Simply put, your district’s brand is your reputation. It’s everything that comes to mind when families, students, and community members think about your schools. That means that every single experience people have with your district: from the user experience on your website to the first impression in the front office of your school, is a chance to build your brand.
This session is a hands-on journey into all the elements of a successful school brand and how to differentiate your district in a new era of school choice.
Related resources
SchoolCEO Magazine's Summer 2025 edition dives deep into the nuances of school branding.
District Case Studies
How Pennsylvania's Middle Bucks Institute of Technology empowers students to help craft their brand.
Why three districts updated the visual elements of their brands and how they got their communities on board.
Is your district a branded house or a house of brands, and why should you care?
Building a Strong Employer Brand
It matters how current and former employees think and feel about your schools. Luckily, you can shape that narrative—here's how.
Transcript
Greg Turchetta: Alright, friends. You're here for on brand, how to create a distinctive school district brand. This is gonna be radicalized candor and inconvenient truths for the next hour.
We are your tour guides here. I am Greg. That's Barrett.
We haven't met before. I'm the strategic communications advisor here at Apptegy. Prior to joining Apptegy a year and a half ago, I spent a decade as a chief communications officer in K-twelve districts in Florida and South Carolina, as well as a stint in the middle in higher ed.
I have three adult kids that are all out of the house at the bottom. They're well adjusted adults with well adjusted boyfriends and girlfriends, so my wife and I are excited about that. We do have three dogs though. Up to the top right is my yellow lab Bagel.
And my oldest daughter loves to run marathons and when she brings medals home, he wears them like he earned them. And you can see the smile on his face. He certainly thinks he earned them. And then the bottom right, we're gonna talk brand, right?
This was Thanksgiving Day at World. I live in Orlando in Florida. My wife and I because the kids weren't here, we went to SeaWorld and tell me that turtle does not understand brand. I mean, is a brand image if I've ever seen one and he took about nine pictures with us like that.
All right, so let's go.
What we're going to talk about today on brand all came out of the summer twenty twenty five School CEO magazine. Hopefully by now you know Apptegy and SchoolCEO are the same thing. SchoolCEO is the research arm for Apptegy. We produce quarterly magazines that you should be on the mailing list to get.
It is must read if you're a comms chief superintendent or anybody else as an administrator in a school. Our agenda today, very simple. One, why do brands work? Two, is your brand working for you?
We're gonna get personal and we're gonna dive into it.
Three, if it's not, how do you build a better brand? And four, once you've built the brand, how do you now do the most important part, which is why the last brand might have failed is how do you connect your brand to all your customers? So we're gonna get into all of that. But first, let's start with a little what is a brand? I can't tell you how many people I talk to who come back with talking about slogans and logos and colors. Those aren't brands. Those are elements.
But a brand is a perception, right? When you think about some of the best brands and that's why I asked you earlier, start having them in your mind. Patrick said Coke, that's a great one, right? What does Coke do to make their brand be more than perceived? Because a brand is a collection of perceptions, feelings and associations that customers have about a company or its products, right? Branding is a process.
That process is the strategic process of shaping a brand's identity and then more importantly influencing how it's perceived by the target audience. That my friends is the beauty of marketing. Your brand is your identity and when we're talking public education we're going to have to get honest with some of these are working and some of these are not. Because yes your identity has the visual elements, the logos, the colors, the packaging, the mascots we talked about but it's the intangible items too like your brand voice, your values, your personality all working together to create what this image is you're trying to give off to your community.
I like to start with this example. Anybody know what that image is? Go ahead, put it in the chat.
It's the Lord's chicken. It's the best run drive thru in America. The shirt should give it away. The vest should give it away.
That's right. It's Chick fil A. Now, when I was a chief communications officer, every time I met with one of my elementary school principals who was we were talking about Carline, I said, Oh, Monet was a marketing manager at Chick fil A. This will get interesting later.
You better weigh in. Okay, but I always told my elementary principals, You need to go to Chick fil A and talk to them about Carline management because they're the best there's ever been at.
And that is obviously Chick fil A is known for customer service, right? I'm not here to tell you their chicken's better than any other chicken you have. The fries and shakes might be, but they get something that businesses don't, which is it has to be a great experience. The food has to be good, yes, but the experience has to be great and that's why people line up. And they also know I'm gonna go through there with amazing efficiency. That's a commitment to quality at every level, right?
And that's what we're going for. They have fresh ingredients, they have quality food. They'll tell you the oil they use for their fries is different than McDonald's uses. I don't know if that's true nor do I care but when I go there I have a great experience. And did you know they make more money open six days a week than McDonald's makes open on seven? So they're doing something right.
