Core Services.

Ways to Work Together

Scroll through our core services to explore ways that we can work together. After a conversation to understand the needs for your school, you’ll receive a custom proposal of services.

  • Marketing Audit

    Marketing and Communications Audit and Strategic Planning

    Goal: Message clarity, prioritization, school-wide alignment, execution planning

    Service: Based on interviews and an assessment of current practices, you will receive a key findings and recommendations document that analyzes needs and prioritizes areas for improvement. Next, a planning document can be created that details agreed-upon objectives, audiences, key messages, tactics, owners, and timelines. This will provide you with the roadmap for coordinated efforts and prevent siloed and sometimes conflicting messaging. It will also clarify priorities and help teams execute intentionally against their highest impact activities.

  • Marketing content

    Content Marketing and Distinctive Storytelling

    Goal: Admission pipeline building, student retention, reputation management

    Service: Today, parents and students expect to see real, lived examples of a school’s mission and values to validate their school decision. They want to be educated, inspired and feel like you are connecting with them individually and personally. Through interviews with the admissions and communications teams and an audit of current practices, you will receive recommendations on content and channels to enhance your current practices, how to apply a segment-based approach to ensure relevance of content to your audience, and a process for content collection and ownership.

  • Skills Building

    Organizational Structures and Skill Building

    Goal: Team optimization, clarity of roles/responsibilities, employee satisfaction and motivation

    Service: With a clear understanding of school goals and what your key audiences need and want, this service will focus on helping your school maximize the talents on your team and identify any gaps. You will receive recommendations related to organizational structures, roles and responsibilities, job descriptions and skill development leaving your team motivated and equipped to execute effectively in today’s digitally savvy world.

  • Adopting Changes

    Initiative Rollouts and Adopting Change

    Goal: Case building, behavior change, adoption

    Service: Change is often met with skepticism and resistance. Grounded in an understanding of your goals and the spectrum of opinions and perspectives of your stakeholders, you will receive a step-by-step and segment-specific change management plan. This plan will help audiences understand, and ultimately accept, difficult or controversial changes based on a projected adoption curve. Through planning, messages will be better understood, and misunderstandings avoided. And, your school will be in a proactive and controlled position, rather than a reactive, and sometimes defensive one.

Examples

  • planning

    Marketing and Communications Audit and Strategic Planning

    The communications department at Alpha School receives requests daily from academic leaders, the development department, and the admission office. The head of school realized that each department was working in a silo, missing opportunities to reinforce key brand messages and overloading their community members with communication. The result was unread emails, audience frustration, inertia, and a slow erosion of connection to the school.

    With a strategy in place, the communication director had a reliable tool to guide a coordinated and purposeful set of messages that elevated the conversation and increased emotional pride and connection to the school. Team satisfaction, efficiency, and collaboration also improved.

  • content

    Content Marketing and Storytelling

    Alpha School’s strategic plan committed to growing its early childhood program. To accomplish this, Alpha School knew they needed to show what was distinct about their program. Through a series of online webinars, Alpha School offered parents lunch-and-learns (while their young children were napping) to educate them on early childhood research and philosophies, demonstrating their expertise in the area.

    This content marketing approach was applied to other channels that together increased Alpha’s admission pipeline and reduced attrition. In the longer term, these efforts solidified Alpha’s reputation as a leader for this age group, built relationships of trust between school and family, and helped to attract talented educators.

  • Building

    Organizational Structures and Skill Building

    The head of school at Beta School hired a new communications manager who needed to quickly ramp up and be prepared to not only execute daily communication needs, but also support larger strategic initiatives.

    With coaching, support in setting up processes to help prioritize requests, and with a marketing and communications strategy, the manager had the strategic tools in place to allow her to execute more productively and effectively. It also provided organizational confidence in the systems that were in place to ensure quality communications school-wide, and to provide the head of school the strategic support he needed.

  • change

    Initiative Rollouts and Adopting Change

    Beta School had made a strategic commitment to further its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. They understood that their audiences were in vastly different places across a spectrum from skeptical and resistant to desperately ready to adopt the new practices.

    Through a detailed change management plan, Beta School understood how they needed to manage groups differently, with targeted messages, channels and expectations, with the goal of moving the whole school in the same direction. The plan was presented by the head of school and DEI director to the board of trustees and shared with the wider community in a transparent manner.