Education and marketing are strange bedfellows. Education is solid, conservative and altruistic. Marketing is ephemeral, glossy and self-serving. What place does marketing have in education?

A decline in school-aged children, more value conscious parents and tough economic times have forced a marriage of convenience between education and marketing that brings new strength to schools.

Marketing can show schools how to attract students, retain customer loyalty, improve PR, manage their image, read the community’s mind and earn respect for the education profession.

All this is necessary because modern parents expect much more than a classroom education and they are shopping around for a school that provides it.

Parents examine schools for sound results, innovative programs that engage kids in learning, values education, personalised tuition to suit individual learning styles, extra curricular choices, holiday care and much more. When they find it they enrol, when they don’t they talk with their feet.

Falling enrolments, closures and amalgamations are tangible evidence that schools now operate in a very competitive marketplace.

All schools realise they need to be responsive to community needs and sensitive to community perception. They need new strategies. They need marketing.

Have you noticed the increasing number of advertisements for schools in the press and on giant roadside posters? This is just one outward sign of a marketing revolution that is taking place in schools.

Quality communication to parents to help them make choices is a feature of contemporary schools. Long gone are the scraps of paper handed to parents at the reception desk with a few scratchy details. Modern school publications are professional and persuasive.

Once enrolled, schools use a multitude of methods to affirm that their customers have made the right choice, and technology is helping them do this.

Our Lady of The Visitation School is the first Catholic primary school in South Australia to introduce SMS (short message service) to talk with parents. For example, if a child is absent from school, the office sends an SMS message to the parent via their mobile phone. The parent then contacts the school with a reason for the child’s absence or an alert. The school’s marketing coordinator, Joanne Sayers, says that SMS enables the school to talk with parents in an instant. “Knowing that the school takes its duty of care seriously makes parents feel secure,” she says.

Marketing shows a school how to reach out to the community (expos and websites) seek community feedback (satisfaction surveys), be more accountable (annual reports, newsletters), train staff in customer service, and invite prospective customers to try before they buy (open days and residential stay-overs in boarding schools).

Marketing is not just for fee-paying schools. All schools who manage their image and monitor their customers’ satisfaction levels become better known and attract more enrolment inquiries. When a school’s quality product is combined with a strategic marketing plan, it positions a school to thrive in a shrinking marketplace.

- Joanne Sayers
Our Lady of the Visitation School