The Chanticleer must evolve

The Duke undergraduate would not be remiss for believing that there is no much such thing as a Duke University yearbook. But they would be wrong. The Chanticleer, which began publication in 1912, is one of Duke’s oldest and, it turns out, most expensive student organizations.

An article in the March issue of Towerview called attention to The Chanticleer’s bulky budget. The Chanticleer controlled $86,000 in 2010-2011, nearly half the budget of The Undergraduate Publications Board. That money purchases 4,000 yearbooks, which are given away for free to any student that wants one.

But the supply of Chanticleers often outruns student demand. The Chanticleer’s editor-in-chief Felicia Arriaga has said, “most people don’t know we have a yearbook.” The 2,500 yearbooks from 2009-2010 that sit in UPB office testify to this fact. This begs the question: are expensive yearbooks relevant in an age where we store many of our memories online?

The Chanticleer has value, even in the age of digital media and social networking. But to justify its budget, The Chanticleer must overhaul how it reaches out to students.

Yearbooks might seem like living anachronisms when we can use Facebook to summon half a decade’s memories with relative ease. But yearbooks still have a place. Print media captures something about the past that digital media seems to miss. And, where social networking sites sometimes have limited life spans (remember Friendster?), a yearbook lasts forever.

But if The Chanticleer aims to fight for relevance in the digital age, it must keep costs down while building student investment in the yearbook.

Indeed, $86,000 of SOFC funding is too much to spend on yearbooks when hundreds of them go unread. The Chanticleer could lower costs by coordinating yearbook supply with student demand. Ironically, the digital age could make this easier than ever. The organization could send out a blast email to rising seniors—the primary consumers of yearbooks—asking them to pre-register for a yearbook. A nominal registration fee might even be in order—students would more reliably pick up a yearbook if they had to pay for it. The Chanticleer could order a yearbook for every registrant, or thereabouts, and distribute them at the end of the following year.

But the Chanticleer faces another challenge: getting students excited about the yearbook. Handing out free yearbooks in the Bryan Center does little to build student awareness and investment. And, at a University with about 6,500 undergraduates, some students may not have reason to own a yearbook that covers few of their unique experiences. To remedy this, the Chanticleer must devise clever strategies for creating student interest.