In today’s digital age, social media has become an essential tool for schools to reach out to potential students and their families, as well as to connect with the wider community. Having a strong social media presence can help to elevate your school’s brand awareness and attract new students, but it’s not always easy to know how to make the most of social media. Here are some tips for elevating your school’s brand awareness on social media:

Identify your target audience

Before you can develop a social media strategy, you need to understand who your target audience is. This could include current and prospective students, parents, staff, and members of the local community. Understanding your target audience will help you to tailor your social media content to their interests and needs.

Develop a content calendar

A content calendar will help you to plan and organise your social media content in advance. This could include posts about upcoming events, student achievements, and school programs. It’s important to mix up the types of content you share, such as images, videos, and infographics, to keep your followers engaged.

Use visual storytelling

Visual storytelling is a powerful way to connect with your audience on social media. Use images and videos to showcase your school’s achievements, students, and programs. This can help to create a strong emotional connection with your audience and make your school stand out.

Engage with your audience

Social media is not just about broadcasting information, it’s also about engaging with your audience. Encourage your followers to share their thoughts and feedback and respond to comments and messages in a timely manner. This can help to build a sense of community and demonstrate that your school is listening and responsive.

Measure and evaluate the success of your social media strategy

Use metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, and the number of new students to track your progress and adjust as necessary.

In conclusion, social media can be a powerful tool for elevating your school’s brand awareness, but it’s important to have a strategy in place. By identifying your target audience, developing a content calendar, using visual storytelling, engaging with your audience, and measuring and evaluating the success of your social media strategy, you can effectively reach out to potential students and members of the community and showcase the value of your school.

Sponsorship Ready’s leading and proven 3-step framework enables schools to successfully deliver on a sponsors business, brand, and community engagement objectives, while effectively conveying their school’s purpose, vision, and values as well improving brand perception.

Find out how your school can become Sponsorship Ready with a FREE 30-minute strategy session or email via info@sponsorshipready.com.au and start succeeding in sponsorship at your school today!

Did you know Sponsorship Ready also supports schools in professional development and capacity building in social media marketing?

Why not check out our Capacity Building & Professional Development program that’s tailored to your school and features free templates and platforms to create social media content that performs.

Find out more on Sponsorship Ready’s Social Media Masterclass for Schools on Wednesday 1 March 2023 hosted at Woodcrest State College.

School websites represent what a school is doing and showcases to their community why they stand out from the rest.

From increasing brand awareness to keeping an open line of communication between schools and their community, it’s never been more important to be capturing new, engaging photos that reflect your school’s purpose, vision, and values.

This said, how do schools effectively communicate exactly what’s required when commissioning a photographer?

Here are 3 tips when it comes to creating the perfect school website photography brief:

Review your school website

Before creating your photography brief, it’s important to review the images currently featured across your school’s website. A few key questions to ask:

• Does your website photography best represent your school’s purpose, vision, and values?
• Are the students featured throughout your school website images current?
• Are the photos cropped in a certain way (i.e. Landscape, Portrait, Square)

Logistics

While it seems straightforward, it’s important to identify some key details required before engaging a school photographer:

• Photoshoot Date & Time
• Location
• Staff & Student Talent (with Media Approvals)
• A shot list that reflects your school’s:
  • Values & Brand
  • Programming
  • Community Engagement
  • Inclusivity
  • Health & Wellbeing
  • Infrastructure

Objectives, Brand Guidelines & Usages

After reviewing your school website, it’s important to provide your school photographer with a detailed overview of any key objectives you’re hoping to achieve. This includes:

• Articulating how and where the images will be featured
  • Website
  • Brochures
  • Social Media etc.
• Who your target audience is
• What your school’s USP is
• Any further context around the message you would like to convey
  TIP: Provide your photographer with a copy of your school brand guidelines to help them develop a deeper understanding of your school, while ensuring a consistent look and feel is achieved when capturing new imagery.

If your school requires support in producing or refreshing its photography, Sponsorship Ready can help in bringing this to life, ensuring all is in conjunction with your school’s key values, objectives, and brand.

Find out more about more on Sponsorship Ready’s photography and other marketing service here or email via info@sponsorshipready.com.au

For schools, some of the motivations for investing in a sponsorship program stem from enhancing brand awareness and perception and increasing community engagement and connection.

It makes sense that your school community feels more connected to sponsors, supporting considered initiatives, that share similar values to that of your school.

That’s why it’s so important to spend the time planning on how to successfully engage prospective sponsors.

