An increasing number of schools are using new communication technologies in school marketing to attract and retain families and enhance community relations with their former students and other community members. This article explores the communication revolution taking place in school marketing and gives examples of schools that are pushing the marketing frontiers using digital technology.
Adam Triode is a 34-year-old father who is in the market for schools for his two sons. Adam has grown up with the internet and he thinks and communicates in contemporary ways. He does not read newspapers or watch TV. Because he is time-poor he avoids Open Days and School Tours but he says he likes Education Expos where he can examine many schools in one location. He looks at his Facebook accounts each morning before he looks at his emails. He stays connected to his former school and former classmates via social networking.
Adam is typical of the time poor modern parent. Schools that want to engage with such parents cannot take the old methods of marketing and apply them in a contemporary setting. A radical shift is needed. Modern communication tools can help schools talk to this demographic. This includes the e-prospectus, online newsletters, videos, websites, blogs and social media.
Schools in the reception to Year 12 marketplace have a captive audience. With few exceptions, all children enter the school system and work their way through. As school marketers, unlike our counterparts in retail, we don’t have to convince our clients to buy education over a competing product. But we do have to convince them to buy our package or brand over another school’s offerings and we have to continually assure them that they made the right choice when they selected our school to educate their children.
Private, Catholic and government schools spend thousands of dollars doing this. They conscientiously package and brand their distinctive services for both local and overseas markets, because a discerning public wants good quality, easily accessible information to help them make complex decisions.
Being distinctive in a crowded school marketplace
Operating in a market environment has prompted schools to develop distinctive features and package and brand themselves in response to the prevailing market forces. For example, a drop in national boarding school enrolments has prompted boarding schools to re-engineer their product by offering casual boarding and weekly boarding. Some call it boutique boarding. As a consequence of biting headlines about sexual abuse and bullying, boarding schools have also become more responsive to customer concerns, hence the development of training program for staff working in residential care. Boarding schools are becoming more open and accountable and using online communication to enhance school /parent relations.
Long established schools in ageing residential areas face enrolment fallout as kids grow up and move out. The recent demise of historic Annesley College in Adelaide in 2010 after over 100 years, and the closure of many city schools is testament to this demographic change. As the local market dries up, many inner city schools are importing students from overseas and turning to untapped niche market segments, such as indigenous students and refugee families. This requires a different sort of outreach.
Newly established schools in population growth areas respond to a different set of market forces. They vie for credibility delivered by bright students who help build their academic reputation. They project vitality and zest via youthful images, dazzling colours, sparkling prospectuses and modern interactive websites using blogs, and other interactive media.
Not surprisingly, schools in a competitive marketplace look for niche and emerging markets to expand their student population. Distinctive offerings include innovative programs for gifted and talented students, scholarships, bursaries and fee reductions for a private education, special programs for sporting stars (Westfields Sports High School) and excellent opportunities for music maestros (Conservatorium High School).
Religion places many schools in a clearly defined market position and these schools capitalise on a values-rich ethos.
Single sex schools draw clear-cut pictures about their unique benefits. Promotional material of other schools may concentrate on leadership. At The King’s School in Sydney, headmaster Dr Tim Hawkes has written a book on boys’ education and toured the state presenting public lectures on ways to motivate boys’ learning. Girls’ schools are equally aggressive in the marketplace with slogans such as “All She Can Be’ (The Glennie School, Queensland). Others convincingly sell the advantages of co-education, such as a global perspective promoted by Sandringham College in Victoria.
For a long time, technology has set some schools apart. MLC School for Girls in Melbourne is a market leader in this field and has built a competitive advantage by promoting computer-assisted learning. The school’s powerful marketing attracts parents keen to secure a technological future for their daughters.
An emerging target for the market conscious school is the early adolescent sector. Trinity Lutheran College in Ashmore Queensland appointed a Head of Middle School with a qualification in school marketing. Another emerging target market is early childhood education. Prince Alfred College in Adelaide and Caulfield Girls Grammar School in Victoria boasts state-of-the-art, award-winning facilities in their early learning centres.
