At a time when schools are sometimes battling to be heard amongst the noise regarding exam results, school reforms and other issues affecting students and teaching staff, shouting about your school’s positive attributes is more important than ever.
Striking a chord with parents
So many things affect parents’ choice of school for their child: academic results, inspection reports, pastoral care, and, not least, what their website and prospectus tell them are the school’s key values.
It’s key to remember that the school prospectus is an extension of your website. The website helps you define your unique offering in any way you choose to stand out from the competition. However, many schools forget to extend their branding to the printed prospectus. Perhaps because it is a printed document, schools feel that they cannot be too experimental with the prospectus, but as this is often parent’s take home material, this is exactly the place to upsell your school.
When parents have completed their school visits, it is often a range of prospectuses that they sit down with to compare attributes.
What makes a great prospectus?
Of course, your prospectus needs to look as good as it can possibly look for your budget. This is your school’s shop window after all, and you are looking to impress potential students, parents, the community and even potential new staff.
Unify for Schools has found through feedback from parents that what impresses them most is:
- a creative and honest approach
- good, quality design and non-staged imagery
- insights from students themselves
- a range of content that appeals to parents and their children.
Appealing to everyone isn’t as challenging as you might think
Parents want to see information on results and pastoral care approaches, of course. They also want to see a good range of extra-curricular activities on offer to ensure there are opportunities for their child to try. It’s probably the biggest decision a parent has to make for their child and many parents agonise over getting this decision right.
In the natural run of things, schools can often become known for being ‘sporty’, ‘musical’ or ‘academic’, whether correct or not, so it’s important to stress to parents the broad range of specialisms you have. Another good reason for doing this is that students change their focus over time. A year 7 child may come into the school identifying themselves as sporty, but as a result of your school’s offerings may leave being a great debater and academic.
Filling the prospectus with content that suits every family is the holy grail to school marketers. How do you tell the stories that each unique family wants to hear to tick all their boxes?
Unify for Schools offers tailored prospectus development
Because every school is unique, and its achievements and offerings change more than once a year, Unify for Schools has created software that enables schools to take the control of design and content creation for their prospectus in-house.
Not only can you create bespoke information, you can save on paper wastage and costs by printing individual booklets on demand. Make sure your prospectus is having the maximum impact it can have. Contact us for advice on prospectus development and to help you plan your strategy for your next prospectus.
To see how Unify for Schools has impacted Felsted School, watch this film.