So why do I tell you all that? Because we're to talk about what great brands are and what they create. They create trust, credibility and consistency. They create an emotional connection with the customer.
As I talked about earlier, it's much more than a slogan, mission or value statement. It's a gut feeling. Now, I'm gonna throw some great brands also at the end of the day, it's a business. They have to create results.
They have to create sales. They have to create profits or they don't exist. So let's talk about some of these on the right. Some of these aren't great brands in my opinion and some are.
And how do I make the distinction? Well, what's the difference between Walmart and Target?
You can put it in the chat, but I'm going beat you to the punch, right?
Especially the ladies on the webinar today. You love Target.
Why? Does it feel and I've done this presentation in person with hundreds of people and they say, It just feels different when I walk in. You bet it does.
Target feels elevated. Yes, Kim, elevated. Fancier, of course. What does Walmart feel like? Lowest common denominator? Department of Motor Vehicles? What's the difference?
The difference is perception and that's everything, right? Disney.
Similar prices but Target feels fancier. Yes.
Walmart's trying to get better for sure but not the same. Yes, and they even have smocks on that say it's a pleasure to help you and I'm not sure their customer service is a pleasure to do anything.
I actually had an experience at Walmart. This was in Georgia. I went through and I had an entire transaction. This is before self checkout. I had an entire transaction with a cashier, never made eye contact with me. Like when she was done ringing up the item, she just stood there and looked down and I went, wow, that's a new low in customer service.
But Disney is the other end. I went on a Disney cruise this fall and let me tell you, as a guy who lives in Orlando and has been to the theme parks countless times, how can Disney take their concept and bring employees from all over the world and baptize them in this customer service religion they have so that the experience is elite everywhere. And on a cruise ship, the entire cruise ship staff was foreign. They were from all over the world.
And that got me thinking because we hire a lot of international teachers to fill in for the teachers we don't have. So how is school districts, can we replicate that? But that Disney quality, it's like Ritz Carlton, the company I work for Apptegy, we like to think we're the same thing, right? The customer service piece is the secret sauce.
Lululemon. A little icon down there on the right if you didn't know what that was.
They are expensive leggings, really expensive leggings. And when I bring it up, people jump to the defense. Go ahead, put it in the chat. Why do you buy a Lululemon?
Go ahead, say it. Quality, it's better. I'll pay one hundred dollars for a pair of leggings because they're from them. And I'm not gonna argue that.
Same thing Nike. Nike can charge whatever they want for their shoes because an Air Jordan is just perceived to be superior. Always has been, always will be.
Starbucks, do they make the best coffee?
I'm not a big coffee drinker but I'll tell you this much, I'm from New England and the people up there will tell you Dunkin' Donuts is much better than Starbucks on any given day. But Starbucks creates an emotional connection And it's a feel thing, right? Like I'll take my laptop and I'll go in when I'm on the road, I'll work on a Starbucks even though I don't drink coffee because it's a vibe, right? It's a feel.
And Starbucks invented the phrase third home. Love that Tabitha. So true, right? The coffee is just a part of the experience.
So here we go. Brand test time.
It's your turn. I walked you through a couple of brands that are on the screen, but I want you to name your favorite brand in the chat.
I want you to tell me what what they're known for or why you use the product. But more importantly, I wanna know how you how you emotionally connect to them.
And sometimes I found it may be something that like laundry detergent, you may be using the same laundry detergent you grew up on because your parents used it, right? It might be the smell that carries over. So what's something that's in your brand favorites list?
Patrick says Apple, reliable products and slick, very reliable. Great point Patrick. Here's the other thing I'd raise with that. Google and Samsung have probably had more technical features than Apple over the last decade, yet nobody's waiting in line for their phones.
Right? So, Apple has really tied into the emotion. I mean, the amount of excitement behind a release is I don't think anything rivals it. Dawn dish soap.
Oh, Jacqueline, I like that one. Third generation user here. That's right. You're soaking in it.
Kim says Puma, shoes, nostalgia. Parents also love Puma. See how this works?
I hope you're getting ahead of me and I hope you're starting to reflect on this for your school district. Starbucks probably, unfortunately. I go to the same one enough that we're on a first name basis. Do they spell your name right?
Most of the time they do. Toyota, reliable, holds valuable. Family tradition of driving Toyotas. There it is again, family tradition.
Honda, they don't break down very much. Marvel, they made being a geek cool again and had strong storytelling for a long time. Yes, Marvel is an experience. When you wait for the next trailer, you go to a Marvel movie and everybody waits till after the credits to see what the big reveal is going to be for the little nugget of the next movie.
Marvel gets it.
Aldi, yes. Subaru, yes.
