The Comprehensive Guide to School Marketing

School marketing is the practice of influencing how people think and feel about your schools. Whether people voice it or not, everyone in your community already has an opinion about your schools. It could be good, bad, or neutral. If somebody has a negative view of your district, that's something you're going to want to address. For those who have a positive or neutral view of your district, you should leverage that momentum and make it easy for them to be even more active advocates for you.

This is where marketing your schools comes into play. When you’re utilizing the right marketing strategies, you have the power to influence your audience to think about your schools in a way that aligns with your district’s mission, vision, and values.

In essence, marketing is a proactive approach to building your school brand. You're laying the foundation, brick by brick, of who you are and what you stand for. The goal is that your community will have a complete picture of your campuses in mind when they think about your schools. 

It’s hard to know where to start with school marketing because it encompasses so many different strategies, platforms, and tools. Your social presence—meaning your presence on social media platforms—can be just as important as your school website. Likewise, search engine optimization (SEO), which is the practice of optimizing your website to appear on the first page of search engines, can be just as important as optimizing for paid advertising. The point is, it all falls under the umbrella of marketing. So where do you start?

Before we get into the weeds of platforms, strategies, and tools, we need to take a step back and start with your foundation: your brand identity. 

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What is a School Brand?

Your school brand is happening around you every day, and it’s more than just a logo or hashtag. It’s your district’s identity. A school brand is the visual and tangible representation of your school district's mission and heartbeat. It represents who you are, your values, and what makes your district unique. It also unifies your schools and creates a sense of collective community pride. When your brand is serving its purpose, it has the power to influence the way people think and feel about your school district for the better. 

What Makes Your Schools Different?

To start branding your school, ask yourself: How are your schools different from others? Every school district has a little bit of magic that sets it apart from others across the country. And it’s that singular charm that draws people in, that the community loves to rally behind. This differentiation point can help you build your brand identity.

Take Nike, for example. If you break down their products and services, they’re not much different than Adidas, Reebok or Puma—it’s all sports brand apparel. But many people are willing to pay more for Nike’s brand name. Why? Nike differentiates themselves by inspiring everyday people to embrace difficulty and challenges. By motivating people to put in the work to accomplish their goals, Nike’s core values can be summed up in a single phrase: “just do it”.

Nike has positioned themselves to be different from their competitors, and as a school, you should be cultivating that same differentiation. A quick note though: What makes your schools special isn’t necessarily unique to your school district. Think instead about what your community—from your teachers to retirees—says that they love about your district. This is what makes your district distinct, and this is core to how your district should approach your school marketing strategy.

Core Message

Now that we’ve talked about brand identity from a high level, let’s break down how you can build your brand identity, starting with your core message. Your core message is a short statement that identifies a need in the community and addresses how your school meets that need. It’s usually one to two sentences long.

To craft your core message, start by answering these questions:

• What do families and teachers want and need from a school district?

• What is your district’s definition of student success?

• What does your competition offer?

• What does your district uniquely offer?

• What makes you most proud of your schools?

Now, take a look at your answers. What families and teachers need, and what your district uniquely offers (that your competition does not)—that’s your sweet spot. This is your core message. If these questions, and the entire concept of a core message sound familiar to you, it’s likely because your core message is often similar to (or even the same as) your district’s mission or vision statement.

Case Study: Washington’s Ridgefield School District

You barely have to glance at any of Washington’s Ridgefield School District’s materials to realize exactly what their core message is. Right at the bottom of their district’s homepage, you can see their purpose statement:

Ridgefield’s team has worked to craft a clear core message. For parents who might be moving to Ridgefield, the statement highlights the district’s unique community connections. For those who might be tempted by the nearby 4A high school, it plays up the benefit of a smaller school’s more personalized experience. They’ve figured out what the families in their community want and offered unique solutions, all in just one sentence. Because this narrative is the backbone of their brand, it’s everywhere. 

Ridgefield is learning from the best: they’re repeating their message over and over again. They read their purpose statement before football games and board meetings, and even include it in the footer of district emails. A boiled-down version—simply “Pursuing Premier”—shows up in logos, on school walls, and even on X as a hashtag. 

As a result, practically anyone in the community, even people who aren’t directly involved with the district, can tell you exactly what Ridgefield’s about. 

