It’s not rocket science, but it is critical. If you don’t have an effective website and you are hoping to attract more students, you are going to continue to see declining enrollment. Yep, that is a reality and it probably isn’t fair. You might have the best curriculum, highly qualified teachers, dedicated administrators—and everyone in your school cares about every student’s success. But, if you can’t portray that to the public in a very visible way, you are going to lose students to a less qualified educational organization who just does a better job of marketing themselves.

Okay, so you aren’t a public relations expert. You not only know nothing about marketing but you actually hate the idea of having to “sell” anything. Heck, you block spam and hang up on telemarketers with reckless abandon.  But, the world of education has changed and you better get on board or don’t even consider joining the ranks of educational administrators.  Marketing your school is now part of the job description.

However, there are ways to make this part of your job easier (and certainly more palatable). At least you won’t be making cold calls from a cubicle or walking up and down in front of the school with a placard on your back. You need to implement effective website and communication strategies for your school. Don’t wait. Do it now.

10 Steps to Outstanding School Website Management

1. Research what your target audience (parents, students, community members) want and expect from their school of choice.
2. Identify the areas in which your school meets or exceeds those expectations.
3. Develop a website structure that will make sharing this information (how you are meeting those needs and examples of your successes) readily available on the website—that means it will include intuitive navigation and be visual, informative, and current.
4. Establish a system for gathering data from your staff on an ongoing basis so proof of your successes continually makes its way to the website. This MUST be done on a regular schedule with reminders and follow-up or those who are in the know (and who all have fulltime jobs already) will forget to get this vital information to you.
5. Review content with an eye toward good public relations. There is more than one way to share information, make sure you choose a way that will do it in the most positive manner (but always be honest and NEVER “spin” straw into gold). Good is usually good enough, don’t ever sacrifice trust for hyperbole.
6. Make it attractive, visual, and professional. The design can be grade level appropriate, but amateurish and homegrown is NOT going to win you points with parents looking for a respected and effective school for their children.
7. Send reminders to your staff every month so they don’t forget to submit information to be placed on the website, in electronic newsletters, in school alerts.
8. Proof everything for accuracy—you are professionals and there is little tolerance from the public if you are careless (this is especially true of spelling, grammar, etc.).
9. Train your staff to become enthusiastic ambassadors for your schools using best practices in communication, public relations, and marketing to highlight your school.
10. Then, repeat steps 4 through 9 all month long.

The above list sounds pretty easy, right? Well, we know better than anyone that it isn’t easy and it is time consuming and requires certain skillsets that most schools simply can’t afford to hire for. You need people who are good at graphic design (even for those weekly and monthly updates to keep your site looking great), copywriting (it needs to be compelling, professional, correct), and it needs to be current. If you have a website that hasn’t been updated in two months, your audience assumes you just don’t care to let them know what is going on (or that nothing is going on for you to put out there). It may not be true, but it is a perception that will be hard to overcome, if you ever get a second chance.

So, if you are going to manage your school website in-house, put the necessary processes in place to do it right.

Warning: here’s the shameless self-promotion part.  If you don’t have the time, money, or energy to do it right, then you can always put School Webmasters to work for you. We do this for hundreds of schools around the U.S. and for much less than you would pay your own staff to try to do it for you. Yep, cheaper than you can keep it in-house. We had a school in Maryland who just selected us last week and his comment was, “I don’t understand why everyone isn’t using you guys.” We don’t understand it either.