Marketing for schools

The story of one school’s marketing efforts, plus thoughts on the use of email for communication and promotion.

One of the highlights of my paid and voluntary career to date has been a stint as a school trustee.  Like more than 100,000 other New Zealanders over the last 21 years, I put my hand up to help our local school govern its future.

Ending up as Chair of our board, it was a challenging role.  When done well, the school trustee role is a fantastic grounding in principles of good governance.  A large proportion of those 100,000 people who undertook training and development in the school trustee role are now adding value through applying their knowledge in community and sports organisations, NGOs and business firms throughout New Zealand.

The challenges in setting  a school’s strategic direction, ensuring good educational outcomes and being a good employer are tough and would challenge any board.  One challenge that frequently results in under-achievement for school boards and management is marketing.

The experience of our board was that marketing was a challenge we could ill-afford to neglect.  At Shirley Intermediate School in Christchurch in 2003, after nine years of declining enrolments, we were facing scary viability issues.  If the trend continued, we would inevitably become another school closure statistic.

Like all good marketers we considered our Four Ps.  Price was out of our hands.  Apart from a few trips and camps, families had our services paid for by the government.  That has got to be good!

Place was also out of our hands.  Our site was determined by history and, short of closure, could not be changed.  This meant that, for all practical purposes, our target market was determined by geographical radius.  The scary thing about this was that much of this target market was choosing to travel to schools considerably further away from their homes than our school.  That was a Product issue.  The good thing about our location was that it is smack bang on a north-eastern Christchurch hub.  A major intersection, a major shopping mall and heaps of public transport.  That was a potential benefit for Promotion.

Dealing with the Product issue was school trustee core business.  Our years on the board saw us initiate major improvements to our school’s physical, social and learning environment.  This was long-haul stuff.  Fundraising for and building an adventure playground did not take too long, but I will spare you the details of the bureaucratic running-through-treacle nightmare that was the refurbishment of our school buildings.  Eliminating graffiti attacks took some committed but simple and swift action.  Establishing systems for monitoring learning achievement and setting meaningful targets was way harder and took a long time.

We needed short-term wins and we knew that the families who were sending their kids elsewhere were under-valuing our school.  From an outstanding bi-lingual Maori teaching unit through to champion maths and sports results, we had a story to tell and not nearly enough people were hearing it.

This was where Promotion came in.

There were three audiences for our promotional messages: students, parents and principals of contributing (local primary) schools.  We traditionally visited primary schools with a performance group and offered the standard annual open night.  As these were proven promotional tactics, we resolved to continue with them.  But we needed more.

Our highly visible location was the next promotional tool for review.  An under-utilised sign facing the high traffic count intersection began getting greater usage in promoting the school and its activities.  The presentation of the school to passing traffic received a boost when the new adventure playground went in.  We could have placed it out of sight on the playing fields.  But the highly visible space at the frontage of the school not only had supervision benefits, it proclaimed our kids-first focus to passing traffic.

Changes in senior management gave an excuse for more contact between principals.  This was useful, as we were aware that some of our contributing schools had been steering students away from us.  A change at the top gave us an opportunity to tell a new story about our goals for the school.  Significant management effort went into building new relationships with contributing schools.

With limited funds, we concluded that our best bang-for-the-buck would be a revamped quality production of our school prospectus.  The material we sent to prospective student families was transformed from a folder of photocopied enrolment material and school rules, to a colourful, professionally produced publication, highlighting happy students doing cool activities.  The new prospectus was a fabulous repositioning statement and, from anecdotal evidence, had a significant impact on the community’s perception of our school.

The objective results of all our product and promotion efforts was a complete reversal of the historical trend.  For the first time in a decade, school enrolments increased.

But from the perspective of 2010 it is intriguing to think what has changed in the intervening years and what else could be done today.  Before we consider this, let us reflect on other school communication issues.

One of the challenges of school-family relationships is timely and quality information.  School notices are the classic means of communication.  But of course, the classic complaint is that the notice sits at the bottom of a school bag until parents clean it out at the end of the school term.

To get around this, many schools resort to soliciting parent signatures to confirm that notices have been read.  A few resort to postage, but the cost is too much for most schools to bear.

So we have two problems here.  One is, how can we efficiently and affordably communicate with parents?  The second is, how could we do the same with the families of prospective students?

Email solutions

On-line email solutions such as Mailshot address these problems head-on.  Unlike the email software on your own computer, these on-line solutions are designed for sending large numbers of emails with a quality presentation.

Try sending an email to a few hundred recipients from your own computer sometime.  You will find that managing those email addresses in one email is a real headache.  Even worse, you will find that between you and the recipients, there are many Internet filters and services that will reject emails containing so many addressees.  Within a few minutes of sending, your Inbox will be filled with mail rejection notices.  No wonder schools are so notable for underutilising email.

An email service eliminates that problem.  But the real beauty of an on-line email service is the incredible added services compared with standard email or a paper newsletter.

Firstly, you can manage your address list on-line and your recipients can manage their own subscriptions to your newsletters via a link on every email.  The tools around managing all those addresses remove a lot of headaches.

Secondly, you get up-to-the-minute reporting on who has opened your email.  It is immediately apparent whether you are reaching parents.

Thirdly, you can link to relevant information that is on your school’s Web site or other Web sites.  Not only that, you can tell how many people clicked on those links, giving you great feedback on the relevance of your content.

To top it off, particularly with a customised service such as Mailshot, you can create very attractive presentations that highlight your school’s identity, include photos and are a pleasure to navigate and read.

The key to all this is collecting email addresses.  Make sure that when students enrol, that you receive a parental contact email address.  When you are holding open nights or sending information to contributing schools, offer prospective families the opportunity to give you their email address.  Mailshot can assist by helping you put a newsletter subscription link on your school’s Web site.

Things have moved on since 2003 when I started on a school board.  These days, even in low decile areas, a very high proportion of families have routine email access (of course, there is nothing stopping you continuing to send paper newsletters to those who prefer or need them).  There is no doubt in my mind that we would be 100% into email newsletters if we were starting out now.

Service recommendation

I make no secret of the fact that I have worked closely with Mailshot in recent times.  There are other on-line email services out there, as a quick Google search will show.  But, unlike the 100% automated overseas services, Mailshot are cost-effective, they work closely with you to customise your presentation, and they are only ever a phone call away.  In fact, if you’re in Christchurch, you can go and have a coffee with them!