Twitter is a great way to share news and information about your school with the world.  Twitter can easily be integrated with your school’s website or even manually updated.  Anyone can learn to use Twitter in under an hour and updates take just a few seconds because of the 140 character limit.  Best of all, Twitter is free.

In the late 1990s it became vital that churches and schools had websites to establish an online identity, but that is no longer enough.  Now, it is crucial that your school have a strong Web 2.0 presence as well.  Twitter is just a small part, though.  Social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc seem to be appearing daily.

Does your school need to make use of all of these?  Probably not, but some consideration should be given to each of them.  Perhaps YouTube would be a good way to share PR and marketing videos with the community or maybe some students or classes could post a series of video Lenten and Advent devotions.  Flickr could be use to share student work with families.  There are an infinite number of possibilities.

What’s important is making it easy for current and potential families and students to find information about your school and to help them understand the ministry being done there.  To paraphrase Scripture, it’s time to be the light of the world and put our schools on a hill so that all can see what is being done there, not for Earthly glory, but for the glory of our Lord and Savior.

Their post on marketing and search engine optimization made a great point about how to think about marketing our schools.

Marketing Is An Investment
When you invest for your retirement and put money into your 401K or IRA, you expect to get your money back. You also expect to make interest on the money you put in. Similarly, when you put money into marketing, you expect to not only get that money back, but also get additional money.

Consider what your school charges for tuition. For the sake of an example, let’s say it’s $5500, about the average Christian school tuition in the US. Now consider how much additional cost your school has for adding that one student. For the example let’s say it’s $1000 for books and other supplies. (Payroll, utilities and mortgage all stay the same with or without the new student). That gives you $4500 for every new student that enrolls that goes towards your general budget (programs, payroll, utilities, building fund, etc.)

So, if you invest $1500 on marketing and get one new student ($4500) you are $3000 ahead. If you get two new students ($9000), you are $7500 ahead. If you get 10 new students ($45,000), you are $43,500 ahead. I imagine you can do a lot with $43,500.

Cost Of NOT Marketing
Let’s say you have a board meeting and one person wants to spend $1500 on marketing and another person wants to spend $1500 on an event. You have “fun” discussion about it for a while and eventually the board decides to spend the money on the event. What happens? Your school spends the $1500 and has the event and that’s it.

Now, let’s say the board decides to spend the money on marketing. What happens? You spend $1500 on marketing and let’s say you get one new student (a pretty poor marketing campaign). You then have made back the $1500 you spent on the marketing and have an additional $3000. So, you are still able to have the event and you are also able to do something else, maybe paint the hallways or something.

By not marketing, it kept your school from getting the new student (who, by the way, next year and each year after brings in another $4500 as long as they stay) and cost you $3000 in additional money for the budget.

One of the participants in the workshop commented that his school has always done well simply relying on word-of-mouth advertising. But it now struck him, “Where could we be if we had done some marketing of the school? We may have been able to expand.” A great point! Even if you are doing well, could you be doing better?

This is the best explanation I’ve seen yet for why our Lutheran schools need to invest in marketing themselves to their communities. Our schools have something very valuable to share and it’s time to get the word out.

Their first workshop was on using the Web to improve school communication. They have some very solid advice. I wish I could have been there for the workshop myself.

I’ll provide a quick summary, but you can get all of the information on the Christian Web Trends blog.

Benefits of using the Web to communicate:

1. Prevents miscommunication
2. Prevents missed communications
3. Save time – parents can get the info themselves.
4. Saves money – less paper copies
5. Strengthen relationships. When communication is good and people are “in the loop” they feel more connected, more a part of the team.
6. Increases retention. When people feel connected, they don’t want to leave.

12 Ways to Use Your Website to Improve Communication

1. Put all info for prospective students on the website
2. Put all forms and policies on the website.
3. Put all school-wide communications on the website.
4. Email all school-wide communications to parents.
5. Have a calendar on your site and make sure it’s ALWAYS up to date.
6. Post & email a weekly note from the principal. Perhaps a blog.
7. Online event registration
8. Pay for tuition, lunch online
9. Maintain a class web page.
10. Put all class-wide communications from each teacher online.
11. Email all docs or a link to them to parents
12. Private student pages for grades & progress reports

Speaking of Web sites, it is crucial that all of our Lutheran schools have well-designed Web pages. In today’s technologically-driven world, prospective parents often narrow their lists of candidate schools based on information from the Web. Having an easy to use, up to date Web site can definitely help your school get that face to face contact with new families.