Dialogue > Article > To Market, To Market

When investigating whether or not to send his now 17-year-old son to private school, Ken Wong turned to the web to do some research. “I didn’t go to the web to pick a school, but I used it to find information that I thought my son would be interested in,” Wong says. “That way, I could convince him to visit the school.”

As a parent, Wong says he found the websites he visited to be adequate: each one provided contact details, academic information and admission criteria. But as associate professor of business and marketing strategy at Queen’s University School of Business in Kingston, Ontario, he says the sites lacked the necessary zing to persuade his son to check the school out.

“Put it this way: he didn’t end up going to private school,” Wong says.

“The brochure materials really wowed me,” adds Wong, but most independent schools have yet to learn to take advantage of the marketing power inherent in the Internet. He says school websites need to do more than just provide basic information — they need to get kids (and thus, their parents) excited about what the school has to offer.

“Before you even think about the web,” Wong says, “you first have to treat it like any brand: What is the problem you’re solving with this site? What is the value proposition? What is different about this school than all the others?” In other words, how does a school turn its website into a marketing workhorse?

The fundamental issue is to figure out what the target market — in this case parents and their children — are buying from the school, explains Marc Lee, president of Affinity Resources, a firm based in Lawrence, Kansas that has worked with several independent schools across the U.S. “They aren’t buying an education anymore; they are buying outcomes,” Lee says. “Parents want to know their kids will move on to college, and kids want to know there’s a future in store for them, too.”

He says an excellent way to do that is through an online alumni section, highlighting the activities of recent grads. “I would recommend showing more than just the prestigious cases, because that might not impress some kids,” Lee says. “You have to show a variety of successes, because kids don’t all desire the same thing.”

How about this for variety: a former student who became a music recording engineer for the heavy metal band Metallica; another who became a pilot for a United Nations agency called Wings of Hope; and yet another who is now a freshman at Stanford University. Their activities are diverse, but these former students all have one thing in the common: they graduated from Shawnigan Lake School on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Each is featured in the alumni section of the school’s website, sls.bc.ca. “We feel the best advertisement for what we have to offer is for our kids to talk about what they do,” explains Jay Connolly, an English teacher who, with his wife Maureen Connolly, the school’s web manager, led the relaunch of the new site in January 2004.

In fact, every page offers photographs of smiling students currently at the school. A link on the main page, for example, takes visitors to a section called Shawnigan Today, which features a weekly report and photo gallery of school events and activities, whether it is a new drama production, spring break trip to Italy or a friendly game of basketball between teachers and students. “This section is important because prospective kids can see what daily life is like through pictures,” Connolly says. “And for the existing kids, they like seeing their pictures online. In a media age, there’s legitimacy in appearing as an object in a medium.” Parents can also see what their kids are up to, Connolly adds.

As well, visitors to the Shawnigan site can check out a detailed school calendar and a summary rundown of a typical day.
Connolly says the school will continue “to look at other site elements aimed at highlighting the kids.” He says the trick is achieving that without sacrificing the carefully crafted design of the site; after all, Shawnigan went through three or four design prototypes before settling on one it felt captured the essence of the school. With the help of an outside design firm, Victoria-based BCN Communications, Connolly says they were able to redesign the core site in about seven months and for less than $10,000.

Initially, he worried about showing the image of the school crest, with its muted colours of black and gold, fearing it made the school appear “stuffy.” Yet by not trying to force a “flashier” design, Connolly believes the site highlights what Shawnigan is all about: human interaction. “That’s why we didn’t distinguish between our target audiences of existing students and prospective ones — because we felt that if we communicated the school honestly, the site would resonate with both audiences,” he says.

Once a school has figured out what qualities distinguish its brand, experts say the next step is ensuring easy access to the site. “One of the clinical components of accessibility and quality of site is web standards,” says Derek Featherstone, president of Further Ahead, a web development, design and strategy firm based in Kanata, Ontario. Featherstone is also a former teacher at Ashbury College in Ottawa, Ontario, where he led a class project in redesigning the school website.

