Welcome back! The feedback from the first edition of SchoolCEO has been fantastic. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out with ideas, questions, and suggestions about how they are thinking about marketing in their schools. Over the past few months we’ve gotten to meet with school leaders from across the country to learn about their marketing needs.
In this edition of SchoolCEO, we address one of the main concerns that we’ve heard from school leaders. The majority of administrators spent their career learning to teach children and run schools, so they don’t have a background in marketing.
Since there is so much marketing information for private sector companies that doesn’t apply to schools, we wanted to give a straightforward explanation of what marketing is and how it can work in schools. Check out “What is Marketing, Anyway?"
School leaders have also told us time and time again that they learn more from their peers than anyone else. We have two pieces from superintendents working through how to market and communicate. The first is a Q&A with superintendent Rick Cobb who had evolved his district to think about marketing in everything they do. He shares some great ideas about what works and what doesn’t. The second is a profile of Dr. Carol Kelley from Oak Park District 97, just outside of Chicago. She has made equity a priority in her schools, and is using technology in interesting ways to promote these ideas throughout the district.
The rest of the magazine is dedicated to a single issue: cyber charter schools, with a specific focus on for-profit education management companies. As many of you know, the academic results from these schools have been, to put it lightly, terrible.
Study after study shows the underperformance of students in these programs. We’ll provide an overview of the current state of cyber schools and dig into an interesting question they provoke: if their results are so bad, how have they continued to grow so rapidly?
The answer is in their marketing strategy. In “The Cyber School Marketing Playbook,” we’ll take you through these companies’ marketing strategies in detail. Some of their marketing is based on multi-million dollar budgets, which public schools will struggle to match, but their underlying strategies bring the latest ideas from digital marketing to the education space.
For us at SchoolCEO, the school marketing magazine, we’ve struggled with the contradictions cyber charters present. On the one hand, they’ve created a lot of great strategies for marketing in the education field, but on the other hand, some of their campaigns are clearly being used to mislead their audience.
The way we see it, marketing is like any other tool. You can use it for good; you can use it for bad. Many schools are using marketing to share their story and spread their culture. Leaders use social media to reach beyond the school walls into the homes of their families. Communities are often learning about what their local school has to offer for the first time through school marketing.
Given the state of education policy today, school leaders can expect only more competition for students and funding. Marketing needs to become a practice in every central office in the country. We hope you can take some of cyber schools’ marketing techniques and use them to strengthen your schools.
Welcome back! The feedback from the first edition of SchoolCEO has been fantastic. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out with ideas, questions, and suggestions about how they are thinking about marketing in their schools. Over the past few months we’ve gotten to meet with school leaders from across the country to learn about their marketing needs.
In this edition of SchoolCEO, we address one of the main concerns that we’ve heard from school leaders. The majority of administrators spent their career learning to teach children and run schools, so they don’t have a background in marketing.
Since there is so much marketing information for private sector companies that doesn’t apply to schools, we wanted to give a straightforward explanation of what marketing is and how it can work in schools. Check out “What is Marketing, Anyway?"
School leaders have also told us time and time again that they learn more from their peers than anyone else. We have two pieces from superintendents working through how to market and communicate. The first is a Q&A with superintendent Rick Cobb who had evolved his district to think about marketing in everything they do. He shares some great ideas about what works and what doesn’t. The second is a profile of Dr. Carol Kelley from Oak Park District 97, just outside of Chicago. She has made equity a priority in her schools, and is using technology in interesting ways to promote these ideas throughout the district.
The rest of the magazine is dedicated to a single issue: cyber charter schools, with a specific focus on for-profit education management companies. As many of you know, the academic results from these schools have been, to put it lightly, terrible.
Study after study shows the underperformance of students in these programs. We’ll provide an overview of the current state of cyber schools and dig into an interesting question they provoke: if their results are so bad, how have they continued to grow so rapidly?
The answer is in their marketing strategy. In “The Cyber School Marketing Playbook,” we’ll take you through these companies’ marketing strategies in detail. Some of their marketing is based on multi-million dollar budgets, which public schools will struggle to match, but their underlying strategies bring the latest ideas from digital marketing to the education space.
For us at SchoolCEO, the school marketing magazine, we’ve struggled with the contradictions cyber charters present. On the one hand, they’ve created a lot of great strategies for marketing in the education field, but on the other hand, some of their campaigns are clearly being used to mislead their audience.
The way we see it, marketing is like any other tool. You can use it for good; you can use it for bad. Many schools are using marketing to share their story and spread their culture. Leaders use social media to reach beyond the school walls into the homes of their families. Communities are often learning about what their local school has to offer for the first time through school marketing.
Given the state of education policy today, school leaders can expect only more competition for students and funding. Marketing needs to become a practice in every central office in the country. We hope you can take some of cyber schools’ marketing techniques and use them to strengthen your schools.