SchoolAdvancement (TM) Helping Schools Advance Toward Their Vision

MARKETING

Click here for this week's free marketing tip, Marketing Matters ^(SM)!

ENROLLMENT

Click here to find out more about BASICS - a FREE TOOL to help bring more students into your school! Enrollment Estimators (TM) are now available for the 12-13 school year!!

DEVELOPMENT

Development Development

A monthly article to help you form a development mindset from a fundraising one. Click here for this month's artilcle!. If you're already developed in Development, and want to advance toward an Advancement mindset, check out Advancementality:. Every week, a new post is made to advance your ability to attain an attitude necessary for Advancement.

PRESENTATIONS

Access to presentations given throughout the year can be found here!

* "Miracle Marketing" - For those in the Diocese of Harrisburg, click here to view or download the presentation. For those in the Diocese of Buffalo, click here to view or download the presentation.

* "Retention: The First Step To Growing Your Enrollment"

For those in the Diocese of Harrisburg, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

For those that attendend the NYSCIRS Conference in Albany, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

For those that attended the Alliance of Catholic Schools of Lancaster County, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

For those that attended the West Virginia Christian Education Association Conference, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

10 Ways to Market Your School Online - Part 5 of 5

The inspiration for these Marketing Matters comes from http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/10-ways-to-market-your-non-profit-online. Since your school is a non-profit, I've tweaked them a bit so that these items relate directly to your school and what you need to do to market it effectively in today's technology-rich environment. This week, ways 9 and 10.

9) Monitor your brand and your industry

While it almost goes without saying that it's vital to continually educate ourselves as educators (call it metaeducation?), it's important to be aware of what's being said about education in the media and online. In this era of unprecedented access to the Internet, it's also CRITICAL to stay up-to-date on what's going on regarding what's being said about your school online! Impossible? Hardly. The following free tools can help facilitate keeping up with what seems impossible to keep up with:

Google Alerts: Google Alerts allows you to type in any term and Google will email you the latest Google web results about that term. You can track your school's name, any other schools in your area, or any other relevant keywords for the education industry.

Google Reader: Google Reader keeps track of specific Web site feeds and aggregates new content from those feeds in a single place for convenient reading. Make a list of all the blogs and news feeds that you read and put them in a folder in your Google Reader, then check your reader a couple times a week to catch up on what's going on.

Twitter: Twitter allows you to keep up with what's happening right now. If you don't have one yet, create a Twitter account and follow people working for your school and other schools in the area get a better handle on "what's happening now." You can use Twitter Search to monitor conversations and find new followers. Twitter can be an amazing resource to both keep up with what's going on, but because it's instantaneous, it does require dedication to consistently checking in and sharing.

10) Use online Facebook ads to drive traffic to your school's Web site and Facebook page

Facebook provides a great venue for extremely targeted ads to push valuable visitors to your school's Facebook page and Web site at a very low cost. Facebook allows you to hone in on your target audience by their location and demographic but more importantly, and unique to Facebook, by their likes, interests and friends. While this can have little influence on your marketing to bring more students to your school, it can help bring more alumni together. For instance, I received an invitation from my high school to a dinner where a member of our class was being honored. Where did I go to contact friends from my class to get at least a table of folks together? My address book? Nope. My Facebook page. There were three couples that attended that had never been to the event before. It was like a mini-reunion, and helped raised some additional dollars for the school.

Make sure that if you send people who click on your ad to your Web site, as opposed to your organization's Facebook page, that you create a landing page on your website that caters to visitors coming from Facebook. It's been found that people using Facebook like to stay in Facebook. So, if a Facebook ad connects to something other than another Facebook page, visitors may leave if they connect to something other than a Facebook page for your school.

Back to Marketing Matters Index