Developing schools
One voice: unified promotion of your school
James Underhill advocates the synergy of the trinity A big fundraising reception in Madrid. After the presentation, I asked a potential major donor what he thought of the school’s development plans. He smiled and airily said, ‘That bit of the show was the advertisement break. I only came here to hear about the school.’ It got me thinking. Remember how you felt when the old-style party political broadcasts would pop up in a five minute slot between, say, Dad’s Army and the News? There’s a real danger that we are triggering the same reaction in our audiences, because so many schools continue to fall back on the same old clichés or reach for clever, but ultimately hollow, messages that fall on deaf ears. More than ever, we need to find mature and convincing ways to promote our schools. Yet our challenge is so much more complicated than marketing a product. We are selling people, values, attitudes, care and inspiration. It’s highly nuanced. It’s about finding a consistent, credible voice, not one strapline. And it’s hard. I witnessed directors of a top city marketing agency applying their skills to a school. There was an expectation on those who made the instruction that these guys, in their chalk stripe suits with no ties, would come up with some phrase or pithy paragraph that would nail it and would take us to comprehensive brand-loyalty, the answer to life, the universe and everything. They didn’t. But they did do their best to gently
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Spring 2019
knock a few heads together and get us thinking about the school in a more unified way. What makes for a good start? It has to be creating greater synergy between Marketing, Development and Admissions. Combining all three, if you like. Because the alternative, fractured approach can be so wearing and unprofessional. The unified voice goes out of the window, and, just as important, opportunities are missed. ‘You can have a page and a half in the school magazine to talk about development.’ It says it all. Development asking for money; Marketing promoting the main product; Admissions liaising directly with parents and schools. Where, in all of this, is the consistent, central message that rises, clear and credible, above the ad-break? Over the last few years a number of schools have started publishing high quality annual reports. Let departments fight over whose budget pays, but keep these reports coming. They’re good. They demand a holistic style of thinking - the school as one entity. In the best of these reports, key school statistics and features about teaching sit alongside plans for future developments. Lists of governors sit opposite lists of donors. More importantly, in the really good reports, there is a consistent ‘voice’. You get a sense of the institution as a personality: someone you can trust.