With Sponsorship working in a way that provides mutual benefits for schools and their sponsors, it’s important to know exactly what your school has to sell while being crystal clear on a sponsor’s objectives.

Without conveying your brand successfully and having a clear message that links back to your school visions and values, how will your audience, both community and prospective sponsors know what you stand for?

More importantly, how will your school align with sponsors that improve outcomes for students and promote your school’s purpose, vision and values in the community?

So, how do you change the narrative?

• How are you defining your schools reach and impact?
• How are you professionally promoting your school’s purpose, vision, and values?
• How are you capturing and connecting the heart of your school?
• Can you talk to sponsors about their objectives rather than just benefits?
• Have you effectively positioned your school’s sponsorship program to run alongside your fundraising program? If any of these questions are challenging to answer concisely, Sponsorship Ready could be the right solution for your school.

Sponsorship Ready does not include selling sponsorship in schools.

Sponsorship Ready provides schools with the right strategy, tools and support so that schools can manage their sponsorship program themselves.

So, what are you waiting for?

We invite and encourage you to speak with Sponsorship Ready for a no-cost 30-minute strategy session.

While a school prospectus sums up what your schools offers and what makes you unique to prospective sponsors, students and their families, it is also important to look at the marketing collateral your school has in place to ensure your key messaging is conveyed across all marketing mediums.

It’s helpful to consider the kind of digital and printed material your school needs, especially if you have new branding and need to update things.

School marketing collateral can include:

1. School Prospectus – make the right impression
2. Stationary – For a consistent look and feel
3. Digital templates – To save you time
4. Banners and leaflets – Get your school noticed

Sponsorship Ready can save you time by creating all your required collateral, from a striking School prospectus design to useful digital templates. We will organise it all and tie everything in with your school brand, so you can hit the ground running. Ask us how!

Sponsorship Ready can support your school in producing a range of social media templates that encompass your brand identity while acting as an extension of your school prospectus. Learn more here. 

Sponsorship Ready provides schools with the right strategy, tools, and support so that schools can manage their sponsorship program themselves.

Sponsorship Ready’s leading and proven 3-step framework provides peace of mind for school’s wanting to successfully deliver on business, brand, and community engagement objectives, while effectively conveying their school’s purpose, vision, and values.

Your school prospectus, website and social media is the first port of call for parents when deciding on which schools to consider for their children.

That’s why it is so essential that your prospectus photography captures the heart of your school.

Your schools image bank of school marketing photography needs to cover leadership, programs, learning, teachers teaching, programs in action, candid shots that showcase students in an engaging learning environment which can then be used across all your school marketing channels.

Commissioning and producing a professional video to position your school in the heart and mind of the community is something worth seriously considering too.

A few key questions to ask:

• Does your school prospectus professionally promote your school’s purpose, vision, and values? Your programs? Your leadership?
• Does the imagery talk to the essence of your school’s brand?
• Does your image bank contain your school’s community engagement initiatives in action?  Or your Health and wellbeing initiatives in action?
• Does your school prospectus need updating? Is it on brand?
• Does your schools style guide need updating?
• Do you need a half day or full day photography shoot to refresh your image bank?
• Have you considered a professional video package?
• Are you using a school prospectus to present to prospective sponsors?

Sponsorship Ready provides schools with the right strategy, tools, and support so that schools can manage their sponsorship program themselves. Ask us about our services:

• School Prospectus
• School Photography
• School Video
• School Social Media Templates
• School Branding
• School Professional Development in:
  • Leveraging school sponsorship
  • Social media marketing
  • Capacity building in school marketing

Find out how your school can become Sponsorship Ready with a FREE 30-minute strategy session or email via info@sponsorshipready.com.au and start succeeding in sponsorship at your school today!

Next up: Is there a difference between a school prospectus and collateral used to present to prospective sponsors? 

Rebranding is a big deal, so it’s important that you take the time to get it right.

The first thing you must understand is that your brand is so much more than just a logo.

Your brand identity is the entire spectrum of touch points between your school and its stakeholders. It is your identity.

Your brand should encompass your school’s heart, personality, story, and values; these specific characteristics are what resonates with your audience and differentiates you from any other school. It is what makes you unique.

Think of your brand as your school’s DNA. Your logo, values and identity are the genes that collectively make up the complete DNA molecule.

