another simple, but powerful curation tool.

We recognise that while most readers love to explore and create their own unique content pathways, others prefer a more structured reading experience and appreciate the ability to read from ‘cover-to-cover’. That’s why we’ve also included the more traditional article and tag indexes, as well as a the ability to search across all articles; returning results for specific subjects, people and authors.

by Tom Barnett

Community love — by Johan Larsson

An overwhelmingly positive response to another school's transition from PDF newsletters to brilliant storytelling with Hail.

When designing and building Hail we had two main goals:

to make the workflow of content creators simpler, faster and more collaborative;

and to create content experiences that audiences will love.

We've had plenty of great feedback from our early adopter content creators, and with every new organisation that comes onboard we're as thrilled by their community's feedback as they are.

Gore Main, one of the latest primary schools to jump on with Hail, has just curated and published their first newsletter. With one click they pushed it out to their subscribers on Facebook and as a beautifully formatted, mobile-friendly email newsletter. The immediate, unsolicited influx of likes and social media comments and shares from their community says it all:

Like the new format!

Loving the new software! Very user friendly!!

This format is great...think I will be better at this than checking emails. Great idea Gore Main.

... love this newsletter

We're very proud of what they've managed to achieve with Hail in the two short weeks that they've been onboard. If you'd like to delight your audience with beautiful, usable content get in touch with our friendly team today.

by Tom Barnett

One click publishing to blogs

Hail now integrates with the big three platforms of the blogging world — Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress. 

When it comes to creating and collaborating on content Hail provides the cleanest most streamlined interface around. It's unique, responsive publications are another key feature, but possibly the most compelling component is the future-proofed formatting, ensuring that not only will your content live on and outlast the platforms it was originally written for, but it can also be published to third-party channels like Facebook, Twitter and as email campaigns with MailChimp.

So, as part of our continuing commitment to make sure your content is wherever your audience goes, in addition to social channels we've now added one click publishing from Hail to the three biggest platforms of the blogging world — Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress*. Those three are trending stronger than ever, with Wordpress alone accounting for more than 60 million websites.

WordPress was used by more than 23.2% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. — Wikipedia

If you're a content creator chances are you publish to one of these blogging platforms, and now you can do so with all the ease the Hail workflow affords. Simply connect to the service once and authorise Hail to post on your behalf. Once authorised you can push all your perfectly formatted Hail content, including hero imagery, photo galleries and associated tags directly to your blogging platform with one simple click.

Sign in today and check out the new services added to the Connections tab, or get in touch for more info.

by Tom Barnett

Yearbook sneak peek — by Tom Barnett

It's unlimitedly deep without blowing the budget, and it's infinitely sharable to anyone on any device. It's about as far away from the dusty, old, printed yearbook as you can get.

This month, just in time for the end of school year in the Southern Hemisphere, we're releasing a major new publication type: The Hail Yearbook.

Save time, money and the environment with digital publishing

Like the Hail Magazine and Newsletter the Yearbook is a next generation, fully responsive, digital publication that will save your school an incredible amount of time and money compared to the traditional printed yearbook.

Because it's digital and in the cloud your Hail Yearbook can be continually produced and updated with the latest news and results right up to the day of publication—no more print deadlines to worry about! Plus fixing typos and any amendments or additions can be made any time after it's published, with every copy being updated on-the-fly.

Worldwide storytelling

The Hail Yearbook's digital nature means your Yearbook will reach further than ever before. Got friends or family in another city or country? Just share the link and they'll be able to enjoy it on any device, from large desktop computers to mobile devices such as tablets and phones.

Because all your content in Hail is carefully formatted for future reuse, the Yearbook will also adapt to new channels and devices to ensure it's always a beautiful, engaging reading experience that your audience will love.

Not only for schools

The Hail Yearbook is designed for any organisation or business that wants to publish well organised collections of deep content. It's perfect for annual reports, large resource packs and rich indexes, such as digital recipe books. The tag-based structure means it can handle hundreds of articles and thousands of photos with ease.

You no longer have to edit your storytelling to physical print limitations. Now you can publish the complete picture and empower your readers. With unlimited articles and photo galleries your audience gets to decide what topics they're most interested in reading and sharing.

by Tom Barnett

Mobile killed the print star — by Tom Barnett

Did you know that worldwide over 50% of emails are now opened on mobile devices? It's a simple little data point that has far reaching implications for your email newsletters.