“If you ask somebody in the district, just a resident, about Pursuing Premier, they’ll say, ‘That’s the Ridgefield School District,’” former Superintendent Nathan McCann says.

Brand Toolkit

Once you’ve established your core message, you’ll need to create a brand toolkit that you can share both internally and externally. Your brand toolkit should contain the visual components of your brand, including your school logo variations, color palette, fonts, district motto, and more. Working together, these elements breathe life into your brand and put a face to your name. Your brand toolkit also acts as a guiding document, providing people with a framework for how to use your brand assets across all marketing platforms. A brand toolkit can either be in the form of an online brand center, an extended google folder or pdf, or even a hard copy.

This figure includes many of the essential elements you’ll need to create your brand toolkit:

Having a brand toolkit is important because it strengthens consistency with your brand. Using the same fonts, color palette, and visual elements helps reinforce your core message and strengthens overall brand awareness. It also makes it easier to communicate these expectations among stakeholders. Many school communicators know how difficult it can be to see a dozen different versions of your logo on club T-shirts. Having a one-stop shop for staff to view, download, and understand expectations is a great way to set them on the right track. 

Remember our Nike example? We all know Nike apparel when we see it because we recognize the Swoosh—and when we see the Swoosh, we instinctively think about their slogan, “just do it.” That’s the power of maintaining brand consistency, which all starts with a brand toolkit.

Tie It All Together

School Website Design

Your school website is often the first place people encounter your brand. It’s your best opportunity to show off your values, culture, and unique selling points. When considering school website design, you probably think about the creative element—in other words, how the website looks. While looks are important (we’re talking websites here), the three elements that matter most for a school website are actually responsive design, ease of use, and ADA-compliance.

Responsive Design

Responsive design means that your website is accessible on any kind of device, from small phones to large desktops and everything in between. A responsive school website is important because it drastically improves your user's overall experience. We’ve all encountered a website that makes us pinch, side scroll, and zoom in just to read its content. A frustrating experience like that usually leaves a bad taste in your mouth, not only for the website, but even the brand itself. And since your website could be many people’s first impression of your brand, this isn’t something you can afford to let slide.

As the trend in mobile searches continues to outpace desktop searches, Google announced the implementation of mobile-first indexing with the hope of eliminating these issues. This essentially means that Google will prioritize how the mobile version of your website functions and looks above the desktop version. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile first, it will hurt your ranking position and thus your visibility on the search engine results page. That means fewer visits to your website and potentially fewer prospective students and families for your schools.

Whether you’re working with our in-house team or a third-party vendor, you’ll want to make sure your school web design is responsive and optimized for mobile first. 

Read Owning Your Digital Spaces

Ease of Use and Navigation

It should be incredibly easy to find information on your school website. Whether parents are looking for the lunch menu or teachers are looking for your employee handbook, your school website should be designed in a way that’s easy to use and navigate. It should have a good user experience.

User experience, in essence, is the quality of interaction and the feeling a person has when navigating your website or app. What does that look like from a practical standpoint? It means having an understandable navigation menu, clear call-to-action buttons, and a simple, beautiful design that doesn’t distract from the information people are looking for. 

When we design a school district website internally, we always make sure families, staff, and community members can find a few key pieces of information quickly and easily through our navigation menu:

• Documents      

• News

• About Us

• Departments

• Students & Families

• Community

• Employees

• Calendar

Along with having a clear-cut navigation menu, it’s important to optimize your website with prominent and enticing call-to-action buttons. A call-to-action is a prompt on a website (usually in the form of a button) that encourages users to take an action that leads to a conversion. A conversion is an action step a person takes on a website—like filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, scheduling an appointment, or visiting a landing page. It all depends on what your end goal is. As you’re designing your school website, you’ll need to think about your conversion objectives and subsequently where to place your calls-to-action. For example, if you’re building an enrollment page, your end goal is likely collecting information of families interested in registering. The conversion would be filling out the form to register or learn more about your district. 

The homepage of your school website is the most important page for call-to-action buttons. Think of the homepage as your site’s first impression. Because most web traffic comes through the homepage, and people, on average, spend less than 15 seconds on a website, you only have a short window of time to grab their attention. 

