In marketing your school, the Head of School is typically the first face that a prospective parent associates with the school. Therefore it is imperative to showcase your school’s leadership.
The two most important reasons to do this is worth noting:
REMIND – It is always helpful (and even necessary) to remind your current families of who the administration is at your school. Depending on the size of your school, this is more important. If you are 200 students, perhaps you have more interaction with the Headmaster in the hallways than if your school has 1500 students. For the larger schools, parents typically interact more with teachers, coaches and the principals. If you have administrators over development, enrollment management and curriculum, these are key executives that often go unseen by your current families. Especially important for the Head of School is to be visible on social media, via a blog, Twitter, Instagram or even using Facebook Live to communicate to families.
INFORM – While you may be very familiar with the face and voice of your school’s president, remember that your prospective families are not. Keep a list of important facts about the HOS’s experience, educational background, expertise, successes, and some of his/her personal traits and share them often. Have a social media calendar that puts a spot each month to feature some aspect of your school’s administration. They are the front-line voice and face for new families.
Now let’s explore some brainstorm ideas on how to showcase your administration (especially the key visible players such as Headmaster, Principals and Coaches).
VIDEO – Whether you are using Facebook Live, Periscope, YouTube or Instagram video, put your administration out there for people to see! If your administrator is “good on camera” (comfortable and a great communicator), do creative and funny things as well as informative sessions (although keep them brief). If they are not necessarily the best in front of a camera (and some of us are not), use video editing to play a lot of b-roll video so the audience is hearing the administrator but looking at other pictures of your school. Recording presentations or webinars is one way to achieve this if going LIVE terrifies you!
BLOG – I am still a proponent of a Head of School having a written blog. This is not a place to write 2000 word essays on her educational philosophy. It is a place to share brief stories of student success, institutional success, inspirational stories or personal illustrations that remind/inform families of his/her background. You can write philosophical posts, but keep them brief and break them up into a series of shorter posts with a lot of bullet points and pictures to improve the likelihood of someone reading them.
AUDIO – President FDR is famous for his “Fireside Chats”. These audio messages provided the President an opportunity to speak directly into the homes of families. Using audio recording and publishing tools like Soundcloud or Podbean (I use both for some random audio messages and for our monthly school marketing podcast), you can publish a 5-, 10-, 20-, or even 30-minute audio message that consistently puts your voice into the minds of your new and current families. Again, use these to do parent/student/alumni interviews or speak to student and institutional successes.
I love their theme, “Taking Stock of Your Professional Development Journey” – as some of you know, Fort Worth is home to the World Famous Stockyards, where you could witness the world’s only twice-daily cattle drive (11:30am and 4pm every day). Fort Worth is nicknamed “Cowtown” due to its location on the Old Chisholm Trail, establishing Fort Worth as a trading and cattle center. I love visiting the Stockyards with my family. And I even ran through the Stockyards during my recent Cowtown Half Marathon!
It will be warm in Texas in July, but I know the folks at the host school, Fort Worth Country Day, will provide plenty of A/C, maybe a tall glass of Texas sweet tea, and a great opportunity for admission and marketing professionals. Rick Newberry shared on his blog a review from three school leaders who all attended the 2015 institute in Baltimore. Rick and I both will be members of this year’s faculty in the marketing track. I have also been asked to participate in the marketing/communications panel.
As the Head of School, you want to have a voice where parents, students, alumni and prospective families hear directly from you. While inviting them to campus a few times a year may allow you face-to-face interaction, people nowadays expect more frequent communication.
Watch the video below to learn how to set up your own Head of School blog in 15 minutes or less using WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms.
.In case you are new to blogging, here are 3 ways a Head of School can effectively blog for your school:
PERSONALITY – your school, especially to prospective families, is an institution. While you likely are familiar with the many families and faces of your school, to the prospective family, you are a building with brick walls and curriculum. Having a weekly or biweekly blog (or more often, but not less), these families get to your heart and your vision. Even current families and alumni (who may not know you if there were different administrators) will be encouraged by learning more about the individual leading their school. You can be serious, funny, or offer a combination of emotions that stimulate interest in your school. Let them know about your family, your hobbies, and the things you do outside the school, too.
MULTI-SENSORY – most of the time, we think of blogs as platforms for written content. However, from time to time, or exclusively, you can offer a video blog (or “vlog”) if you find this easier or more effective than writing. In a vlog, families and students are inspired by your words, but also captivated by your body language and eye contact.
CHALLENGE – when choosing your content to blog about, consider more than just boring announcements about the latest fundraising campaign. Rather, take trending topics (especially peruse Facebook and Twitter for what’s on the minds of people) and address these from your point of view. Perhaps there is education legislation that needs explaining, a spiritual examination of a controversial topic in the news or providing a unique worldview challenge for a global crisis making headlines. You are a leader so use this platform to show your students and families what kind of leader you really are!
Heather Hoerle, Executive Director of SSTAB (Secondary School Admission Test Board), shares a brief, but important topic, “A Year of Trustee Topics in Admission” in the video below. In summary, she shares:
Enrollment management should always be a strategic priority
Hear at least 3 times a year what’s happening to examine trends in the market space
Reporting should be all-year round (so there’s never any surprises)
In the fall, analyze enrollment season results, especially dissecting the numbers by specific categories
Whether you are seeing a decline or an increase, you need to know why
In the winter, you may not fill every seat in your first season (around February); step up your efforts toward the spring/summer to fill available seats by the time the second season ends in August
At the end of the school year, the Board and Admission team should consider a thorough checkup
Understanding your competition (it’s not just private schools)!
In marketing your school, you must consider how the approach to education is an attractive element for prospective families. Many families are hungry for something unique, something that they will not find in the typical public education system.
Whether or not you agree with this being the future of education, it is worth a look simply to challenge your school’s view of the educational model and paradigm to which you subscribe.
Click the video below to watch 13 minutes of paradigm shifting:
This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award.
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