“There are a number of published standards out there that offer a lot of benefits to schools, including ease of maintenance and updating as well as being compatible across multiple web platforms,” Featherstone says. Published resources include the World Wide Web Consortium, founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. The site features a number of free tutorials.

Featherstone says that by following web standards, schools can avoid such pitfalls as locking down text size on a web page. He says this can be annoying for parents who may have trouble reading smaller text. “That makes it tough for parents trying to research a school because they can’t change the text size to be able to read the copy,” Featherstone explains. “Another common mistake is taking a graphic developed for a print brochure and putting it on the web. If there is text as part of the graphic, it makes it very difficult to resize.”

Bob Regan is senior product manager for accessibility in the San Francisco office of Macromedia, a web software provider, and the former director of technology at St. David’s School in New York. When designing a site, Regan says schools should be aware of accessibility issues, such as parents with carpal tunnel syndrome or weak eyesight. “In Japan, accessibility isn’t about the disabled but rather aging. As we grow older, there is much higher incidence of disability,” Regan points out. “The children themselves may not have it, but parents are one of the most important audiences for schools, and they might.”

(For more information, visit the National Federation of the Blind and Web Accessibility in Mind.)

Most web experts agree that sites should divide information onto different pages, not have more than two or three screens full of a vertical scroll and never have a horizontal scroll. While experts disagree on how much information to provide (some say provide as much as possible), most agree it should be broken up by links and drop-down menus.
Once the website is accessible and user-friendly, it is time to juice up the site with interactive tools that make the Internet such a powerful medium. For instance, most experts suggest that if a school has the budget, it could offer streaming video in the form of online video tours of the campus. For an example, visit the ourkids.net Virtual Tour page.

Experts warn that sites should also provide an option for users not on a broadband Internet connection, because they will likely be unable to access the video. “With the tours, you can have different versions at different resolutions, which can help with broadband issues. You can also offer a small, static picture tour for somebody with little broadband,” says Featherstone. “Technology isn’t about closing doors to anyone, but providing options.”

Offering an online admissions process adds convenience for time-strapped parents. David Lee, former director of admissions and the current director of advancement and alumni development at Toronto’s Royal St. George’s College, says parents don’t have to worry about mailing an admissions application to the school, a major plus for those who may be living out of province or outside Canada. In fact, during the 2004 admissions year, only 16 people requested the application form be faxed or mailed, or picked one up, versus applying via the Internet. “Filling it out online also avoids the expense of mailing costs,” Lee says. “Let’s say we had 500 inquiries; that would mean we’d have to buy 500 stamps to send out the information. Now everything is at the parents’ fingertips.”

More important, he says it sends the message that the school is with the times. That is especially significant for a school that positions itself as technologically savvy: from Grades 3 to 6, all students at the school are provided with laptops (Grade 7 students are responsible for purchasing their own).

Charles Fowler, the school’s director of information technology, adds that this enables the school to keep a database of student information, which can be used for everything from market research to quickly generating form letters to specific students. “We can summarize who has applied and in what month. For example, if we can see that all the Grade 7 students are applying in October, we can focus our marketing efforts next year before that time period to ensure we reach those people,” says Fowler. “We have a whole new way of quickly digging deep into the information we’re gathering.”

The power of databases is yet another reason that proves the Internet is an influential marketing medium. Ken Wong expects schools will only become smarter about creating a “sticky site” (a website from which visitors can’t pull themselves away). He has another son, a 14-year-old, who he will soon encourage to consider attending an independent school. He suspects if schools have injected a little more marketing into their websites, the outcome just might be different this time around.

> More information
Constructing Accessible Websites, by Jim Thatcher et al (APress, 2003).

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (New Riders, 2001).

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir (New Riders, 2001).

Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Website More Usable for Everyone by John M. Slatin and Sharron Rush (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 2002).

Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy by Nick Usborne (McGraw-Hill Trade, 2001).

The Non-Designer’s Web Book by Robin Williams and John Tollett (Peachpit Press, 2000).

Centre for Marketing Schools: Australian organization whose mission is to help educators become better communicators