So now let's flip it around.
Let's start looking at your schools and your district with the same critical eye. I want you to take your communications hat off for a second. I want you to put your parent hat on. We do that all day, every day, but for this one especially, don't be defensive about whatever your district has built, especially if you've a hand in it. But there's three questions I've got to ask you that hit hard. One, is your brand driving student enrollment? If you're losing students, you have a brand problem.
I'll elaborate in a minute. Is your brand impacting teacher recruitment and retention? If districts around you aren't down as many teachers as you are, you may have a brand problem.
And is your brand raising money for your schools? And what do I mean by that? When I sat in the chair, I told my principals and I told my teachers, if you need something, talk about it on social media. You're the largest employer in your county, most of the time.
Businesses would die to be a part of what you are. They want access. So if your brand's strong enough and you have an image of quality, brands should be lining up to get a piece of whatever action they can in the school district. If they're not, we're going to show you how to change it.
And that's where we have to look in the mirror.
So when it comes to branding and I love this graphic from our OnBrand Magazine, it's the periodic table of elements. Julie is saying something interesting. I just had a conversation this morning and realized our own staff don't know our slogan or motto because we have too many. That is a great point, Julie.
And we'll get to simplifying a message too. But if you're gonna look at a brand, you gotta look at all the elements that make up that brand. Notice top dead left center customer service. Now we call this the school branding periodic table of elements.
And I love that analogy because if you think back to science class, I don't know, middle school, high school, depending on how smart you were in science.
If you think about carbon dioxide, CO2, right? If you take one oxygen molecule away from that, what do you have? Carbon monoxide, which is deadly.
And I like to use that analogy with customer service because customer service could be carbon monoxide for your brand. Think about when you walk into certain buildings, who you're met with, what kind of response you get, and whether customer service is a true focus in a Chick fil A or Disney way or more in a we do what we have to do and we're overwhelmed. And far too often it's the latter at certain schools and you could point right to them because you know. But all the elements that go into this, the website experience, logos, superintendent reputation, that's a big one. Especially with so many superintendents getting fired lately. Turnover and churn of leadership really impacts brand.
Crisis communication, alumni relations, you see what it's all made up of, right?
Every element combines to form the brand but there's more than that. There's sub brands to your brand.
Each sub brand influences the other sub brand and as a result, either lifts or pulls down on the overall brand. So let's get into that. All right, there's the district brand in the middle. We've got students, right?
Student academic impact, the brand. Athletics, a state championship in a sport can certainly positively impact your brand. Your employees, when they're at the grocery store talking about your district, that impacts the brand positively or negatively. The schools themselves, some schools are A's, some schools aren't.
They all have an impact on the overall brand. I just mentioned the superintendent turnover, but a dynamic superintendent can be incredible for a school brand, especially if they understand branding and marketing, which many of them do, especially those that are being elected now. But that one at the top left school board members is a challenging brand element right now more often than not.
If you have board members that are actively speaking that of your district, that hurts your brand and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it because that's their purview. And then the politics of which we're operating right now, there's a lot more of this going on than anybody would like but we can offset it a bit in our storytelling and I'll talk about that more too. But you have to tell your success stories from each of these groups to prove and strengthen your brand image. If you're not telling it, who is? Your critics.
If you're not proving your success every day then you're not doing what Coke and Apple are doing, which is proving we're the best at what we do.
A great brand shines with every customer interaction and if you take anything from me today, customer service is a huge piece of the brand and from the comms chair it's hard to keep an eye on that but it's getting more and more important especially when it comes to enrollment because we all are starting to have enrollment challenges and customer service and enrollment marketing, it's all intertwined with this brand.
Alright, so let's go. Now let's do a test.
You ready? I'm gonna ask you a series of nine questions.
If you answer yes to five or more, it might be time to explore a rebrand. If you say yes to two to four, you might need a refresh. Zero to one might just need a good campaign. You ready?
Get your notepad ready.
Staff can't state our unique value in one sentence. That goes back to I think what Julie said earlier about the too many slogans.
Our identity is inconsistent across our schools and channels.
Enrollment is flat declining year over year.
If you're up in enrollment, put it in the chat. I'd love to hear if there's anybody that's up.
Number four, parent trust or advocacy is trending down.
Number five, our website social look and voice don't match our classroom experience. And that one cuts me deep. Because if you happen to work in a district that has great academic outcomes and you're on the surge and you're becoming like a top ten district in your state, our brand has to match that because everybody would kill for those results. I worked in districts at times where it was a challenge to find anything to market.
Number six, competitors messaging feels clearer and more modern than ours.
Number seven, our brand is hard to use. There's no templates, there's no brand center, there's no governance. It's the wild west which means it's probably been around for too long without being refreshed.