That’s why we recommend placing your most important call-to-action buttons above the fold on your homepage. The term ‘above the fold’ simply means the top half of a website that a user can see before scrolling down. For your school, this might mean placing your enrollment and career application buttons at the top of your homepage where people can easily find them. 

Schedule A 15 Minute School Web Design Demo

ADA Compliance

Think about your school district’s website—does it provide a user-friendly experience for everyone? Would someone be able to understand your school’s content without being able to look at their screen, use a mouse, or hear a video?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ensures that “places of public accommodation” are made accessible to Americans with disabilities. Since a lot of the information families and community members are interested in can be accessed through your school website, your website needs to be ADA compliant. 

If your website isn’t ADA compliant, not only are you failing to serve your district’s families—as well as anyone else who visits your website, you could receive an accessibility complaint from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education.

While there are many types of disabilities covered by the ADA, you can frame your website’s accessibility around ensuring that people with physical, mental, or developmental impairments face no extra challenges in accessing or navigating your website or attached spaces. 

Read The Guide To K-12 ADA Compliance For School Websites

School Mobile App

Most digital interaction lives right in your pocket—on your smartphone. According to Pew Research Center, over 90% of American adults now have a smartphone compared to just 35% in 2011. On these devices, apps reign supreme. The value of mobile applications is that they combine all of the information your community could need into one unique place. Providing users a great experience with your school app not only helps boost engagement with your online presence but also strengthens your school’s brand.

There are a couple of elements that are vital to a great user experience on your school mobile app:

Fully-Branded Design

It may sound obvious, but your school app should be an actual app. There are plenty of "school apps" that just send users to a modified version of the school's website instead of offering any real value as an app. What’s more, sometimes users have to log in to an account or manually select their child’s school in order to see information related to your brand. That’s far too many steps for users to follow to reach your content. It’s better if one click on your mobile app leads users directly to your school’s information. 

In addition, your app should be a repository for information, not a repository for links. Anything a parent needs—from the lunch menu, to the basketball team’s schedule—should be accessible directly from a smartphone instead of somewhere else. Segmenting content like this creates a frustrating user experience, while also bringing third-party brands to the forefront instead of your school’s brand. When you bring everything directly into your app, you help your audience access the information they need faster as well as keeping them within a branded environment that you control.  

Comprehensive Information

A school mobile app should be the single source of information for parents, families and community members. For example, it’s important to include districtwide updates, as well as individual campus updates—not one or the other. This keeps users from bouncing between the app and their browser as they try to access information relevant to their child. 

Along the same lines, your school app should be multifaceted and multifunctional. Instead of toggling between multiple third-party tools for things like athletics scores or important staff documents, bring everything together in one place—your app. It just makes life easier for your community.

Build Your School App With Thrillshare

Ease of Use

Finally, your school app should be easy to use. There are plenty of examples of great content and features that are obscured by poor user interface or just plain bad user experience. Here are some factors that could influence how people think and feel about your app and brand:

Responsiveness: Your app should open without delay. It should never crash. As you perform different functions and clicks, it should be able to respond quickly. Slow load times and lag between the push of a button and an action is annoying and can even cause people to close out of the app altogether.  

Ease of Navigation: It should be easy to find information within your app. If it takes more than a few clicks to get to any particular section, you run the risk of user confusion and frustration. Most people who are using any school communication app know exactly what information they’re looking for and expect everything to be at their fingertips.

Familiar Look and Feel: Your brand is important. It's how people in your community recognize and identify your school and your values. It’s therefore vital that your app be built from the ground up with your brand in mind. That includes everything from your logo, to the color scheme and graphics used throughout. You want users to immediately feel like they’re engaging with your school each time they open up the application.

Schedule a 15 Minute School Mobile App Demo

When you think of marketing, it’s understandable that your mind might go to a sales campaign or creative advertisements. These are all aspects of marketing; however, they don’t tell the full story. Marketing is about influencing how people think and feel about your brand, and there’s nothing that says influence is just a one-time deal. Big, private-sector brands like Wal-Mart or H&M treat a product sale as if it’s the beginning of a relationship, not the end. Brands like these understand the importance of engaging with current customers just as much as potential customers. 

Internal vs. External School Marketing

External marketing is about growing interactions and brand impressions with people who aren’t already a part of your school community. 

