Leadership by example {MARKETING}
The best way to share what is great about your school? Use your students SIMON HEPBURN, of Marketing Advice for Schools, discusses why you should develop a social media crew at your school
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n my school days one of my favourite TV programmes was Press Gang – the story of a school newspaper. It made making a school newspaper glamorous and, no doubt, inspired many of my generation to become journalists (perhaps no surprise as it was written by ex-teacher Steven Moffat who moved on to create Sherlock!) Visiting schools today there is much that has changed and improved since the 90s but I’ve also noticed that there are far fewer students involved in creating stories about their schools than there used to be and that surprises me for two reasons: ● F irstly, because many more students will go on to careers that require a wide range of mediarelated skills such as writing scripts for video, interviewing, presenting, shooting and editing video and sharing content online. ● S econdly, because schools are in severe need of content to promote themselves to increase admissions, raise extra funds or just show the local community the positive things they do every day – and students have the time, ability and insight to do this. Create a ‘Student Media Crew’ (your own Press Gang) today with a focus on video rather than print and you can set up your own TV channel or supply great videos for an existing school website or social media. The only downside is an initial investment of time and, perhaps, some new equipment (although schools often have a lot of relevant IT kit!)
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December 2021
Below we look at the key stages in the process – and show the outcomes already achieved by one school.
HOW TO SET UP YOUR CREW
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FIND THE RIGHT TEAM: you will need motivated students, and staff who can inspire them as well as sensitively monitoring what they produce! To recruit the students, I’d suggest asking around the staff room and inviting individuals as well as putting up posters around the school. The team needs to be balanced between those creating content (producers, writers), appearing on screen (interviewers and presenters) and those managing the technical side of the process (recording, editing) – a team of eight is probably the ideal initial number. FIND THE RIGHT EQUIPMENT: you will need a green screen (or other suitable background), at least one video camera (‘phones and tablets are good enough to start with, but you might want to move up quickly), a good microphone and editing software (you can
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