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.

Now You Need a Mobile Web Site!

Hopefully your school has made the move to a professional-looking, inviting, and interactive Web site. If you haven't made the move yet, hopefully you're planning to. Since SchoolAdvancement.com will celebrate it's 5th anniversary in July of 2011, I'm planning on launching a new design. It's taken about a year to research different content management systems that were not only affordable, but were easy to learn, and which could provide me with the same type of editing experience I've become accustomed to. While there are lots of choices out there today (many more than five years ago), the affordability, learning curve and familiarity seem to be the three most significant demands when a Web site redesign is necessary.

Rather than focus on what I'm doing, however, I'd like you to consider taking a couple of steps forward in order that you can be ahead of the curve. Let me explain.

To be perfectly blunt, it took schools a long time to get on the information superhighway. When they finally decided to do so, professional site creation may have been a very expensive proposition. Schools turned to parents who dabbled in Web site design, or may have had their school Web site's built as an 8th grade community service project. Today, if a site doesn't look professional, your school will not be taken seriously. Fortunately, there are many tools available today to help create professional-looking Web sites for little cost (such as WordPress.com). While WordPress is actually a blog program that looks like a Web site, there are many developers that can take WordPress templates and customize them for your school. With a good Web presence, then you can budget for the content management system and Web site that you really want to convey your school's brand to your constituents.

But the next wave of technology has already hit - desktop computers became notebook computers which became netbook computers. Five years ago, the new technology was the tablet computer. Today, ipads are becoming staples in higher education, and those who require Flash capabilities are purchasing Android platformed tablets like the Motorola XOOM. Iphones, BlackBerries, Androids, and other smartphones (like the Motorola Atrix - a phone that acts like a computer when you plug it into its keyboard/screen) are becoming the computers of tomorrow - and tomorrow isn't decades away. Tomorrow is...well, tomorrow! Consider these five tools that you need to be aware of to effectively market your school today.

1) .mobi - If your school has a .org URL, you'll want to purchase a .mobi URL for it and create at least a small site for it. When a visitor tries to access your .com site, it might be too large for the mobile device. Or, it might be converted by stacking the header, then the left navigation panel, then the main body of the site to an incredibly lengthy scrolling page. Such a page might take a very long time to download completely too. If you have a .mobi site, even if a visitor types your main URL's name with a .com or .org on their mobile device, the device will search for a similar .mobi site. You can then create a "Full Site" link on your mobile site. For some excellent tips on creating a .mobi site, visit http://ow.ly/4GSTo.

2) Tiny URL - the last part of the previous paragraph points to a "tiny URL." There are several of these free services available, which converts a long Web URL into a small one. Used primarily by Twitter users to save character space, it creates a trackable link to a link that may be misspelled because it has so many alphanumeric and punctuation characters, not to mention upper and lower case letters. Try http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url or http://tinyurl.com/ and see how it works for you!

3) QR - Short for "Quick Response," it's the graphic you've begun to see that looks like a square UPC barcode. Turn your URL into a QR here by visiting http://qrcode.kaywa.com/. Other sites, like http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/, will turn your contact information into a QR. Put it on your business card - actually, it becomes your business card. Individuals with Smartphones an a QR reader app can take a picture of the QR, and take them directly to a Web site page (great for your "send me more information" form page) or can pull your contact information into their Outlook contacts file.

4) Personal URLS - These are URL that take visitors to a Web page that's personalized especially them! Think mail merge document, but instead of a letter, it's a Web page that speaks directly to them. Check out how the Diocese of Erie used this program for their annual appeal - http://www.cathedralcorporation.com/News---Events/Personalized-URLs-Work-for-Nonprofits.aspx.

5) Web Keys - These are small USB devices that can be attached to a small card. When inserted into a USB port in one's computer, they take the viewer directly to a predetermined Web site. For example, if you're looking to promote your Open House, you may have a Web page that gives details about the event. Rather than asking people to copy a lengthy URL, a card with a Web key is prepared, with the text, "To find out more about our Open House, insert this Web key into your computer's USB port."