If every second email you send is being opened on a smartphone or tablet then you better make sure that your email campaigns are all highly readable and actionable on any device.

The revolution will be mobilised

50% is the current figure, but just think how quickly, over the last 5 or 6 years for most people, that mobile devices have become a part of our everyday routine. It's clear that the mobile revolution is only just getting started — where will the figure be a couple of years from now? 60%, 75%, or will we practically be spending all our screentime working and relaxing with next generation mobile devices?

Whatever may come, the future is already here and the casualties are already clear — the PDF was a questionable format on the desktop, but it's practically inexcusable on mobile.

All the baggage of print — none of the mobility

Online PDFs are the perfect example of form-over-function. The PDF was designed to be a digital 'page', a format for distributing content across the web and email, for printing out and reading. This made traditional print designers struggling with the web and the digital revolution very happy, because they could simply design content like they always had, with custom typefaces and graphics, all very carefully chosen to output a specific layout at a specific page size and shape.

Unfortunately people didn't always want to print out the PDFs, so we ended up struggling with digital copies that had all the constraints and inflexibility as the printed version, but without the one advantage — that you could hold it in your hand and read the printed page how and where you pleased. The PDF didn't allow such manipulation, it forced you to try and zoom it to a comfortable reading magnification and then navigate the 'pages' with clunky, fiddly interfaces. It didn't automatically adapt to your devices size or screen resolution.

"Please, allow me to make one thing clear before I go on: Nobody is reading your PDF." — Karen McGrane

A PDF is frustrating enough on a desktop computer, but the reading experience is so bad on mobile that people simply are not bothering to even try. We've all been there, squinting in to a 4 inch screen, trying to read and navigate a school newsletter, white paper or restaurant menu that was designed to be printed at magazine size. If your readers are having to pinch and scan, like short-sighted grandparents with the phonebook, then you've already lost them.

Some might argue that a person who receives a PDF by email on their phone will wait until they're back on their desktop to read or print it out for later, but if we're honest with ourselves that email will take its place with hundreds more in the inbox that 'we're going to get back to one day'. In content marketing you need to strike while the iron is hot, and in email campaigns that's when the email is first opened — if your content isn't readable and easily sharable at that moment then you're practically throwing away half of your precious email database.

"Over 71% of subscribers delete emails that don’t look good on their phones, resulting in significant lost revenue potential for email marketers." — BlueHornet

Luckily there is a better way, and although Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a relatively new term, HTML and the web itself has always been capable of flexible content layouts, it's only just over the last few years that we've seen an explosion of mobile devices that have demanded we use the technology as it was always meant to be; to distribute and display flexible, adaptive content, with typefaces and images that scale to provide the best reading experience on all manner of screens and devices.

by Tom Barnett

Merrin School Newsletter — by Tom Barnett

Merrin School recently started creating, collaborating and communicating via Hail and are excited by the positive feedback from their community.

Up until recently Merrin, like most schools, had been producing fortnightly PDF Newsletters. They were time consuming, fiddly to design and difficult to collaborate on. Plus the finished product was only really readable on desktop computers and didn't cater for the majority of their audience who checked their email on mobile devices. These PDFs were not able to be effectively shared by email or social media and all their school content was locked up in an inflexible format, resulting in a very poor return on investment.

A month ago Merrin made the transition to Hail and are now enjoying the benefits of creating, collaborating and sharing all their content within the cloud. Much to their delight the change was met by huge enthusiasm from their community of students, parents and caregivers, who are now able to discover the content across multiple channels and enjoy the stories on any device. Here's some of the feedback they received:

"Love (and so did Miss 7!) the new layout"

"Great, easy to use!"

"Enjoyed reading the new format"

They are now producing and publishing all their future newsletters with Hail and are excited by effortlessly curating their content into digital magazines and yearbooks. Check out their latest newsletter here. 

by Tom Barnett

Kristan and Arnika from Logan Park High School — by Mark Anderson

As an early adopter of Hail’s digital publishing, Logan Park have seen engagement from families, students and the community skyrocket — all while saving time, money and the environment.

by Tom Barnett

Content creation and collaboration on the go — by Tom Barnett

When it comes to content marketing, imagery is key and a great hero shot or drawing can be the difference between clicks or skips.

by Tom Barnett

Georgina and Kate from Firebrand — by Katy Miller

As one of the first web, design and marketing agencies to use Hail, Firebrand are excited to be at the forefront of a new way of creating, curating and publishing content.