Samantha says she's at capacity in multiple grades. I love that Samantha.
Quinn says they're up, only charter school in our district that is currently up for enrollment.
There's some success stories out there friends, but some of you, especially down here in Florida are feeling it.
Other states when you get universal vouchers, we'll talk more about that when I do the enrollment marketing webinar but that's a big one. All right, number eight, accessibility or mobile issues keep popping up. The tools are outdated and they're just not functioning well. And nine, we have more detractors than we have advocates.
Now that's a tricky one because the detractors are always going to be more vocal. But on a true measurement, we're starting to see much more action at board meetings that's all about negative and the positive people are going silent and they're not coming forward.
So again, little more tricky there. So where do you fall? Where do you fall?
And what do we do with that information? Here's what we do with that information. We go a little deeper. If you're going to build a better district brand, we need to take a little more look at when it's time to rebrand.
School choice pressure is a huge one and it's real. I'm building a presentation right now for NCE next month about the alternative realities of working in school comms in a blue, red or purple state. And the differences are real, although there's some commonalities that I'll share with you guys in another webinar to where you can take it on. But enrollment declines, stagnant inquiries, families struggle to explain how you're different from nearby charters, virtual or private homeschool options.
That's a real problem.
And that's a messaging problem because we have got to be better at telling that story. Because if our staff can't differentiate, if they're asked in the grocery store aisle, what makes you better than that new school it opened down the road and they fall flat on the answer, that's an enrollment issue.
Fragmentation. Schools and departments are using their own logos, colors and voice. Staff often DIY materials because the current brand system is unusable or unattractive. And then that perception versus reality gap.
Survey data shows lower declining trust and advocacy despite strong academic outcomes. I've worked in a district like that before, was a top ten in the state, but if you listen to what people were saying, they would have thought it was a failure factory. And we had to work really hard to correct that because when you have the outcomes, you have everything you need. Or an aging identity.
If your visual system hasn't had a meaningful refresh in ten plus years and it feels outdated, uninspiring to families you're trying to reach, it's going feel uninspiring to your staff and it just looks like we're not can you imagine if I know going retro with logos for brands is a popular thing now but can you imagine if they just didn't update it? And that's what we do. Let me give you an example. This is one of my former districts and a brand rebuild I led in my first year at the district.
On the left is the nineteen seventy school board official logo and boy it looks it doesn't it? The district school board of Collier County. That's the official name of the district. This is in Naples, Florida, if you're trying to find it on a map.
Picture that logo on a polo shirt or a t shirt. Nobody wants to wear that. Nobody wants to put that on a sign. Nobody wants to put that on a bus. Certainly as a letterhead. So on the right was we came up with three different versions of what the refresh would be, keeping the same elements, Everybody has the book of knowledge, the flame of inspiration.
We kept all of that. But what was really curious here was people were referring to our district as CCPS, not the district school board of Collier County. The only time you heard that term was at a school board meeting or in a lawsuit because that's the official legal name. So we knew CCPS was what people wanted to call it.
We just had to put it into a situation that would work. That is now on t shirts and polo shirts and it's been that way for over ten plus years and still going strong. Could it be refreshed again? Yeah, because it's been ten plus years.
Here's another example. I've worked recently with Chesapeake Public Schools. If you want to read more about this rebrand, it's actually a case study on our Apptegy website.
You can go check it out. But on the left is their outdated, looks like a pigeon. Again, the flame of knowledge. On the right is the blue heron that they this is a self drawn logo. Here's the cool part.
One of the comms team at Chesapeake, her dad actually drew the original logo and she got them back involved to draw the new one. So there's that full circle of attribute and trust but man that looks like a community I'd want to move in on the right with the heron and the water. I mean, a water guy that speaks to me but it's speaking to their community as well and they're having great success with it.
Now, here's another one. Let's go to Georgia. Dalton Schools Making Your Mark rebrand. The graphic at the top is Dalton's old logo and you can see there's ten leaves on that tree. That's supposed to be a tree and the ten leaves are each one is for a school.
So they had a new executive director of comms come in and she had had a sports marketing background and she said we really need turn this up a bit. All ten of their schools have a cat themed mascot. So do you see what she did with the D? All the bottom logos are the new brand. That's a cat scratch in the D. That looks like an athletic mark but that is their actual district logo and I love it.
Again, this is another case study you can go read about how they went through all of this but the tagline making your mark and the way Kendra Pinnell, their chief explained it to me. She said we want our students to make their mark on the community. We want our teachers to make their mark on the students. We want our schools to make their mark on everybody.
