5 Marketing and Communications Items to Complete Over Summer

For most independent school people, summer represents a chance to breathe, rest, and recover from the mayhem of spring. June following my first year as Director of Marcomms at Christ School, I simply tried to catch my breath. In the summers that followed though, I started to use the time more effectively and eventually I embraced a simple fact… summers are your secret weapon.

This article explores five things you should do this summer to prepare for successful marketing and communications efforts.

1. What Worked (And Didn’t Work) This Past Year?

Take time to audit your efforts from the past academic year. We encourage people to break down the audits into categories. Consider budget, content, personnel resources, website, external partners, and more. Meet with your teams and colleagues to recap and get their input.

Schools are often very additive and too rarely end initiatives. Don’t be afraid to cut things! You have finite resources and you need to be cutthroat.

An example? A school has a communications staffer live-tweet and write a game summary for varsity athletic events. The school also added live streaming capabilities to every field. Without ever reviewing processes, the school could end up live streaming, live tweeting, and writing summaries for all varsity athletic games. Is that the best use of resources? Likely not.

2. Refresh Your Core Messaging

What themes, topics, and efforts resonated last year? Are there any major events or themes emerging for this coming year? Perhaps it’s an anniversary year for the school. Perhaps there’s been a leadership change. Are you starting a capital campaign or major fundraising efforts?

Recognizing those events and themes will help you tighten and define your messaging. It will also help you determine where to allocate resources.

3. Build or Refresh a Marketing Outline

Once you’ve determined the key themes and events to hit throughout the school year, develop a marketing outline to guide your efforts. Creating a plan is the only way to break the cycle of reactive marketing and communications.

The plan doesn’t need to be huge and comprehensive. The main goal is to plan ahead and anticipate needs. Note key admission periods, advancement events, and school events. When do you need to start working on projects? Where do you need external help? Assign ownership and accountability for execution (even if you’re just a team of one).

4. Audit Your Website (Especially Admissions Pages)

A never-ending battle is updating content on your website. We suggest you develop a list of pages that contain dated content and add calendar reminders to update them. Think about pages that contain the PDF school calendar, event dates, certain deadlines, tuition information, faculty directories, etc. Those items all have a point at which they become outdated and old. In many cases, that point is at the beginning of the summer.

Beyond outdated items, take a longer look at your website. Do you need to refresh photography and/or video content? As you explore Google Analytics, are there any clear bottlenecks or user experience issues? Some of these items may take significant time to fix or produce, so add them to your marketing outline.

5. Get Ahead on Content Creation and Break Down Silos 

Think ahead on your content needs for the school year ahead. When should you schedule video or photography projects? Do you need to update or redesign email newsletter templates or social media graphics? Do you need to bring on a freelance writer or partner with an external group like us on a project? This is your chance to reset and consider your needs for the school year ahead.

Summer is also an opportunity to continue breaking down communications silos at your school. As the new academic year approaches, update your internal resources (style guide, templates, messaging) and distribute it to faculty and staff. Brief administrators and staff on upcoming messaging priorities.

Perhaps most importantly, review your systems for gathering information from faculty. Your best and most authentic content is generated from them. How do you hear about what they’re doing? Are you planning ahead or being reactive? Do they know what you need and when you need it? Set all of that up over the summer!

In conclusion, summer is the marketing and communications office’s secret weapon. Use it to your advantage and plan ahead. Break the reactionary cycle and don’t continue doing what you’ve always done just for the sake of it.

If you want help reviewing your processes or if you need some external help with your projects, give us an email at info@38house.com!