Katie’s Declassified HHAD Survival Guide

By Katie Bradley, Project Assistant, Seattle University’s Project on Family Homelessness

For my Housing and Homelessness Advocacy Day (HHAD) reflection, I decided to create a flipbook describing my experience and what I learned throughout the day. An online flipbook is a new version of the traditional flipbook — a series of pictures that appear to be animated when you flip through them quickly. I felt like HHAD was a lively growth experience for me, and wanted my reflection to be equally dynamic, both visually and physically.

I also wanted to provide insight into what HHAD was like for me and share what future HHAD attendees can expect throughout the day.

The “Declassified HHAD Survival Guide” flipbook showcases my experience, while providing recommendations for the process of preparing for, attending, and reflecting on Housing and Homelessness Advocacy Day.

New technology, new challenges, my recommendations

In the process of creating this flipbook, I ran into more challenges than I thought I would. It was difficult to find and choose a platform to make the PDF flipbook responsive, so that the pages would flip as the viewer turns a page. Additionally, embedding the flipbook proved to be a complicated and overwhelming process – especially as someone who is not familiar with HTML coding.

Based on what I learned throughout the process of creating this guide, I have some recommendations for anyone wanting to create their own online flipbook:

• Make a PDF file of the content and information you want to share. To create my flipbook PDF file, I used the free site Canva.
• Find a platform to make the PDF responsive. I originally planned to use FlippingBook and the company’s free trial, but the free trial only saves the flipbook for the trial period and there is an annual fee of $44/month. I ended up using a company called Flowpaper and downloaded their software onto my laptop, which allowed me to upload my PDF file and create an online link to share the flipbook.
• Consider if you want to embed the flipbook on your site. Be sure to look into how embedding works and understand the process for your specific website. This was where I had the most difficulty. Because we were trying to upload this to a WordPress blog, I could not embed the Flowpaper flipbook without installing a plugin, which requires a premium WordPress account. I wish I would have researched the embedding process more in-depth before I fully committed to the platform I used for my flipbook.

Here are the two tools I used to create my HHAD Declassified Survival Guide flipbook:

• Canva to make the flipbook. I used the magazine format for my PDF.
• Flowpaper to make the flipbook responsive, so that viewers could flip the page.

Check out my flipbook here!  And good luck if you decide to try making one!

For more about HHAD 2018, you can also read Tess’ reflection about our day and how we delivered 545 advocacy postcards to lawmakers: Overcoming Impostor Syndrome at Housing and Homelessness Advocacy Day.