With a brand refresh, you don’t want to completely start from scratch – but rework, revisit and develop what you currently have, including but not limited to:

• Values
• Mission
• Logo
• Motto
• Website
• Brand Guidelines
• Social Media
• Newsletters
• Enrolment collateral
• Letterheads
• Photography
• Staff Email Signatures
• Signage

Competitive Advantage

1. Have you researched what some of the best schools are doing from a branding, marketing, and online perspective?
2. Have you factored in what is happening within the education sector currently?
3. Have you planned out how you’re going to advise and communicate with your existing parents, students, and teachers on your school’s brand refresh?

The key to great branding and conveying it successfully is having a clear message that links back to your school visions and values. If your audience feels like they know you and what you stand for, they are more likely to trust you. This is vital for attracting new students and forging ties in the community.

Sponsorship Ready has developed a brand refresh checklist for school’s wanting to professionally convey their school’s purpose, vision, and values to the community.

If your school requires support in producing or refreshing its brand guidelines, Sponsorship Ready can help in bringing this to life, ensuring all is in conjunction with your school’s key values and objectives.

Find out more about Sponsorship Ready’s branding guidelines here.

Sponsorship Ready is a professional development and capacity building program, with an unwavering solutions-based approach to sponsorship in schools.

While it can be difficult to put a dollar figure on the awareness or community-building aspects of social media in schools, there is one area that’s easy to quantify: sponsor acquisition and retention.

1. DO YOUR RESEARCH
   

Before you can effectively engage new or existing sponsors; you need to know what your social media presence can offer them. Start with the following questions:

• How many social media followers do we have?

Understanding the number of followers on your school’s social media supports in defining how engaged your audience is when reviewing your page insights and data,

• What’s our social media reach?
  Using Facebook Insights, schools can define top posts that deliver the most reach for your school’s Facebook page. See what content works well and how you can best leverage your data to create sponsorship driven content.
• What are my audience’s demographics?

Knowing your social audience’s age, gender and location helps schools identify where their most valuable audiences lie and can be a useful tool to leverage when seeking sponsorship at your school.

• How does my school stack up against similar school social media pages?
  Through the Benchmarking tool located in Facebook Insights, schools can compare social media performance and content with surrounding schools in their catchment and define where successes and opportunities lie.

TIP: Research your existing sponsors social media presence. If a sponsor doesn’t have a strong following, therein lies and opportunity for your school to support in driving reach and engagement. On the flipside, sponsors with a strong social media presence can compliment and support what your school is already doing online.

2. MAKE A PLAN

Inviting your school sponsors to work with you and define your social media plan maximises involvement and helps schools understand precisely what your sponsors hope to accomplish through the sponsorship.

Plus, it’s an opportunity to come up with creative ways to meet sponsor’s needs.

3. SHARE YOUR SPONSOR’S MESSAGES

An easy and simply way to provide social media benefit to school sponsors is to re-post and share their content. This not only a great way to drive recognition for your sponsors, it’s also an effective way to keep your social audience highly engaged and informed. This can also be appetising for prospective students and families looking to enrol at a new school. Make sure you refer to them as Sponsors!

4. CREATE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL CONTENT

Creating social media content that benefits both your school and its sponsors can take your school sponsorship to the next level.

• Sharing organic photo and video content that showcases the good work a sponsor is doing in their community and their support of the school while increasing the reach of your school’s social media content.
• You can also offer your sponsors exclusivity in a type of content. Just ensure transparency. For example, if your school posts a monthly style series of content i.e. “Student of the Month”, perhaps this content is sponsored by a sponsor that includes their logo and branded messaging.
• Invite your sponsors to engage with your social audience by providing blog style content for your school’s website

5. TELL A STORY

Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to engage your social audience and provides ample opportunity to create content that aligns with your school and sponsors values. One of the best ways to convey storytelling is through video and blog style content.

6. EXPRESS GRATITUDE

Like most of us, your school sponsors like to feel appreciated. It doesn’t take much effort to post of photo of students (with appropriate approvals) in front of their signage that showcases them as a sponsor. If your sponsors support a specific program at your school, there lies an opportunity to further personalise your thank you messaging that link backs to the positive outcomes for students supported by your sponsors.

7. SHARE YOUR RESULTS

Share social media successes with your sponsors through Facebook Insights. It’s a great opportunity to showcase results of sponsor driven content and for your school to review reach, shares, likes and increase in followers to refine and define what compelling sponsor content looks like for your school’s social media.

Ultimately, the key to successful sponsorship at your school is in providing value for both your school and its associated sponsors.

Sponsorship Ready’s leading and proven 3-step framework provides peace of mind for school’s wanting to successfully deliver on business, brand, and community engagement objectives for their sponsors, while effectively conveying their school’s purpose, vision, and values.

