You might think that this is a strange title for a post on school branding. But I think the following story illustrates an important point.
A few days ago my daughter's school principal placed a survey online asking the question "How frequently would you like to receive the school newsletter?" He then offered a number of options that parents could choose from. My reaction to this survey was "Newsletter frequency? There are bigger issues at stake here." The school principal immediately replied and said he would be interested in my thoughts. The next day we saw each other in the school grounds, I put on my school branding hat and began talking about ways he could effectively engage with parents, improve the school website, use social media, iPod videos, photography, themes and styles for marketing...the list goes on.
The next day I was talking about the survey with a very dear friend of mine who said to me "It's just the newsletter. All he asked was how often would you like to receive it. That's it!"
Sometimes we become so passionate about what we do that we forget that not everything is about 'the big picture'. Sometimes it's about enjoying what we have and looking at things in a simple 'childlike' way.
School branding at a Primary/Elementary level is about keeping things simple, uncluttered, easy to understand. It is about being honest, real, authentic, human. If I was going to use jargon, it is about having a clear 'brand personality' and 'brand narrative'. But I'm not. Let's just say it's about the values and character attributes that are important and the story which explains all the wonderful things - past and present - that are special about your school.
So while it's important to look great, what matters most of all is content.
Do you have a story you can share about your school with your school community? What character traits or values are important at your school and how do you demonstrate these?
I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Craig
Being a Graphic Designer I also become frustrated at missed opportunities to enhance and build on branding, or simply making something look and function in a better way. There's a lot of
ReplyDelete"ugly" out there and there's ALWAYS room for improvement. But sometimes you have to rein in the passion and see it for what it is. It IS just a simple newsletter for a small primary school. It's function is to inform parents of the weeks news and up and coming events, not set the world alight with a branding extravaganza. Yes there are much better technology based ways of reaching parents via the internet with beautiful news stories in full colour and shiny high res photos to go with it. But the simple black and white photocopied newsletter (that yes, isn't the prettiest thing on earth)is still functioning and doing it's job just fine. And if the school isn't quite ready to embrace the future entirely then that's fine. I think you'll find it's probably the majority of the parents that are a little slow in catching on and still prefer the good old hard copy.
Time to take a deep breath .... and let it go :-) PS. I love your passion for what you do.
Thanks for your thoughts Deb.
DeleteI think you've hit on a really interesting point. Sometimes simplest is best. School administrators are being so overwhelmed by the different forms of electronic communication - social media channels or otherwise - that they are finding it difficult to keep up. As designers we might be aware of 'better ways' but, at the end of the day, we do need to move at the same speed as our clients.
I'd love to hear from school administrators on this topic.