Internal marketing, on the other hand, is how you keep current families and employees engaged and bought-in to your district’s mission. The key to internal school marketing is regular, consistent touchpoints that reinforce why families made the right choice to enroll in your district in the first place. Think of it like a good friendship. The most meaningful relationships are those built over time—they take work.

The good news is that you’re probably already doing some internal marketing for your school, whether you realize it or not. Think of the email newsletter you share with your district each month. This steady stream of positive updates, and things to look forward to in the weeks ahead, deepen the relationship between your schools and your community.

Simplify Parent-Teacher Communication

One of the most subtle but effective ways to market to your internal audiences is through simplifying parent-teacher communication. This suggestion might seem like it’s coming out of left field, but hear us out. After talking to thousands of school leaders across the country, we’ve realized teacher-parent communication is a huge pain point for school districts. 

When parents, families, and teachers have to juggle multiple third-party tools, communication inevitably gets lost and the user experience becomes frustrating. So what’s the solution? 

We’ve found that eliminating third-party tools and funneling all of your communication into one place makes teachers and families lives much easier. And if their lives are easier, they’re happy customers, which is a key part of internal marketing. Remember, marketing never stops. You should always be looking for ways to build loyalty with your existing customers.

Rooms: The Hub Of Parent-Teacher Communication

Every school district has their own unique goals for social media. You may be trying to grow brand awareness or increase traffic to your website. Maybe your focus is building relationships with current and prospective families and teachers in your community. Whatever your goals may be, we’ve found that there are a few social media best practices that every school district should stick to. We call them The Golden Rules of Social Media. Let’s dig in.

Stay Consistent

You might feel like you’re saying and doing the same thing over and over again, but a vital part of social media for schools is maintaining consistency. Consistency generates more traffic to your website, builds relationships, and increases recognition and affinity for your district’s brand as a whole.

Staying consistent in social media can sound a bit ambiguous, so let's break it down. Social media consistency means:

Sticking to Your Brand Style Guide 

Your logos, color palette, font choice, and photo and video editing quality should all have the same look and feel every time you create a post. When someone sees your post pop up in their news feed, they should be able to easily identify your brand by your visuals alone.

Maintain Posting Frequency 

How often should you post on each social media platform? Well, there’s really no one-size-fits-all strategy. Social media management platform Hootsuite recommends posting at least three times a week on your Instagram feed; twice per day on your Instagram Stories; once per day on Facebook; and twice per day on X. 

If you don’t have the bandwidth to maintain that schedule, though, don’t sweat it. Frequency is far less crucial than consistency. Evaluate how often you can realistically post on each platform, set your own schedule, and most importantly, stick to it. If your Instagram followers are used to hearing from you five times a week—and for whatever reason, you lose momentum and dip down to two times a week—you’ll see a noticeable drop in your engagement rate and followers. 

Read Instagram for Schools

Content Variety

Simply put, content variety means distributing a wide range of social media content for the purpose of reaching all of your target audiences. Content is the only part of your school’s social media strategy that shouldn’t be consistent. 

Take Facebook, for example. Your audience on Facebook probably consists of several different demographics, like faculty, teachers, families, and community leaders. What might appeal to families—like a post about what the cafeteria is serving for lunch this week—won’t appeal to the community leaders following your page. They may be more interested in school performance ratings and news about how your district is giving back to the city.

Remember, content variety is more than what you say. It’s about the way you say and deliver it. That means changing up your method of sharing and distributing content. You should strive to share an even blend of posts, stories, reels, live videos, polls, and more every month. 

Additionally, it’s important to incorporate a variety of creative assets into your editorial calendar. That means photography, graphics, video, and reels should all be a part of your monthly social plan. It might be tempting to fall back on “quick” forms of content, like tweeting the scores of last night’s football game. But more polished content, like a 30-second video about a new school program, is just as vital for keeping users engaged. 

After talking with several school leaders, we’ve found that a major pain point in social media marketing for schools is coming up with fresh, unique content to share. And while every school is different, we recommend posting a variety of content around these topics: 

• School Life

• Culture & Values

• Academic Excellence

• Teacher & Staff Appreciation

• Community or City Life

• News

• Real-time Content

Reputation Management

Reputation management, as it pertains to social media, is the act of influencing the way people think and feel about your brand online. A reputation management point person is someone who represents your school brand by actively engaging with your audience online. Rep managers are the face and the voice of your social media accounts, responding to comments, likes, reviews, and direct messages on a daily basis.

