SUBMIT A SUPPORT REQUEST
Why must your school ensure you are delivering clear, consistent brand messages?
Your school’s ‘story’ should be consistent regardless of what communication channel your audience can access. Your school website, social media channels and school environment should convey the same messages and brand values, colours and voice. This not only creates a professional outlook, but also builds trust with your school. If everything is consistent, there is no question about what you say and what you do being different.
Are your school logo or colours and font styles consistent or do you have variations?
A consistent brand helps prospective parents to recognise your school and become familiar with it if these messages are being consistently reinforced. Whilst having variations on a theme is great for ensuring your logo and branding is usable in different ways (i.e. having a light and dark version for contrasting backgrounds), if these variations are wildly different, consistency can be lost.
If you need to make alterations in order to display or use your brand better on materials, make sure to keep this in mind and stay as close to your original brand as possible.
Does your brand actually represent you?
There are many different types of school, including primaries, secondaries, independents, special schools, faith schools, specialist subject schools and more. Your chosen logo and overall brand should reflect this, and make it clear exactly what you are. This message then needs to be shared consistently across your website, social media, branded materials and more.
If, for example, your school has a major technical focus which is reflected in your website but all your social media channel posts are about your sporting successes – this could be sending a confused message. If you looked at your website now, would you say the key messages are reflective of your school vision and values?
Should our school only talk about our brand during recruitment?
No! Reinforcement of your brand and message should be delivered consistently throughout the school year, not just when the window of opportunity opens to recruit parents. More often than not, parents may have already decided which school they want their children to go to way before the application process starts. If you get into good habits of defining what your brand is, what values your school embraces and delivering these consistently and effectively throughout the year, then this will make life easier when it does come to those important times of the school year.
You don’t have to be an expert in Marketing to review your brand and values and ensure consistency. Your school will have a logo, so ensure that you have a file that all staff have access to with the correct logo style in there – potentially in various formats that will ensure that your staff aren’t scanning age old headers to get a copy of your logo.
You will have set values for your school and you will know how your school differs to other schools you are competing with for places, so use this to your advantage.
Ensure once a week, you are posting something reflective of your school values. If these are focused on resilience – show how your school is doing that.
