The term is now firmly entrenched in the lexicon of school district communications – Branding. How strong is your school brand? Is your school brand clear? What are you doing to improve your school brand?
I'll answer those questions then provide some practical direction by sharing the five essential steps to building your school brand.Yeah, sure colleges have embraced branding. Many private schools too are figuring out branding and marketing, thanks to the efforts of private school marketers like Brendan Schneider, himself a private school communications practitioner. But school districts?
With its word roots in the searing a ranch’s mark/logo into livestock to clearly differentiate which animal belongs to whom, ‘brand’ can make an equally important and lasting impression on your school community.
In most cases, really what we’re talking about here is rebranding. For purposes of this article, I’ll refer to it as branding. But whatever you call it, it’s a chance to make an accurate, current, forward-thinking statement and create a foundation that helps you stand out from other schools.
Tips for building your school branding foundation:
Arriving at your new school brand – that distinctive personality, culture and voice for your school – first requires developing consistent messaging. More than just a new logo or color scheme, your brand derives from your messaging, which must be carefully considered.
Start by writing a concise statement, your branding communications mission statement. Not to be confused with your school’s mission statement, a branding communications mission statement serves as a springboard, helping you develop talking points, and helping guide the design process that your design partners need to articulate your brand.
It's not just about a cool-looking logo or new mascot. This statement serves as a source for many facets of your school messaging. Think of it as a summary document or a practical abstract that your communications team can visit and re-visit to draw inspiration and craft messaging.
Considerations to help define your school brand:
It’s now time to mobilize design resources. This is the fun, conceptual stuff: the phase the uninitiated think of when they think of branding.
This is where the messaging foundation you’ve created is translated into visual elements. Design concepts, logos, color schemes, sub-brands mocked up in various executions in typical formats. Designing a look and feel that reflects the expectations and school culture is a pivotal piece of your entire communications planning, so jumping to this step without completing steps 1 and 2, is asking for trouble. Without the due diligence of a strategic framework, design is ill-conceived. For a longer look at how to create a strategic communications plan for your school, see this article.
Keys to creating a great school brand:
Now, once you’ve selected your design partner and approved designs, you need to pull it all together – or more specifically, your design partner should pull it all together – and create a branding style guide. Do not proceed with using your new look without a branding style guide.
Your style guide should address all the visual design fundamentals: typography, color palettes, logo usage, positioning, sizing, and ratio restrictions/considerations. It should also address the extensions of the brand that occur throughout your entire district. A well-conceived ‘brand family’ reinforces the mother ship (district) while affording each school or campus within the district to assert a distinctive sub-brand that fits within the larger brand architecture.
Why a style guide is necessary:
While the guide is the fruits of your labor, your work is not done yet. In fact, in many ways, it’s just starting. Now comes the time to begin executing the school brand.
It’s crucial that you let those closest to your school mission – your internal audiences – in on the new brand. Faculty, non-teaching staff, school board members, etc. Use staff in-service days and board meetings to give them the first look. You need to get their buy-in and then use a coordinated roll-out plan and your new style guide to kick it off.
Your other key group, of course, is your external audience. But before taking it to the streets – parents, public, business and community leaders, etc. – give your local media a sneak preview. They love good news.
Keys to successful brand execution:
If you want to engage and keep engaging members of your school community, distinguish your district from the other districts – some of which are most definitely can be called your competition – and just generally capture the essence and beauty of your school, embrace the definition and need for understanding and applying branding in your school district.