Selective high schools such as James Ruse High in NSW, offer benefits for students intent on academic achievement. Every year their HSC results are their strongest selling point. (but over 95% Asian)
Vocational colleges such as St Patrick’s Technical College in Adelaide are gaining ground in a competitive marketplace by offering career pathways.
Other schools differentiate themselves by promoting language studies or specialisation in the performing arts. A well-promoted reputation for environmental studies is a strong selling point for The Hills Grammar School at Dural in NSW.
A Jazz Academy at the enterprising Tenison Woods College in South attracts regional and international students to the specialist Year 13 high-profile course. www.tenison.adl.catholic.edu.au
No matter the specialisation a school may offer, or its geographic location, it needs to get the message out far and wide to attract enrolments.
Technology delivers school marketing message
Time-poor people want easy access to quality information. They want it fast and simple and preferably as visual language. They also like interactive communication where they can have their say. Market oriented school are using the following digital methods to satisfy these needs:
Good School Websites
An interactive website has the potential to engage readers and drive them deeper into a school. Below are examples from the School Marketing Awards that show how innovative schools are applying modern communication techniques.
Each year the Centre for Marketing Schools run the international School Marketing Awards to recognise excellence in promotional productions. The Gold Award at the 2010 School Marketing Awards went to Newington College in Sydney. The judges described the website as ‘sophisticated with good functionality and design’.
Take a look at
www.newingtoncollege.nsw.edu.au
Judges were impressed with the biography blocks that highlight members of staff, the video blocks (YouTube) and the map blocks that use google maps to embed locations (such as sports fixtures). They liked the easy downloads for a range of enrolment forms. They also pointed to the event calendar that is accessible from the home page and each campus page. They appreciated the high level of search engine capability.
As a marketing document they appreciated that the home page identified the school by answering three essential marketing questions: Who? What? Where? Contact details were on every page in the footer.
In 2009, a winning website was Covenant Christian School in NSW. This website continues to evolve with outstanding content and interactivity. Instead of creating one website the school decided to create three linked sites. Each is designed for a distinct audience. The main site
www.covenant.nsw.edu.au is for prospective parents, the second and most popular is a blogsite for the current community, and the third for former students and staff. Although the school only has 800 students the website averages over 3,000 visits each week. With over 2000 pages and a clever use of keywords, the site performs very well with search engines.
A School Tour on DVD has been an effective tool for helping existing families share the school with others. Offering the free DVD and school tours are a major focus of the website. Being willing to try new things has helped the school grow more in three years than in the previous ten.
The school’s YouTube channel
www.youtube.com/covenantschool has over 100 videos. This combined with facebook and twitter allows families to have a greater insight into the life of the school. Marketing Manager, Neil Pierson says, “I keep discovering new things with the world of connecting people. While Covenant have embraced a lot of new ideas there is so much more we could do!!”
School Promotional Videos
Some people will wade through pages of text but these people are getting thin on the ground...there is no better way to communicate the uniqueness of your school and convey what business you are actually in than video. It can bring your school to life.
Some will say, “hang on... we’re stretched enough already, how do we do all of this?”
Well, you have within your students a resource already expert in many new media trends and processes as the following examples demonstrate.
Tamani Anderson Powell is the Director of Marketing for the Magnet Schools in Wake County, North Carolina, USA. She uses videos to promote her cluster of public schools. Students Mary and Dolphus made one of these videos. It’s original and creative, possibly a little long, but worth a look
www.wcpss.net
Another comes from Beechwood School in the UK where students have used video clips to add a fresh look to their website
www.beechwood.org.uk
It seems that expensive clichéd videos are passé. Authenticity is the new language of the marketplace and that’s why student-made, natural productions (with all their technical imperfections ... not slick productions, but fun-filled, home-made efforts) are holding our attention.
The NSW Department of Education and Training has launched a major project encouraging schools to work with students to produce digital promotional material for use on the school’s website. The project is called the Great Schools ‘Show-off’. Ros Bastian, Senior Promotions Officer, says, “We want everyone to find out more about our great public schools. Through this new and exciting schools promotion project, schools are being encouraged to tell their school story, to let everyone know of the outstanding work being done in NSW public schools. Students are producing amazing videos, vodcasts, web pages and a variety of other technology based materials. Working under the guidance of a teacher, students will be encouraged to use these skills to create a short promotional film, video, animation or other digital or photographic material to use on their school website, and elsewhere, to promote their school’s successes and achievements to their local community.”
