When I work with schools on marketing and communications, there's always one form of communication that causes the most stress. No, it's not social media or creating a new website, but the regular parent newsletter! If you're one of those people who ends up stressed...
Will 2023 be the year of the multiverse, AI or augmented reality? It might be in some sectors, but it's actually going to be something more mundane that finally changes school marketing and communications - at least in my opinion.I've been talking about the importance...
In the past there used to be marketing, sales, and customer service – three different stages of customer interaction that were delivered, often in very different ways, by different groups of people. That’s still true in most schools – with different people responsible...
Two months ago I wrote about our new Prime Minister. Now we have another one - I was not surprised (but perhaps a bit embarrassed) when a school leader in Minnesota I was training said that people in the USA were worried about the UK... But it underlies how things can...
In 2019 people were worried about teacher recruitment and retention. I spoke about marketing-based solutions at a number of conferences and started writing a book - ‘Recruiting Teachers’. However, the book was finished just as the first COVID lockdown took place...
So... the least surprising political result of the last decade is now official and Liz Truss is Prime Minister. As a fellow graduate of Merton College, Oxford from the mid-1990s I'd like to think that I could offer some great personal insight into her character, but I...
It's sometimes worth reflecting on how new social media is. Facebook didn't exist before February 2004, Twitter was launched in 2006 and Instagram in October 2010. So has the past couple of years, with most schools focusing on these three platforms, lulled us...
This year I've spent a lot of time working with schools that serve more than one age group on their 'retention' problems - ensuring children stay from Nursery to Reception, remain in the school from Y6 to Y7, or choose it for Sixth Form. In the case of prep schools, a...
1) The need for alignment on key issues and messages. With the growth of social media (perhaps especially 'dark social' media such as WhatsApp) people have more connections than ever with school staff - and they're likely to use them for research before choosing to...