The Importance of Goal Setting in School Marketing & Communications

Schools often realize that they need to implement marketing strategies. Sometimes it’s social media content, written website content, advertising, video, or more. They feel urgency and jump right in, start posting, and too often, they skip planning and goal setting. Honestly, I understand how it happens.

When I was Director of Communications & Marketing at Christ School, my days were filled with meetings, assemblies, chapels, photoshoots, and office walk-ins. My afternoons were filled with coaching varsity golf. At times, I was just happy that our department was creating engaging content. It felt like we didn’t have time to define goals, refer back to our plan, and review what was working (or wasn’t working). 

When we didn’t define goals, it was very difficult to decide where to allocate resources, and importantly, know when to cut or stop initiatives. The result is that initiatives often piled onto one another - we were great at being additive, but we were rarely reflective enough to remove things. As we continued to pile on, frustration, overwork, and burnout ensued.

This problem is rampant at schools, and it applies well beyond marketing and communications. The thoughts below will help you avoid this doom loop!

How to Define Goals

Divide your goals and thinking into two categories – process goals and outcome goals.

Process Goals

Process goals pertain to specific steps and actions that you want to take in order to achieve an outcome. When we’re working on a school’s marketing plan or performing an audit of a department, our recommendations often focus on process goals. Once those process goals are defined and successfully executed, the results will follow. It’s tempting to focus solely on outcomes, but reviewing the processes and defining goals around them is key to success.

Outcome Goals

While process goals are crucial, you have to define the desired outcome. Whether we’re consulting for a school, developing their marketing plan, or creating work product for them, we always have a defined outcome goal. It’s a target from which we can gauge progress, define success, and stay focused.

Process goals and outcome goals should be related. An example: Your school wants to increase young alumni donor participation. The outcome goal: Reach 25% donation participation from alumni who are within five years of graduating. The process goal: Implement a series of young alumni touch points starting with gathering updated personal contact information before graduation (with more process goals stemming from there). You need to define both types of goals.

You Must Review Outcomes

At whatever interval you deem fit, review your goals and see what’s working. If something isn’t working, is there a problem with your process? If yes, adjust and be nimble. If no, seriously consider ending that initiative and allocate those resources elsewhere.

If you don’t partake in these regular reviews, you can easily fall into that aforementioned trap of being perpetually additive, and never subtractive. Resources are finite – use them wisely! This is so often overlooked.

Some of Our 2025 Goals

We’re thinking a lot about process goals in 2025. “Continuous improvement” is one of our core values and nearly all of our goals focus on improving our internal systems as we continue to grow.

A few examples:

An early 2025 goal was redesigning our system for gathering client feedback following project completion. We now gather feedback in a way that is more scalable and trackable. The outcome goal is to constantly improve the client experience.

Another goal is implementing “Project Improvement Notes.” This series of internal documents is a formal way to note ways that we could improve. These ideas are big and small – they range from hiring for new roles to updating formatting in emails. We jot them down throughout a project and have a dedicated meeting to discuss post project. The desired outcome goal? Be nimble and constantly improve our relationships, systems, and work product.

Want to brainstorm goals or figure out how to reach desired outcomes? Shoot us an email at info@38house.com. We’re always keen to talk!