School Video Testimonials
Another effective marketing device is testimonial interviews. A contemporary presentation using video interviews on
‘Why choose a Christian school’ uses interviews with parents and teachers in a powerful way
‘Why Christian Schools’ was created by Neil Pierson to help address questions parents ask about Christian Schools. Neil says . . .
“When I meet marketers from other schools I realise that parents are asking the same questions everywhere, yet no-one seems to be using video to answer these common questions. I hope this will be a helpful tool for schools to start discussions with parents.”
Videography and the interview style are also being used as a tool for recording the history of a school. Covenant Christian School is 32-years-old and the school has just released edited footage on YouTube of old interviews with the school’s pioneers. Neil Pierson says, “Our aim is to communicate the school’s vision to a new generation”. Take a look at this moving footage at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYgjEvMD6i8)
While making your own video is lots of fun, there are some things you need to be aware of when making natural/authentic videos on YouTube. Here are a few . . .
- It is illegal to use copyright music.
- Be careful about letting comments go up automatically rather than selecting "comments allowed with approval".
- The school can lose control over a video if it is posted on another person’s channel (eg a former student’s channel).
- Make sure you have permission from the people who appear in the video.
Social media creates interactive culture in schools
Today, school communications are going interactive driven by product innovation and society’s growing digital literacy. You may ask “is it the school’s place to be hosting social media conversations for parents? You bet. In a world where it is difficult to get busy parents engaged with our schools, the new way of building community is online.
One of the most surprising developments is that people don’t visit websites in the numbers they once did. This seems incongruous considering that we are more web savvy, connected and being subjected to more content than ever before. The big change is that websites are no longer the font of all knowledge. Content is being pushed out, replaced by social media, which is creating and absorbing much of our time online.
What does all this mean to schools? It means that if your communication and marketing strategy is confined to the cyclical newsletter and institutional website, you’re falling behind.
Schools are marketing to a new parent body. Websites aren’t enough any more. You have to stay ahead with technology. This includes Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and Blogs, websites optimised for mobile phones, RSS Feeds delivering up to date news, and Forums. Businesses are delivering these to computers, smart phones and now iPads because they realise that to get their message heard they need to deliver it in a medium that customers want... not the way they want.
Marketing in the digital age is not just about pushing out messages that people will “buy”... it’s also about opening up your community to the outside world and letting others get involved.
Social media is giving schools the opportunity to develop a sharing and collaborative culture – 86% of Australians online are looking to fellow internet users for opinions and information about products, services and brands ... why not aim to get the same level of support flowing through a school community and out into the broader community.
And what part do you think kids play in choosing a school these days? You better believe that it’s significant. And you also better believe that they’ve done their research... but they didn’t check out web sites first. No, they spoke to their “friends”.
When I was at school, out of a student population of 1100 students my network was probably 5 or 10 close friends. Sometimes we’d have pen pals as an alternative to school friends. Today, networks are huge and constantly changing. Connecting with those networks is a primary focus (not just of students but also of young parents) and they seek opinions from their network of “friends”. They trust what their friends say. When Adam Torode was looking for schools for his two boys he went to his online network and asked his friends to relate their experiences with schools. On this basis he developed a short list. This is the power of new media.
School Blogs
Feedback from customers is valuable information and an exciting way to engage and interact with your audience. By hosting a blog site, a school can play host to two-way conversations, allowing the entire community to engage.
Covenant Christian School in Sydney averages two new stories each school day on their blogsite. It makes extensive use of photos and video. In three years the blogsite now has over 1,000 stories and 10,000 photos. Students, parents and staff regularly add comments to the stories. The comments need to be approved before being displayed. Neil Pierson says “it has allowed our community to engage and better understand what is happening at the school and congratulate each other. Parents and students love seeing photos of themselves. The blogsite helps demonstrate and reassure current parents that the school is providing a rich and varied education”.