And that making your mark with the cat scratch, with the cat theme, they still have the academic slogan here to learn, lead, succeed, but their marketing for their is making your mark. And that just that to me I think lands beautifully. So well done to them.
Alright, so if you're gonna build a successful district brand, if you do it's time and the time to do it right.
You always start with an audit and research. You just don't walk in one day and go blow it up, right? We know that the race process or RPIE, whatever one you're using, you start with research. Stakeholder interviews, surveys, parents, students, staff, taxpayers. There's a lot of these logos and a lot of especially these school logos that have history, you gotta be careful.
You wanna look at channel metrics performance and if you can, again, money's tight, but an overall perception study. What do people think? What do they like? And I'm going show you some more of how we dive into that.
Positioning and message. Is there a clear brand promise? What parent personas are you going to target? What are going to be your proof of performance points?
And then what tone and voice guidelines are you going to give to your staff? Because remember, they're the ones who gonna have to execute this. You're going to roll it out but it's really going be up to them to keep it moving. And then how do you enable it?
Brand templates and brand guides. We're going to talk a lot about that and I'm going to show you some examples. Approval process and then training for principals, secretaries and coaches. All these people that are going to touch this brand.
We don't want them going on their own and clipping out their own images and stretching logos. We don't want any of that. So we got to be specific. And then when you roll it out internal first, we know that internal before external all the time.
And then to the community updating high visibility touch points early, the website, the app, signage, athletics, things that are high visibility. One of the things I always told people when I did it was we'll get to the stationary when we get to it. We're not gonna throw all that stationary away and waste that money. We can cycle through it.
But the bigger things we get right on it. And then of course you got to measure it. How do we know this is even worth doing? It'll probably cost you some money and your school board or superintendent will want to see proof that it had an impact and that impact can be found in enrollment inquiries, tours, web conversions, attendance at school choice events and social media engagement all easily to measure.
Now I talked about with that history in it, Here's another one of these really old logos. This is Roselle Public Schools in New Jersey. So I've got New Jersey on here. This story is in the magazine again, I'm just going to touch on it but if you want to read the background on this, it's really cool.
Here's why it's cool to me. Doctor. Nathan Fisher said, I didn't want to be the guy who destroyed history. So when I but he knew he had to update this.
So I kept all the elements of the old brand but modernized them and you can see what he did. There's that book of knowledge again. We got the light bulb coming out of it and then their slogan First in Light, First in Education. What makes that cool is that points back to Rizelle's history.
They were the first community in the world to be lit by Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb. How cool is that?
Right and as Doctor. Fisher said, they could see that I understood the essence of what the school community was built on and that is critical. When we did our rollout, we didn't just pick a logo, right? A design.
We picked three or four and we let the community vote on it. We were okay with any one of them, right? But they chose and then we could say, you chose, this was your choice. If can get a student to design it even better because now student artwork's involved.
Some of you have marketing and graphic design programs that are good enough to do that but being true to history is so important.
Are you gonna be a house of brands or one district brand? And so again, in the magazine, we tell the story of Denton ISD, Denton in Texas, forty five brands, schools that have existed past grandparents, right?
When they went to do their rebrand, they couldn't reel it all in. So they just had to manage it and they couldn't put that genie back in the container. So what they did was they said we're gonna manage it from the print side. We're gonna move all print assets back through communications, have an approval process for that and then really tighten down the logos.
So that's more of a brand tune up. Burrville in Rhode Island, I'm actually from Rhode Island so this one speaks to me. I didn't choose them, they were in the magazine. But Burrville said, we are the Broncos, the whole district.
It's less than ten schools, they're the Broncos. From the time you're in pre K to the time you graduate, you're a Bronco. And their superintendent was smart about this because he was having an enrollment problem because Rhode Island's so small, you can put your kids, you can move fifteen minutes be in another county and be in another school system.
So they were losing enrollment and immediately within the first year, he started seeing his retention numbers go up because people were buying into this Be a Bronco concept. So if you're in a smaller district, highly recommend taking a look at what Burrville did because it's smart. If you're in a bigger district, be smart about it.
Alright, let's talk about Durham Public Schools in North Carolina. I worked closely with them over the last year. They relaunched everything. And Durham's one of these districts. It's a large district in North Carolina a lot of people look to. But Sheena there, their comms chief, was very intentional about how she did this. I want you to look at, this is their spark newsletter.
You can see their logo is built into that. Their school websites have their image and colors built into it just like the district. So tying that brand identity through everything you put out, not just in the logo, but you can just tell by looking at all of these, you're on the Durham site. And that's smart because it's smart internally and it's smart externally and it brings it all back under a family.
