Why Advocacy Is Key in Sharing Your School’s Story
Advocates of Storytelling are important members of the school community, they contribute to the creation and broadcasting of the school’s identity. Advocates are typically among the school’s teaching or coaching body, and are interested in, or would enjoy posting to school-owned social media accounts.
Why should schools utilise their advocates?
Empowering teachers to upload their own content to Social Media provides a great insight into the true nature of the people, place and purpose of a school. Marketers are unable to be in two places at once, let alone every classroom. Teachers are able to capture stories in an instant and provide the content that marketers may miss, in order to showcase the truly amazing everyday stories within a school.
Schools run the risk of lacking authenticity in their content and can be tempted to share polished and staged stories for the sole purpose of driving admissions, rather than sharing its own authentic heartbeat. That authentic heartbeat in itself may be the strongest marketing tool available to a school. Teachers share stories to showcase everyday life at the school, which in turn, paints a broader image of what the school stands for. By showcasing these stories, schools provide clear illustrations of pupil life at their school and provide opportunities for prospective families to find the right place for their children.
Who are your advocates?
There is likely at least one teacher at every school who regularly sends images of their lessons to the Marketing Department. There may even be members of staff who are eager to post their stories to Social Media themselves. If this is the case, then you’ve already identified your first advocates to storytelling.
How to empower your advocates’ storytelling.
In utilising storytelling advocates for Marketing, schools are able to roll out a meaningful content strategy as quickly or as gradually as suits their strategic plans. Some schools start small, with the most obviously visual subjects, like the Arts, Sciences or Sports taking to Social Media to share their stories. They, in turn, encourage their colleagues to identify the elements of their own departments that lend themselves well to social media. Soon enough, other subjects like History are sharing videos of their pupils’ historic reenactments and the Geography teacher is posting about their trip to Iceland!
Marketers are left with two choices: the first is to gradually empower the teaching body to share their own stories directly to social media while ensuring guidelines and best practices are in place. The second is to maintain the school’s storytelling in the Marketing office, and closely curate their own stories, with either limited or even non-existent contributions from the living heartbeat of the school.
Even if Schools have dozens of advocates, we would still recommend developing a school-wide Social Media strategy slowly, so as to ensure that your community is sharing relevant and balanced content. Empowering whole departments at once can result in an imbalance in storytelling, which may in turn create biased views of the school. For example, if the Art Department uploads more on Instagram than the Geography Department, it may appear that your school prioritises the Arts over other subjects, which may not be the case.
Teacher-advocacy is a crucial part of rolling out a storytelling strategy, as they are present throughout the school and are able to showcase the valuable opportunities that storytelling affords. It’s vital that teachers feel inspired by advocates’ storytelling skills as teachers’ stories are an invaluable element of any school marketing strategy and provide the most authentic insight to any school community. For more information on how to successfully implement this proposed advocate approach to storytelling, please reach out to social@interactiveschools.com