Here’s an example of a blog making a Principal more personable and accessible. The Knox School in Victoria broadcasts a Principal’s Blog each week on its website
www.knox.vic.edu.au. Principal Suzanne McChesney gives an account of her week listing highlights with her personal thoughts and aspirations and an occasional cute photograph. It gives her the freedom to express her human side in a personal conversation with the reader. She is holding a relationship building conversation that allows a parent to ask the Principal at Saturday sport, “How did you enjoy the film last week that you went to see at the Dendy Theatre on Thursday night?”
A Canadian arts publicist, Rebecca Coleman, who specialises in social media writes:
”In the past we employed ‘spray and pray’: i.e. you got as much marketing material as possible, and put it in as many places as possible. Your goal was to reach as wide an audience as possible, because you never knew where they were. I’m talking billboards, TV commercials, sides of buses, ads in the newspaper, posters, postcards, websites . . . the whole works. The problem with spray and pray is that it’s expensive. And the return on your investment was minimal, maybe, if you were lucky, 10%. Today, marketers are looking for niche markets via social media. But you can’t just spray and pray to new niche markets using the same methods. Marketing Tweets and Facebook work if the receiver knows who you are and they are already interested in what you do. They inform in a timely, personal way, but they are a real turn-off if you are just trying to sell something. The secret of social media is to think relationship, not ‘bums' on seats.
School E-Prospectus
People want information quickly, preferably as visual images. Here’s a school that has dispensed with the traditional prospectus and uses video to present a parent’s view, a teacher’s view and a student’s view of the school
www.pilgrim.sa.edu.au/Default.aspx?tabid=67
Another outstanding, fully electronic prospectus with automatic page -turning comes from Bloxham School, a small school in rural England
www.bloxhamschool.com
School E-newsletter
When Fernhurst School in North England changed direction it needed a vehicle to communicate this. The school’s new mission is to get
disaffected and/or disengaged learners back into positive education via a vocational route. Take a look at their new e-letter
eepurl.com/bCG2b
Marketing Coordinator Jenny England set up the newsletter using mailchimp and she suggests that others many find this useful.
She writes . . . This high-tech newsletter is completely free and pretty straightforward. It's got people talking about our school in a positive way. It is fab for market research. I can track exactly who opened it, how many times they viewed it and which link was clicked on the most often.
School Newsletters on mobile phone
Parents don’t connect in the car park the way once did – the pace and pressure of modern life has seen to that. But, if you want to move from simply being an information provider to community builder you need to move your marketing strategy from “one to many” to a “many to many” format.
School newsletters should consider moving to an online optimised format. This is important with the growing use of smart phones... Mum and Dad, and prospective parents, now have the ability to connect with school content on the run via their mobiles. Giving parents options on how to receive information is important. The traditional paper newsletter may still work for 30% of your parents but the others may prefer electronic versions. The purpose of a newsletter is communication. Therefore it is essential to use the mediums your clients use.
And don’t underestimate the mobile phone. It’s going to become the primary source of communication and information gathering. Organic LED screens as thin as paper that can be folded and taken anywhere will solve the issue of information display.
Mobile phones incorporating miniature projection capabilities will also make any clear surface ideal for display.
So, simply by delivering information in more contemporary mechanisms and allowing for two way communications, you automatically lift parental and student involvement and promote engagement.
Continuous school marketing
So there are many channels to connect with parents to promote the school and build community relations, but once is not enough. You need a continuous marketing strategy to convey your message to your audience in different ways, with spaced repetition, over time.
You need to approach a prospect no less than seven times before giving up and moving on. A system of multiple exposures works best. For schools this may mean reiterations via advertising, website, internet, expos, mail-outs, follow-up emails and follow-up phone calls Different communication spaced apart (2 weeks to start then less frequently) can effectively build top-of-the-mind awareness.
A priority for the future will be to manage community involvement in schools and to build stronger bonds with the rising tide of vocal and discerning customers. Smart players in the marketplace realise that the methods and thinking that got them to where they are today will definitely not get them to where they want to be tomorrow.
About the authors
Dr Linda Vining was the Founder of the Centre for Marketing Schools. Neil Pierson is the new Director and co-wrote this article for Mal Lee.