Not everybody has to be the same but they got to be in the same family. And I'll have more examples there too but here's Klein in Texas. Klein's another district I work closely with But what I love about this is this is three elements I pulled off their homepage. It's not built like this but promise to purpose, choose excellence.
Why choose Klein? And here's all the students with reason fifty one, reason sixty three. That's a brand that you don't need to know much about Klein but they're screaming excellence and they live it. So there's a lot of inspiration, I call it admire and acquire.
Go out and look at some of these people that are really working brand hard because I can tell you the examples I'm showing you, they live it behind the scenes and it's having impact. And that's the important part at the end the day. Being pretty is one thing, having impact is another.
Here's one of my favorite brand storiesenrollment stories out there. This is Duval County, Florida. We built this website. This is four different elements of this website.
This is the number one enrollment focused website in the country. I challenge anybody to find a better one. And here's why. These are just four elements from their homepage.
Their homepage is one argument after another about why they are excellent at what they do. The Duvall School's Difference. Duvall Delivers at Florida A rated school district. Here's all their performance numbers.
They even have a section called More Reasons.
Like they've just poured reasons on for as far as you can scroll and here's some more. That's how you make an argument. That's how you let people know you're damn good at what you do. And that's what gets people excited to come buy your product even though it's free.
Okay, now you got them in. Now we're talk about brand control and consistency. Because if you're like me and I'm sure you are, you've spent a lot of time trying to reign that brand in from the people that are bad actors or just don't know any better and try things. Everybody has good intentions. They don't have all good design skills.
Brand consistency. The same approved logos, slogans, and colors used across all schools in the district office. Regulated in the brand guide. That comes brand control. The brand guide is in place to regulate fonts, colors, logos, slogans. Don't let people try to figure out what they do with a business card.
Trademarks. You don't have to oversee the trademarks, but if you have a legal counsel in your district, you go to them and say, we are doing a brand refresh and I need to trademark our logos.
They'll handle the rest of it.
And then probably the most important, it's a great opportunity for you. If you're in district where you're struggling to have your expertise recognized, whether you're new to the district or communications has never been viewed as the critical function that it is, this is a great opportunity to gain that control back. Position you and your team as experts here to teach and coach all users. If you're gonna launch a brand, it's a year long project minimum. No different than launching a website, launching an app. If you launch a brand, teaching is a huge part of it. And you gotta be willing to put the work in and be the go to for that because that's how you get consistency.
Speaking of consistency, wanna give you another example. This is Chesapeake, Virginia.
Look at the schools to the right. Okay, so I'll give you a backstory in Chesapeake. Again, case study. You can read this story from start to finish.
This is one of my favorite stories. But they were a district of forty eight schools that didn't really have a district identity until they just created one recently, like in the last five years. So all of these schools had very, very set in their ways with their look. And so, they said we're going to bring it under, all under the umbrella.
But see what they did? Every one of these schools you can tell are in the same brand family yet they keep their individuality and I love that.
Standardize school logos but create a consistent feel across the district which is great. Now look at their websites. At the bottom is the Chesapeake district site and the top five are just some of the schools. Do you see how well that ties together?
Because here's the other thing Chesapeake learned. When they started doing the websites, they realized websites are an equity issue because the parent came forward and said, it was a Hispanic mom from a poor section of town who said, our school doesn't have the same resources as the affluent schools. They've got spends a lot of money and they have a much better website and they learn about things before us.
That's a huge moment, right? Branding is equity. Schools have to have the same tools. They have to have the same access. They have to have the same speed of their communications. And your principals need to know that. The parents are looking at it like that feeling we're treated less than because the honest truth is it just might be a principal who sent the message out first.
But Chesapeake learned things like student opportunities need to come from the district so everybody gets it at the same time.
And that's really what it's about.
Here's Edmonds, Oklahoma. This is my friend, Jeff Bardock. He actually did this webinar with me in the fall and we walked through what Edmonds did. Edmonds, Oklahoma is another great example to go look at but I'm going to highlight a few things. Number one, department logos. This is often overlooked but the departments when you bring up a brand new brand, everybody wants to be a part of it, everybody wants to have it on their stuff.
May get ahead of you and take your logo and start changing it. No, no, no. Administration, child nutrition, communications, custodial, athletics, they're all built. You're getting all of it. There's different variations. You can see how they change the colors around but here it is.
At the school level, schools are getting it. This is what it is. Edmond Memorial, your red, your gray, these are the bulldogs you can use.
Nice and simple, nice and easy because if you're gonna hand it to a principal, it's gonna be more work out of the gate, we know that.
But it doesn't feel like work when you guys have done the heavy lift.
