After finishing out the school year, July is the time to recharge.
But when you return from your well-deserved summer break, there are dozens of tasks big and small to tackle for next year. With so much to do, you need a simple plan that you can realistically accomplish.
This free, six-part video series will help you refresh your school’s brand in six easy, digestible, and practical steps. Each five-minute video and homework assignment will help you strengthen your school’s brand and admissions communications for an admissions season with high inquiries, applications, and yield.
[Watch the video series HERE]
1: Assess the Brand You Have Now
Brand is just another word for reputation. By asking a dozen or two diverse community members about your school’s reputation, you’ll be on your way to assessing your brand:
- What reputation does our school have among families in the area? Or, our school is the school that: ____________)?
- Why do families choose our school over others?
- How would families describe our school if no one was listening?
- What can families get here that they can’t at other schools?
Be forewarned, your stakeholders may not all be on the same page about your school’s reputation (and that’s an important finding itself), but if you hear things like “we’re the best kept secret,” push a little more to find out what exactly the secret is.
2: Identify Your True Mission-Fit Audiences
The second step is to identify your true mission-fit audience by listing the FIVE audience groups most essential to your school’s success, and thinking deeply about what they care about. Most schools prioritize:
- Faculty and staff
- Current families
- Alumni
- Administrators at sending and/or feeder schools
- Students
Instead of a group, imagine a person who represents each category. Give each of them a name that corresponds with a value they share with your school (i.e. Cameron Connection, Innovative Isabella, etc.), and answer these questions on their behalf:
- What do they care deeply about?
- What do they know about our school?
- What do they want/need from our school?
- What do we want/need from them?
Rather than including everything they know or want, keep the focus on their value – Cameron Connection wants a community to belong to, for example.
3: Examine the Competition
You’d be surprised by how many schools skip this effort, thinking they already have the answer. But understanding both what other schools tell families about themselves and what reputation (brand) they actually have in the minds’ of families is critical. Your brand can’t stand out from the pack unless you understand the pack and intentionally signal how you’re different. Doing so is a gift to families and helps you attract families who truly want what you uniquely offer.
To do this, repeat the exercise in step one, but replace your school with the names of the schools you most often compete with. You’ve completed this step when you can describe each school using a “word on the street” phrase that summarizes their reputation.
4: Find the Open Opportunity
The fourth step is to find the open opportunity for your school’s brand, and you can’t do this until successfully completing the first three steps. Now you’re ready to develop a briefly worded summation of your school’s unique approach, value, or point of view. To create a strong brand strategy, it must be authentic to your school, relevant to your audiences, and distinctive from your competitors. You’ve completed this step when you can finish this sentence: We are the ______ school.
5: Distill That Difference Into its Purest Essence—Your Brand “Positioning”
The fifth step is to distill that difference into a single big idea—your brand “positioning.” Let’s start with the definition of “brand positioning” — that’s marketing jargon for a phrase that tells us how a brand is different from its competitors and where, or how, it sits in customers’ minds relative to other choices they have. To translate your open opportunity (step four) into a brand position, do two things:
- Start the sentence with “We are the only school that/where______.”
- And then, frame the difference as a benefit to the student.
6: Intentionally Begin to Send Signals That Reinforce Your Positioning
The sixth and final step (that never ends) is to strategically send signals that reinforce this unique brand positioning—what families can only find at your school. One way to do that is through your school’s spoken, written, and digital messages. Mission Minded’s Minute Message Model is a robust framework that helps you develop messages for every occasion, and the “belief message” (commonly referred to as an elevator pitch) is the message everyone in your school should know and use. Our simple formula will get you started, and we invite you to reach out and share yours when you like how it sounds.
Learn more about how brand can help your admissions communication efforts here. Also, our free guide details 10 Tips for Effectively Marketing Your Independent School.
Good luck!