Why does reputation management for schools matter? It might seem trivial, but taking the time to respond to comments and reviews (even if they’re positive) is an easy way to build a positive perception of your school online. Your quick response brings delight and ultimately establishes trust with your audience. This is important because the people who trust you are going to be the same people who advocate for you if your brand is ever attacked online. 

A social media best practice for schools is to establish a dedicated reputation management point person. This person will check all of your social accounts two to three times per day for 15 to 30 minutes and respond to people on behalf of the school. It’s important to choose a person who can write well and has a high attention to detail. They should understand the ins and outs of your school and have a clear understanding of how to best represent your school brand online.

But what do you do when someone posts something negative on social? This is a question we get asked frequently by school leaders. Responding to negative comments and messages on social media is what private sector marketers call crisis management. The name isn’t as daunting as it sounds. In fact, studies show when crisis management is handled the right way, you can turn the most vocal detractors into advocates for your schools. 

There are a few best practices in handling negative social media comments that every communications person should know. We discuss them in our SchoolCEO article here.

Read Crisis in the Comments

Having these essential channels of communication is a good first step in establishing a strong school marketing plan. The second step is to actually make a plan by identifying your goals for the year and using each channel cohesively to accomplish those goals. 

It’s easy to see your website, social media, school app, and other marketing channels as singular units that don’t interact with each other. But the opposite is true. Each channel is like a thread on a spider’s web or a brick in the foundation of a house. Together they hold up your school market plan. The challenge is to make these elements work in tandem with one another, all while managing a budget, gathering content, and more. So how do you do it? 

Set a Budget

As you approach your school marketing plan for the year, the first step is to establish a budget. How much do you want to spend on social media ads? What about traditional advertising like radio or billboards? Consider how much you’re willing to spend on digital channels like Google Ads. Once you have a budget laid out for each advertising channel, make a spreadsheet to keep track of how much you’re spending per month. If you don’t have a spreadsheet, you can download our free marketing budget template here.

Download Annual Campaign Budget for Schools

Approach the Year in Quarters

Once you have a budget in place, you can begin strategizing. The best school marketing strategies are approached seasonally. There’s so much that happens in one school year and in the summer months. It can be overwhelming to think about your marketing goals in December when you’re only in the month of March. That’s why, at Apptegy, we like to approach the year in quarters and plan our goals accordingly.

Get together with your communications team and discuss what you want to accomplish from January through March (Q1). Maybe your district is in the midst of passing a bond and you want to devote the first quarter of the year towards getting the word out to your community. Think through your marketing strategy for Q1. How do you want to promote your bond on social media? Who’s gathering content? Assign a point person to set up landing pages for your campaign. You already have an annual budget for the year but how should that budget be allocated in Q1? Then discuss how to measure success.

You’ll use the same planning method for Q2 (April through June), Q3 (July through September) and Q4 (October through December). Making a school marketing plan is a lot less stressful when you approach it seasonally.  

Once you have a rough idea of what you want to accomplish, you can begin planning your campaign(s) for that quarter. The term “school marketing campaign” gets thrown around loosely these days. It’s understandable that few people actually know what it is. We’ll break it down.

What is a School Marketing Campaign?

A school marketing campaign promotes a specific goal, such as raising awareness for an upcoming school bond, generating enrollment leads, or promoting a school event. Campaigns are usually promoted through a variety of marketing channels, like email, digital advertising, social media, and print advertising.

When embarking on a marketing campaign, the first step is establishing what you want to accomplish. Clear, quantifiable goals should guide the creation of your campaign and the metrics you intend to measure to evaluate its success or failure. These goals could be wide-ranging, from increasing the number of followers on a given social media platform to boosting the number of families who express interest in enrolling. 

While you should always define clear and specific goals for your school marketing campaign, most of the time they will fall under these main categories: 

Awareness

A campaign designed to introduce or increase knowledge of your school brand, a particular program, or even an important deadline like school registration. 

Consideration

A campaign that aims to increase engagement with your school brand, potentially setting the stage for later action. One example of a consideration campaign is any attempt at generating more website traffic. 

Conversions  

A campaign centered around engagement and getting your audience to take a particular action, such as submitting a form on your website.