Here's the secret sauce though for Edmonds. And when Jeff explained this, I thought it was great. Look at Sequoia Middle School right here under the name badge on the left. See how it has the Sequoia logo and the Edmonds logo?
And they were intentional about that. They said because we have a lot of employees think psychologists, interventionists, people that travel between schools and the district.
If that just had the Edmonds logo on it, it wouldn't hit the same way to a parent receiving it. Now they're part of the school, right? We're not a district. We're one hundred and fifty individual schools that happen to live within a district but my parent connection is with the school, not the district.
So subtle little touches like this if you're redoing your brand I think are so powerful. I love the dolphin on the business card, right? There it is again, branding. They were just so intentional in how they treated every school and there's no room to wiggle here.
They're all within the Edmond family. They're all high quality and guess what? Their people were excited to get it. This wasn't viewed as, Oh, here we go, another change initiative.
This was exciting. This made them feel great.
Connecting your brand to all customers.
You got to connect with students, connect with staff and connect with community. So what does that look like? I want to take you to Middlebucks Institute. One of my favorite stories. If you look at that picture on the left, can you already tell what Middle Bucks Institute does?
Of course you can, right? That image is powerful. It's also a stereotype buster, which makes me love it even more.
But Doctor. Mark Covell, the administrative director there, was at a conference with a group of students. And the next day after they came back from the conference, a student walked up in his office and said, Hey, Doctor. Covell, do you realize if you take our name, Middle Bucks Institute, and you take the M, V, the I, and the T, as you can see on the image to the top right, that's in the middle of the word ambition.
We should do something with that. And he goes, you're right, I never thought of that. And a brand was born from a student. How cool is that?
So, but Mark went a step further. It's one thing to get students credit, it's another thing to operationalize it through the students. And at a trade school, this is a great idea. Our students are the most prolific consumers and producers of social media, turn them loose. So that's what they did.
If you're afraid of how to do that, talk to us later because we have the tool with a built in approval process that made this possible. Students work as paid media associates for two hours a day up to four days a week and they established very clear workflows that required a thorough review and approval before it was published but it's gone crazy. It's been great. And I love when Mark says authenticity is our North Star and it's vital to share a clear message about the real work happening within our walls.
It's the same thing for you, not just a trade school thing. People don't know what's going on in your schools. Think about it. A lot of your community, if they don't have kids in your schools, haven't seen the inside of a high school in twenty, thirty years.
Think about how much has changed. Think about all the things you see every day that your voters don't. And that's why this initiative is so important. A student driven identity shaping authentic brand message.
Touchdown. That's what we're here for.
All right.
You can connect it with the community, but you have got to connect it with your employees or it goes nowhere fast.
So it starts again with discovery. Everything your employee experience impacts your brand. Yes, salaries, yes, professional development opportunities. Think about when you're recruiting teachers, what you're selling them on, right?
It's those things. We provide more professional development than the districts around us. Great, but there's the intangible aspects too like your school culture and your staff sense of belonging. They don't get that right away.
They don't get that in the brochure. They get that in the building.
So we have to be intentional when we do a branding initiative about what values and priorities we want our schools and our district to be known for doing very well, not just doing, but doing exceptionally well and maybe better than your neighbors. And you have to be really clear on what you want people to know and remember for your staff and your parents.
And then you have to make it visible. I went to an ENSFER seminar session in St. Louis a few years ago and saw one of the most powerful presentations I've ever seen, which was the marriage of PR and HR.
And it was how those two departments worked together for recruitment and it changed the way I worked. I went back to my district and I took control of our recruitment page for teachers. And here's why. They said exactly this. You have intentionally sharing stories about your employees experience that reinforce the strength of your brand. I want to hear from people that work for you on your careers page, talking about why your district's an amazing place to work.
Why wouldn't we? If I go to a college site, I'm gonna see that, right?
Your careers page has to have those testimonials of your culture and values. By the time I get to hit the apply button, I should be so excited about what I've heard, what I've seen and what I feel that there's no doubt this is the district I wanna work in. We gotta get through the fingerprinting and we're done, right? Or do we just have them fill out an application, they show up to the school that they had a spot in and after the first week, they look around and go, wait a minute, this doesn't feel anything like what I was told.
And we all know we have those buildings too.
So how do you fix that? You do it by closing the authenticity gap. The ultimate goal is to close the gap between the employer brand you're promoting and what staff actually feel. Get them together, be honest and candid and that's why letting the staff talk about it, peer to peer reviews are the strongest things that are out there.
That builds authenticity which helps attract, recruit and more importantly retain staff.
So this goes back to that customer service and culture piece. Brand is customer service and culture at every level.
Now, I'm going to leave you with what I think is the best example that public education can learn from. Anybody know who that is on the right?
