Unlocking External Insights for School Success
By: Mike Connor, President of Connor Associates Strategic Services LLC
Since founding Connor Associates in 1998, I’ve been speaking about scanning the external environment as critical for the survival and sustainable success of independent schools. It's very important to get an external perspective of your school from feeder and matriculating schools, community influencers, educational consultants, real estate brokers, business leaders, the admission funnel, and the media, to name a few.
Internal strengths and weaknesses are important to identify. But when you compare yourselves to how others outside the school see you, THAT is where great marketing plans are born. When done well, external Image Audits are a great tool that will give you valuable information to calibrate your program, build and strengthen external relationships, and raise your school’s reputation and visibility.
An internal audit of strengths and weaknesses will tell you who YOU think you are—what YOU think your assets and liabilities are. However, an external Image Audit identifies both perceived strengths and weaknesses as well as threats and opportunities and will reveal who THEY think you are. You need both internal and external perspectives to craft an informed and effective marketing plan. A true SWOT analysis depends on both internal and external insight.
Simply put, you can’t read the label (your brand and identity) from inside the bottle. Your brand is essentially what people say about you after you’ve left the room.
It is in the school’s best interest to listen carefully to what your external audiences, admission funnel, and potential referrers are thinking and saying.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF IMAGE AUDITS
There is an art and science to conducting successful Image Audits (also known as external brand/identity perceptual studies). It is important for your interviewers to have training in investigative interviewing and reporting. It is also important that those you interview have confidentiality. If the school is doing the audit, the subjects of your audit won’t be as willing to be candid with you.
Like an investigative reporter, for every answer you get you must dig deeper to find out what is influencing that answer. Then you keep digging till you hit perceptual “bedrock” — the deeper psychological forces at work. That's why confidential qualitative interviews, which allow dialogue and follow-up questions, are much more reliable and productive than surveys. Yes, they are more labor intensive than surveys, but the result and direction it provides is worth it.
IT’S A WIN WIN WIN
Connor Associates has been doing Image Audits since its inception in 1998. I can attest that when you invest in giving those you serve and seek to serve a platform to share their candid and confidential thoughts, several benefits result:
1. You will get the internal audience of the school on the same page regarding marketing. Now that you know how those you seek to serve position you in your market, those insights can become a potential rallying cry which can bring the school together to reinforce strengths and overcome negative myths.
2. You will raise the reputation of the school as one that is self-assessing and wants to serve the community. You raise awareness of the school as an asset to the community, deserving of outside support.
3. It can get the school into your community by discovering opportunities for capstone projects with potential partner organizations and providing your students a “real world” education outside the walls of the school. It is equally an opportunity to cultivate leaders in the community and get them into the school to inspire your students.
YOUR SCHOOL HAS EVERYTHING TO GAIN
If executed professionally, there is nothing for a school to lose by seeking outside perceptions:
1. If perceptions are positive, run with it!
2. If perceptions are negative but not true, you simply have a communication issue to fix.
3. If perceptions are negative and you have the honesty to admit those negative perceptions are valid, then you have now identified substantive issues to address. We find substantive perceptions often bring to light critical teaching and learning issues. Once addressed, you can then announce to both your internal and external audience what you did about it and how you used this feedback to increase your educational value.
A GREAT APPROACH TO STRATEGIC PLANNING, ACCREDITATION, AND MARKETING
The biggest obstacle to conducting an Image Audit is leadership that assumes they already know what the people you seek to serve believe. Sometimes, leadership may not be keen to expose the school (or the Head of School) to critical feedback. I hope your leaders are not among them!
Image Audits require vulnerability. Vulnerability requires courage.
For all these reasons, external Image Audits are a great way to approach and inform accreditation, strategic planning, and effective marketing.
When done well, Image Audits are a great tool that will give you valuable information to calibrate your program, build and strengthen external relationships, and raise your school’s reputation and visibility.
Connor Associates stakes its value on its experience with providing comprehensive services, including ensuring proof of ROI through Image Audits (reputational asset and risk management), Alumni and Alumni Parent Surveys, Enrollment Feasibility Studies which identify qualified appropriate prospects at rooftop level, Five-Year Enrollment Forecasts, Location Studies, Business Office Evaluations and Plans (pricing sensitivity, tuition elasticity and analysis, benchmarking, reliable revenue streams, and capital management), Strategic Marketing Plans based on research, and onsite training and coaching to get everyone in your school and your trustees supporting enrollment, retention, and philanthropy.
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