blog

• Blog
• Education

An Introduction to the Personal Intelligent Prospectus – the Future of Schools Marketing

The world of digital marketing for the Education Sector is ever-changing and always challenging, but hugely rewarding. Nevertheless, it is increasingly important that schools and colleges no longer think of websites, videos and other forms of digital communication as individual tasks that need to be completed and think instead about a complete Digital Strategy.

A well-considered, well-researched and well-executed Digital Strategy can put your establishment in a position to have a professional and consistent message to past, present and future audiences for your communications. Concept4 and Affixxius Education bring their specific, and shared, skills to this exciting new challenge in the Education Sector. For any Digital Strategy to work there needs to be a series of core marketing and creative guidelines that are used as the foundation for some or all of the elements that we can collectively provide. This coming-together of expertise and experience in both Digital Design and Video Production, underpinned by joined-up creative and strategic marketing strategy, presents our customers with an unrivalled offering in the field.

What is it?

So, in a sentence, what exactly is a Personal Prospectus? It can be described as “an online personal experience of your school for your prospective market.”

What are the benefits to the school and its audience?

Personal Experience – crucially, the experience that someone has of a school through a Personal prospectus is personal to them. The level to which the experience is personal can vary depending on the project, but the key feature of the system is that your audience sees the material they want to see when they want to see it.

Your Prospective Market – although a school’s audience can be generally divided into different categories (parent, pupil etc), there are often variations in audiences that make crucial differences to how a school can be marketed. For instance, messages to boarding students or overseas students may be different to messages given to sport-mad or arty students. The Personal Prospectus allows the right information to go to the right audience at the right time.

Online – a Personal Prospectus is an online tool. Is it not a ‘website’, per se, but it is bolted onto your website to give prospective parents or pupils somewhere to go as a ‘one stop shop’ for information about the school. Also, the addition of a Personal Prospectus to a school’s web provision can often make customers think hard about the role of their ‘ordinary’ website.

Your School – every Personal Prospectus is built from scratch entirely to the needs and wants of each school. That means that the experience your audience has of your school is carefully designed to ensure they get as much of a ‘feel’ for the school as possible.

Understanding where a Personal Prospectus fits in the ‘scheme’ of your school’s communications and marketing is vital. Also, it allows you to consider communications to both an external (prospective) and internal (current) audience.

The role of the school website in its traditional form is changing. With the huge developments in online technology, more and more is being piled onto the ‘role’ of the site. Personal Prospectuses draw a line in the sand. They are a one-stop-shop for the prospective audience, allowing the website to act as resource for the internal audience and casual browser and as a signpost for the prospective audience.

Loretto, Scotland’s oldest and most prestigious boarding school, commissioned Concept4 and Affixxius Education to create an innovative Personal Prospectus to bring parent and student communications into the 21st century. The Loretto project was by far the most challenging yet rewarding and is an excellent example of a well-considered, well-executed digital strategy.

To view the Loretto Personal prospectus, click here