Good, you can put it in the chat. Has anybody seen them?
I've missed out on tickets this year and I'm deeply disappointed.
Yeah, you've seen their videos? Okay.
So why do I think we in education can learn from the Savannah Bananas? For those of you who might be here not knowing what I'm talking about, this is a minor league baseball team in Savannah that Jesse Cole is their owner that came in and said, baseball is boring.
And the traditionalist went, no, baseball is boring and I fall into that camp. I would much rather watch baseball on SportsCenter than beat a game. I like the peanuts, the hot dogs, the ambiance of being in a stadium but don't get me wrong, the game was too slow. So the bananas changed all the rules.
That's a guy on stilts in the background that hits and pitches on stilts. That's a kick line going on during the game. They have a hundred plus elements of entertainment built into the game. There's a script they follow.
Yeah, there's still baseball being played and there's still winners and losers and now there's multiple teams.
Jesse looked at it and he said, know that if everyone in your business makes the customers the stars and gives them the red carpet treatment, you'll make those customers feel like a million bucks. It changes everything for the customer and your employees will be more fulfilled and take pride. Imagine what's the best possible fan experience and do that. At a Savannah Bananas game if you catch a foul ball it counts as an out. You are in the game.
Now this is a five hundred million dollar company that's on a world tour that's selling out Major League Base ball and NFL stadiums multiple nights in a row.
So something here has landed. And so here's my connection to education.
Education's boring, right? It's been the same for one hundred years. Now in the classroom, it's changed, but people's perception of it are going down, not up.
How do we take some of this excitement? How do we take some of this what's best for students? I can't tell you how many cabinet meetings I sat in where people say, well, we do what's best for students and that's what we do. Not all the time. A lot of times we do what's best for teachers and the unions because we don't wanna make anybody angry. Or a lot of times we take the easier route because nobody wants to redistrict. But that might be best for students who have long transportation rides, right?
But in this case, they really live it. So how do we go back and look at our customer service, our brand, our communications? Are we communicating exactly the way the parents want it? Parents want apps.
They're used to apps. They want something in their hand. They don't wanna have to go to twenty one different apps. They don't wanna to go chase teachers in all these different places that the teachers decided they're gonna communicate because it's best for them.
No, they want one single source of truth, you. They want one simple way to engage with the district, you and the teacher and the principal and they want it made easy for them. Because at the end of the day, a well informed parent leads to better academic outcomes which leads to everybody succeeding.
Here's the problem, folks.
Regardless of the kind of brand you build, the goal is the same, to establish a positive reputation that will build community and connection, which is what the bananas have done. But as a school district, you're selling basically the same product as a district down the road.
Good education, hopefully a great education. Test scores might be a little higher or lower than the district next to you. Their teachers might be just as qualified as yours.
This is where your branding separates you.
This is why you have to differentiate from your competition. You're gonna have to go back and have a conversation with your superintendent leadership team and let me tell you, as somebody that trains districts across the country, they look at me and they go, Greg, are you saying we have to compete? Yes, look around.
Public education is under attack by people who think they can do it better than you.
People with no education experience are opening schools saying we can do this better.
So we have to compete. We have to tell our brand story. We have to be bold in telling we are incredible at what we do every day. Because you are incredible at what you do every day under the circumstances that now you're having to do it. Amazing.
But we gotta be bold in that and our brand should have that because Apple doesn't have to tell anybody they're great at what they do, right? It's baked into what they do. Disney the same way. If you go to Disney and have a bad experience, you probably can count those on one hand because they're trying to fix anything.
How many times has somebody gone to a front office and walked away frustrated? How many times has somebody gone to enroll a child in your district and the application is too complicated?
Especially in English as a second language family who's already struggling to figure it out, try to get through the processes. That's all pieces of brand and that's what's going to distinguish you from your competition. So this is hard work. This is the kind of thing where you're gonna be unpopular if you go back and say, I think we have a problem that we can correct.
Because if we don't do it now and depending on where you are in the country, certain pockets are further down this school choice road and I'll take you to Florida here for a second. I mentioned universal vouchers earlier. Florida districts on average are down between three and ten thousand students this year. They're closing schools.
They have a fifty million dollars budget shortfall and one of them with this one hundred thousand student district, I'll let remain nameless, was in the news a couple weeks ago saying they're gonna hire a third party marketing firm to come in and market their schools. That's not the problem.
This is an A rated district. They should have everything they need to do it. It's an institution district wide commitment to doing it and saying we are gonna be bold in telling our story. We're gonna be bold in serving our customers. We do it better than any charter school common in town can do it because we have the scale and we have the ability. Now we just have to do it.
So I'll leave you with that.