How to Market Your School: A Guide to Marketing, Communication, and Public Relations for School Administrators

by Johanna M. Lockhart

Increased competition, declining resources, changing demographics, news media scrutiny, and the importance of public perceptions are reasons why schools and school districts need an effective marketing program. However, even school and district administrators who recognize the importance of marketing often feel unprepared to initiate and maintain a strategic marketing effort. How to Market Your School is a comprehensive guide that provides school administrators with tools to help them create, implement, and maintain a successful marketing program. Topics covered include developing a marketing strategy, marketing research, communications, media relations, building beneficial partnerships, public relations, and fund raising. Although written for public school administrators, the book is equally applicable to private and charter schools.

Genres: Education

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was much more interesting than I expected it to be. I have an immediate and visceral reaction to business, customer service, marketing non-think stuff. If you say, “To my way of thinking” – I will assume you don’t think. If you say, “At the end of the day” – I’ll assume you think life is a series of ‘goals’ and therefore that you've pretty well missed the point. If you say, “going forward” – well, there’s just no hope for you, is there? And if you say any or all of these things there is a very strong likelihood that you will also believe that strategic customer focused service oriented measureable outcome perception managed expectation transcendent deliverable high fibre on-time sustainable corporate value is something worth striving for. Having wasted far, far too many years of my life listening to meaningless crap like this in endless meetings – meetings where, ironically enough, the endlessness of the meetings was mocked by the number of times each person in the room said ‘closure’ – it was only following the exertion of an extreme act of will that I was able to pick this book up in the first place.

Perhaps this video is going a little too far, or perhaps not: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj... Beware, it contains language and images and stuff like that.

What I’m saying is, I’m the last person who would normally read a book like this, so the fact I’ve given it four stars and am only going to rubbish it at the end really does say something.

I’m doing my PhD on school marketing. Well, sort of – I’m looking at how various groups of students are represented in school marketing materials and what this then says about student subjectivities and their exclusion (self and enforced) from academic success. I hadn’t realised how much this topic would come to take over my life. One of the problems is that once you start looking for this stuff – you know, how girls are treated in school marketing materials, how various races are treated, who gets to play sport, who gets to hold a pen, who gets to smile – you start seeing it everywhere. But I had thought that not having a background in marketing might make saying anything about this stuff a bit of a problem. So, it was important that I read at least one book on marketing – but the couple I’ve started so far have been really too much to ask. Listen, if you are a marketing type person and you are thinking of writing a snappy little book as an introduction to the whole topic of marketing, there really is no requirement for you to confirm all of my prejudices in one go. I'm just saying.

At the start of this book I assumed I was in for much the same ride as I’d been on before, but given the title, I also knew that I was also going to have to persist with this one as, well, unless it was called, ‘Everything McCandless Needs to Know about Marketing for his PhD’ – I was probably going to struggle to find a book more patently directed at my needs.

The author says that she wants this book to be well used – not read once and forgotten – and if you are a school administrator or in someway in charge of marketing your school, this book really could be that. She has done a lot of the hack work for you – written the surveys, written the letters to parents, written the letters to local businesses. This is all handy and useful stuff. She goes over all of the standard things – SWOT Analysis, Ethnographic Analysis – you know, all the stuff you really ought to do if you want to get a handle on what your school needs to be looking at if it wants to improve. Her advice on writing - avoid adverbs, stick all of the important information in the first paragraph, that sort of thing - is all good advice.

She gives an interesting series of basic checklists for marketing efforts and repeatedly says useful things to remember – you know, if you are writing for others maybe it is a good idea to keep your audience in mind, if you are providing a service for your community it is good to focus on what is in it for them and how you are addressing their needs. All of this is good, bread and butter, useful stuff that really is hard to be reminded about too often.

I thought the stuff on the use of the web and accessing digital materials for research, etc, was also good clean advice. This is, in the main, a quick and easy read – one that actually practices what it preaches – and that really could save a school time in putting a marketing strategy into practice. She even points out that it is a sad state of affairs that we live in times when public education needs to rely on marketing to stay alive and that cuts to school budgets and effective cuts to school time (through high stakes testing) mean that providing an excellent education is increasingly difficult without the added assistance that comes from support from the local community that can be harnessed through marketing. So, she did find a shortish route to my heart.

Now for the criticisms. The first is that this book is written in the US and so some topics are taboo by definition – social class being but one. While there is lots of talk in this book about integrating various ethnic minorities into the life of the school and using marketing techniques as a means of achieving this, there is little to nothing on the problems schools in poor suburbs have in the distinctly middle class world of marketing. If you are a local business you might want to sponsor your local private school, but probably not the school in the neighbourhood where the parents are dirt poor and have ‘limited disposable income’. That the turn to marketing as a means of supplementing school incomes has such devastatingly unfair outcomes needs to be constantly in view – but a society that believes that ‘all it takes is effort to overcome any difficulty’ ignores that for some the effort required is superhuman and for others hardly anything at all.

The other is that, as expected really, this author believes her own bullshit. She really does believe that schools should market to their strengths – are you a poor school in a mostly non-English speaking background area seeking to attract disadvantaged kids to your remarkably effective learning centres? Then you really need to let people know so they can beat a path to your door. Except – of course – the research shows pretty much the opposite is actually the case. Virtually all research into school marketing shows that schools all want to look middle class, white and female. Well, except for the elite private schools which want to look like holiday camps. To write a book on school marketing and to ignore this fact is really quite something. It basically proves that the author lives in a world completely different from the world that exists ‘out there’. The problem is that to write a book that really explains how schools market themselves would appear so cynical and so discriminatory that such techniques as put forward in this book are what Chomsky would call, ‘Necessary Illusions’.

This book gives useful advice on how to develop marketing strategies for public schools – as such it is well worth reading.

[Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lockhart's book has some useful information in it. However, I was disappointed as I felt the marketing techniques covered could have been geared more toward the digital age. Overall there were several great ideas though in other areas. Marketing for parents and with the community had some really good ideas. Ultimately, was the book worth reading? Certainly. It's worth the cost and the time to read it because there are bound to be several solid ideas that will help your school's marketing efforts. However, I still want to learn more about marketing a school in a modern digital age.