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? 

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.

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.