KYRA BALCH
The Blaze Co-Editor In Chief 25-26
JEA Wisconsin Journalist of the Year 2026
Marketing and Audience Engagement
Marketing
Cost
At the beginning of the school year, the yearbook is sold at $70, with the price slowly increasing as time goes on. The yearbook created prior to this year, volume 27, had four different covers. With that, came extra costs for manufacturing, forcing The Blaze to spend more. With Hawk Talk Productions gaining a studio setup, more money was taken out of our budget. Finally, the selling of this yearbook, volume 28, came around. With all the money spent and books selling at the cheap price of $70, The Blaze was loosing money. In order to make as much of a profit as we could, my adviser, co-editor in chief and I decided to wait to promote the yearbook until it was at a price of $85 per book, and we heavely promoted our SmugMug.
ITTV
Throughout the school year, we ask our school's daily announcements to make segments about the yearbook. These announcements air everyday to all students, getting the word to spread across the school. We typically have them feature the yearbook at least once a week, more often around the end of the school year for final sales.
Social Media
We consistently make Instagram (@theblazeithsa) and TikTok (@ithsa_blazeyearbook) posts about how many days are left to preorder books and how many books we have left. With these posts, we also give sneak peaks to the theme and pictures that are in the yearbook. In this case, we used our theme in the wording and a picture that is on one of our theme pages.
Everyone on yearbook staff is commited to getting the word out and make sure people buy their yearbook. With that being said, a majority of us repost The Blaze instagrams posts on our stories, so the message gets out to all of our personal followers. This helps the word spread to more people and also helps gain followers for The Blaze. We also do this on TikTok by reposting the TikToks made on our yearbook page.
Posters
As the seasons and holidays change, we make sure posters are fitting the theme to draw the attention of students. On the left is the poster I made for Valentine's season this year. On the right is a poster I made for the winter season. I use Canva to make the posters.
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Audience Engagement
TikTok
Connecting with our audience is hugely important. We take inspiration from trends and other organizations when making some of our videos. For example, it has been a trend in sports to ask players a random question as they are walking into practice. We copied this idea during our summer bootcamp with our staff. Doing this helps keep the students engaged, curious about the yearbook and get to know the staff a little bit better.
We love getting our classmates and teachers involved as much as we can. An example of this is when we made a sign and had a ton of students pose with it. This not only got a ton of students involved, but it also helped advertise the yearbook. Furthermore, more people followed our accounts because they were excited to see themselves. This made it easier to promote the yearbook and sell the books.
The Blaze Website
Every Wednesday, I help my adviser come up with a new poll to post on our website. We make sure they are relevant and relatable topics that students like to talk about. I post about these new polls on our instagram story to promote people to go there. These polls help attract people to our website and be a part of our process.
