To do great school communication and marketing — work that truly moves the needle for your school — some of the most impactful levers you can pull do not depend on the size of your budget.
Here are six things you can do that won’t put any strain on your budget. But we warn you, it’s not going to be easy. Through our experience of working with hundreds of school Heads, we know these ideas can be difficult to action … but not impossible.
Lever #1: Talk with your customers. No, really talk with them.
Too many school Heads struggle to have meaningful conversations with parents (their customers). Your position as Head of the school can cause parents to filter their conversation so what you hear is often a distorted version of reality. They might believe you don’t have enough time to go deep on a topic, that you are the only problem solver, that you might view their child differently if they speak openly, or that, to make their point, they need to deliver a rant that is closer to a WhatsApp post than a civil conversation.
You are the leader of marketing at your school. You must be able to hear the aspirations, concerns and fears of your customers firsthand. Don’t fall back on focus groups, surveys or two-minute pleasantries at the afternoon pick-up as a proxy for meaningful discussions, because they are not, and they never have been.
It is hard to make the time for long-form, meaningful conversations, where you can get past the filters with your current and prospective parents, but if you don’t, the price you will pay for not talking is irrelevant marketing.
Lever #2: Make your people famous.
The quality of student learning outcomes can never exceed the quality of teachers.[1] So if your teachers are critical to your success, then make them ‘visible experts’.[2] Smart people on the internet can make a strong brand impression for your school and aggregate significant audiences — and that’s the tension.
A lot of schools get nervous about making anyone in the school, including the Head, too visible. They fear they will leave and take their audience with them. That’s just poor-quality thinking. It is unnecessary, and often impossible, to find a solution for a problem that has yet to occur.
Invest in your staff and show your current and prospective parents they are worthy of their trust. At the same time, you will show the talented staff you care enough about them and their careers to invest effort in them.
Lever #3: Choose expertise over availability.
When working with schools that don’t have big budgets (that’s all schools) we often hear them complain that they’ll never be able to attract the true marketing/video/social media/design experts. Yet, with persistence, we’ve discovered the right expertise is almost always discovered and at a realistic price.
Leveraging the insights and skill of true experts isn’t vanity or reserved only for high-fee schools; it’s a gold mine of value for your marketing. Talk to real experts – not just those available to you at first glance.
Stand firm in finding and using genuine expertise and don’t give up your search without a fight.
Lever #4: Fix relationships.
If your marketing and enrolment teams don’t work together as a tight unit, your marketing team is effectively cut adrift and working blind. Your marketing team still ‘owns’ the enrolment lead generation pipeline and without it, enrolment enquiries will dwindle to a trickle.
If your marketing team loses contact with, and the confidence of, your admissions team, they’ve lost contact with the people who have actual conversations with prospective parents: the people who have acted (or not) on your marketing messages.
Let’s be candid. In many school cultures the marketing team are tucked away in a corner and, as long as the newsletter goes out on time, they are often ignored. The enrolment teams are on the front line and rightly get the glory that goes along with winning new families to the school, but no matter how entrenched the animosity, it will always be worth your time to fix these relationships. It won’t cost you anything but time, energy and political capital.
Lever #5: Slow down.
You can do this for free right now. That communication or marketing piece that no longer reflects who you are and what you promise? Stop doing it. Just stop the whole process. Go back to square one and fix it.
Yes, that might mean temporarily letting some of your stakeholders down. Let them say what they want. If you are going to make something that motivates action, moves people and changes lives, then take every additional minute you can to make it excellent at the job it is intended to do. Because when it is excellent at its job you are moving closer to achieving your mission and nothing else matters.
Lever #6: Tell your stakeholders they are wrong.
There are few things less useful to you as leader of marketing at your school than a scared and skittish communications and marketing team. On the flipside, there are few things more valuable than a team that is confident enough to assert how things should be done.
Of course, they need to back up their confidence with sound reasoning and results, but you can still waste a lot of time trying to get all your stakeholders to agree. The end result is that your audience — usually current and prospective parents and staff — do not give a hoot about how much your stakeholders are in agreement. They care how right you are. They care if your message resonates with them. They care about what you do for them. They care if you are wasting their time.
So, if you are quietly concerned about pleasing everyone, but secretly worried that your communication and marketing are not up to scratch, then stop, take a step back, and remember your mission. It’s not achieving consensus.
[1] Schleicher, A. (2018) Teaching and Learning International Survey TALIS 2018, OECD – TALIS. Available at: https://www2.oecd.org/education/talis/TALIS2018_insights_and_interpretations.pdf.
[2] Entwistle, B. (2022) ‘Using your expertise as a competitive advantage’, School Marketing Journal, 2022 (Term 4), pp. 18–19.