School Landing Pages

Once you’ve defined your goals, you need to create landing pages to support your campaign. A school landing page is a web page created specifically for a marketing campaign. Visitors are directed to your landing page after they click on an email link, ad, or social media post from your campaign. Most landing pages have elements like call-to-action buttons, social proof, and forms. These elements help website visitors “take the next step,” which could look like filling out an inquiry form or signing up for a newsletter. We discuss the foundational elements of a school landing page in our SchoolCEO article here.

Read The Anatomy of a School Landing Page

Set Up and Execution

The next step is setting up your campaign. You’ll need to decide which marketing channels would be most effective to use. Here are a few you can choose from:

• Pay-per-click

• Social media

• Retargeting

• Print advertising

• Radio

• Email marketing

If you’re interested in utilizing LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram for your school marketing campaign, we’ve outlined step-by-step instructions on setting up and monitoring your campaign in this article.

How to Launch a School Marketing Campaign

Tracking Analytics

Once your campaign is up and running, you’re going to want to know if your efforts are having the desired impact. You can monitor your performance by tracking a few simple numbers. Common metrics for school marketing campaigns include:

• Impressions: number of ad views

• Clicks: number of ad engagements

• Click-through-rate (CTR): number of ad clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100

• Spend: amount of money spent on ads

Your marketing goals should determine what metrics you choose to track. If the goal is to increase brand awareness, impressions should be your driving metric. If you want your audience to engage with specific information, clicks might be the best way to measure success.

Monitoring Performance and Making Improvements

Over the course of your marketing campaign, the data you collect along the way will be invaluable in gauging whether or not your particular effort is having the desired impact. Some people think that a marketing campaign is a “set it and forget it” affair. The reality, however, is that the best school marketing campaigns are interactive processes. They aren’t one-time efforts. Little tweaks in targeting or refreshed ad copy and creatives can make a big impact. 

Remember, there’s nothing wrong with making changes midway through as long as you're working towards hitting the goals you set at the beginning of your campaign.

Watertown Unified School District Case Study

When Wisconsin's Watertown Unified School District (WUSD) wanted to increase their enrollment, they turned to a marketing campaign to promote their diverse academic offerings. With a set of ads running across both Facebook and Google Search, the district team regularly evaluated ad performance on a weekly basis. 

WUSD was able to adjust tactics on the fly throughout the campaign. The first thing they noticed was that videos performed better on Facebook, as opposed to still images. In response, they quickly switched over all of their ads to videos in order to maximize engagement. 

By promoting engaging content that highlighted what their district had to offer, Watertown was able to build not only awareness among prospective students and their families but also stronger brand affinity within their community.

Nearly every aspect of a district’s operations, from staffing to program offerings, stems from one key factor: enrollment. After all, in most cases, your enrollment numbers determine your funding—and your funding determines just about everything else. Enrollment marketing is a complex problem that can’t be solved with a simple answer, but one strategy can help: the customer journey.

The customer journey refers to the series of steps customers—or, in your case, families—move through as they learn more about an organization or brand. Applied to enrollment, it tells the story of how families join your district and how your happiest families become advocates for your schools.

Step 1: Awareness

During the Awareness phase, families encounter your brand for the first time. In this stage, families may or may not be shopping around for a school district. Your objective here is simple: Get in front of prospective enrollees’ eyes, and make them aware of your schools. Or, if you’re the only district in your town, remind families that your schools are doing great things for the community.

What to Do in the Awareness Phase: Make touch points with your audience through ads, social media, community events, word-of-mouth, and search engines. These are all great ways to leave lasting impressions with your audience and help them develop familiarity with your brand.

Read more about the Awareness phase.

Step 2: Interest

Like the name implies, you’ve probably piqued a family’s interest by the time they arrive at this stage of the journey. Maybe they’re new to your area, or they have a child just reaching school age. Perhaps they’re unhappy with their current district. Whatever a family’s reason may be, when they’re in the Interest phase, they are actively comparing schools to find the best fit.

What to Do in the Interest Phase: Share student success stories and testimonials, offer tours of your schools, and create a page on your website detailing what it’s like to be a student in your district. This stage of the customer journey is all about making unique connections. What are the little things you can do to make your district stand out? 

Read more about the Interest phase.

