I admit that my possibly offensive title probably sounds like I think volunteers are a nuisance. Actually, the point of this article is to help you find practical ways to involve school volunteers who are always asking, “how can I help?”
First of all, while volunteers are a blessing, they come with conditions. It cannot be denied that volunteers on your marketing team operate differently than paid staff or outsourced consultants. Administrative officials and hired contractors work for results which are often tied to how much money they make or how long they keep their job. It’s one reason to consider NOT assigning critical, timely marketing tasks to volunteers. While they may indicate a willingness and eagerness to help, they MAY not operate with the same sense of urgency you have. Nor may they offer the same level of excellence you would demand of an employee or contractor. You want to have the freedom to dislike their work without feeling like you are going to offend them and run them off from volunteering ever again (or worse, writing a bad review about your school . . . uh, see #7 below). You want to be able to “fire” them if they do not perform. But how do you fire a non-paid volunteer?
So what jobs can you create for your eager beavers? Here are 7 ideas your school volunteers can do from any computer or mobile device: (more…)
Seems like many private schools have an interest in Pinterest. Independent schools and Christian schools are asking “how can we use Pinterest in our marketing strategy?” In a two-part series, we first talk about how we use Pinterest to help your school marketing. See the shownotes below for links to various boards. And click here to go to Part 2.
Time [14:29]
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SHOWNOTES:
- Follow Your School Marketing on Pinterest
- Specifically follow our boards like Private Schools Pinning, Parent Articles, Schools & Social Media, and boards about recruitment, retention and referrals (what we call the 3 Rs of school marketing).
- Read our recent article: “Shareable Content is King”
IMPORTANT NOTES:
- See below or click here for more PODCAST episodes
- Suggest a TOPIC or GUEST for the school marketing podcast.
- If you have a question or comment about this episode or any of our school marketing podcast shows, leave us a VOICEMAIL.
- Review our podcast in iTunes – your positive feedback tells other school marketing, admission and communication professionals that this is worth their time (remember, most podcast episodes are only 14 min and 29 seconds long!)
- Click here to go to Part 2 of this Pinterest Podcast
- To subscribe to the school marketing podcast, click on the image below:
As we continue to offer marketing consulting for private Christian schools all over the U.S., I wanted to give many of our new visitors a summary of the way we deliver free marketing ideas for private schools. We love to give away free ideas and freely share resources that we find all over the web. Here are a variety of ways we share marketing ideas with private schools:
- School Marketing FREE REPORTS (see bottom of this page) – we invite you to download for free any of our free reports (we hope to add a few reports in 2013)
I also found this article that you may want to review as well. What I found interesting is, at the end of the article, the Asker of the question tells you what idea meant the most. You will want to check it out: “Marketing ideas to help increase enrollment in private school?“
From time to time, I will showcase specific boards we have on our Pinterest account. As we do our research on the web (from articles we find on Twitter, paper.li., Facebook and several other sources), we curate content around specific topics and pin them to our different boards.
Click the image below to view the board offering ideas on referral marketing and word of mouth strategies for private / Christian schools:
Does your school have a visual content strategy? Nowadays, you are probably aware that the social world is heavily focused on the “visual” representation of the events of your school. Are you using Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Facbeook photos, or Twitter pics to showcase all the events at your school?
Besides just snapping photos, your school must have a visual content strategy in order to optimize the use of pictures. Your families (current and prospective) are very visual and the integrated world of social media is highly visual. How visual is your online content? In a recent guest article on a nationally-recognized small business forum, I was invited to share the important elements of having a visual content strategy. I think you can easily make the translation to having a visual marketing strategy for your school.
I invite you to read the full article: “2 Easy Steps to a Visual Content Strategy.”
-Randy
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