Find out how your school can become Sponsorship Ready with a FREE 30-minute strategy session and start succeeding in sponsorship at your school today.

You bet it will!

With over 7.7 billion people in the world, more than 2.9 billion of these people have active a Facebook page.

That’s nearly 40% of the entire world population logging into Facebook each and every day.

A key to attracting potential sponsors to engage with your school community is defining your reach and impact.

Social media can provide valuable statistics to help quantify this.

Examples of statistics that can be gathered include:

• Facebook followers
• Instagram followers
• YouTube subscribers
• Facebook video views
• Facebook post likes
• Social Media Insights to define content strategy
• Demographic Data

In a recent survey, we discovered:

• 10 of the largest schools in Queensland have 5000+ Facebook followers
• 50% of 20 of the largest Queensland schools use Twitter to engage with their community
• 57% of the 7 largest schools in Queensland have a YouTube channel
• 100% of the 40 largest schools in Queensland have 1000+ Facebook followers

What a great opportunity for these schools to take advantage of!

Did you know Sponsorship Ready supports schools in professional development and capacity building in social media marketing?

Why not check out our Capacity Building & Professional Development program that’s tailored to your school and features free templates and platforms to create social media content that performs.

Schools play a huge role in their community, yet many struggle to convert that to sponsorship revenue.

If you’re wondering why, keep reading as Sponsorship Ready covers off the most common mistakes schools make with Sponsorship.

1. They talk to benefits instead of understanding objectives

​All too often a school will engage with a prospective sponsor and just start offering benefits like signage, or apparel positions or activation opportunities but they are making a BIG mistake. How could they possibly know their marketing and business objectives without having this ‘discovery’ meeting. Your school will find once they explore the prospects commercial, brand and community engagement objectives it will be decidedly easier to find the right sponsorship platform.

2. They confuse fundraising and sponsorship

If your school can deliver on business objectives it can succeed in sponsorship and change the narrative from a $500 donation to that of genuine sponsorship. Schools are powerful conduits to thousands of people in a catchment and this is worth more than mere donations. Think in terms of what the prospect is spending on its current marketing activity and raise the bar!

3. They go to market and pitch for Sponsorship with collateral which misses the mark

An invitation to sponsor the school is an opportunity to engage with the community, improve outcomes for students, showcase programs the school is running, professionally promote its purpose, vision and values and good governance and so much more. It has some specific and unique ingredients which includes but is certainly not limited to a) great photography and an image bank that captures the heart of the school (and not all enrolment facing images!), b) compelling copy and c) defines the schools reach and impact.

Some other key reasons include:

• They have not considered what they really have to sell
• Their selling tools do not target the audience
• They are simply not sponsorship ready when they approach the market
• Who is going to manage a sponsorship program once its created?

Sponsorship Ready’s leading and proven 3-step framework provides peace of mind for school’s wanting to successfully deliver on business, brand, and community engagement objectives, while effectively conveying their school’s purpose, vision, and values.

Find out how your school can become Sponsorship Ready with a FREE 30-minute strategy session and start succeeding in sponsorship at your school today.

Your brand is your identity and the way your school becomes recognisable and can be differentiated from other schools in the eyes of your school community.

So much so that today, 89% of people stay loyal to brands that share their values.

So, when it comes to building a strong school identity and connection to community, one of the ways to ensure your school team understands your school brand is through creating a set of branding and logo guidelines.

So, what exactly are brand guidelines?

Simply put, brand guidelines are a set of rules, definitions and examples that explain your brand and how to utilise your brand assets. This includes colours, logos, fonts, imagery and more.

From print to your school’s website and social media, the intent of branding guidelines is to ultimately drive a consistent and feel across all your school assets.

That’s why, here at Sponsorship Ready, we work with schools to provide brand guidelines that save you and your team time by having an easily accessible document, that’s simple to navigate and comprehend and includes:

Logos

• How to use your logo:
• minimum sizes, spacing and where not to place it
• secondary logos (a school crest, or house-specific logos), include them as well.

Colours

• A clear outline of your school’s primary and secondary colour palettes

Typography

• A clear guideline of typefaces that you use at your school for headings and body copy across the web and print, and how to access them.

Imagery

• How to use imagery across photo and illustrations
• Different platform usages
• Examples of how all your assets work together
• a screenshot of your website homepage
• a social media post
• a brochure
• a photo of school merchandise (such as a water bottle or backpack).

Sponsorship Ready has a talented team of marketers and graphic designers who can build your school brand and logo guidelines and support in driving brand consistency.