Step 3: Decision

The Decision phase is a critical moment in the customer journey; at this point, families are deciding to enroll their child in your district. However, the decision isn’t official until they’ve submitted their last registration form and their child has shown up to class. Focus on making the enrollment experience as seamless, helpful, and easy as possible.

What to Do in the Decision Phase: Customer service and hospitality play a big role in this stage. Being readily available to answer questions and explain the registration process can go a long way toward offering a seamless enrollment experience. Your enrollment page is arguably your most important tool in the Decision phase, so you’ll want to make sure this page provides helpful information and an excellent user experience.

Read more about the Decision phase.

Step 4: Retention

In the marketing world, the Retention phase is all about delighting and engaging families so that they continue on with your district rather than switching to another option. Making sure they’re having a great experience is key to keeping them in your schools.

What to Do in the Retention Phase: One of the best ways to retain families is to keep them connected to your district. You can craft these connections in a variety of ways: investing in extracurricular programs, providing exciting course selections, being strategic about feeder patterns, or even building ongoing touch points through newsletters. Think about how you can keep families looking ahead and continuously excited for the future.

Read more about the Retention phase.

Step 5: Advocacy

Advocacy is the last stage of the customer journey. By this point, families don’t just want to be a part of your district—they’re committed to it. Families in this phase will often advocate for your schools to their relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. They’re also the group of people who will stand up for your district if or when it’s necessary.

What to Do in the Advocacy Phase: To grow more advocates, you have to invest in the ones you already have. The Advocacy phase is all about amplifying your advocates’ voices and influence. Engage with them through community leadership programs and family advocacy initiatives. Because word-of-mouth is so powerful, your advocates are oftentimes the first touch points people have with your schools—the spark that kick-starts the customer journey cycle all over again.

Read more about the Advocacy phase.

Whether you’re a one-person shop or have a fully fledged team, school communications is often demanding and unpredictable. The day-to-day work of telling your district’s story while maintaining clear and consistent communication with all of your stakeholders requires efficiency, flexibility, and real-time decision-making. Whether you’re a communications lead or a superintendent doing the work of a school communicator, you don’t have the time or capacity to do it all. 

In fact, SchoolCEO’s recent survey of school comms professionals indicates that many school communicators are stretched too thin to focus on the elements of their role that they deem most important. Building a school district communication plan takes time, so we reached out to a few experts to see what advice they might have for working smarter, not harder. With their guidance, we’ve gathered some field-tested shortcuts to help any school communicator save time and stress.

Use Templates in Your School Communications Plan

Posting on social media can be a bit overwhelming when there’s a lot going on in your schools. From weather updates to crisis communications, you often need to create and share content quickly while also maintaining the brand and voice your stakeholders recognize. Using templates that are already aligned to your brand—with your logo, school colors, fonts, etc.—can save you a lot of headaches and promote brand consistency across social media platforms. 

When it comes to actually creating templates, most of our experts mentioned using Canva. The user-friendly online graphic design tool is free to use or has a paid subscription option if you’re looking for extra design features

Plan Ahead with Evergreen Content

Sometimes there’s so much going on in your schools that sharing every story seems impossible. And if you’re trying to get vital information out to your community, it may not be the right time to post about the quiz bowl team’s big win—even if that victory just happened. 

Many of the communications directors we’ve spoken to over the years have mentioned that part of their school district communication plan includes saving up content for later use. When times get hectic or your comms team is stretched too thin, having a bank of positive, evergreen stories to share can help keep your district’s inspiring work from getting lost in the shuffle.

Leverage Online Tools in Your School Communications Plan

If your district uses a custom app to keep school families updated, you already know the convenience of having one digital space where your stakeholders can find information about your schools. Keeping your app up to date is key for building trust within your community. 

Betsy Bailey, director of communications and community relations for Arkansas’ Searcy School District, has found Apptegy's communications platform to be a great tool for keeping her community informed and telling Searcy’s story. “We use the platform because it goes to three social media channels at the same time,” says Bailey. “And you only have to type your message in once—that saves me a lot of work.” 

Apptegy's communications solution allows multiple users to keep your website and custom app updated. You can post on your Live Feed, share content on multiple social media platforms, and even send notifications, text, and voice alerts to your stakeholders—all from one app on your phone.

Learn more about Apptegy’s communications solution

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