After contacting four highly-recommended and experienced independent school marketing firms, it is exciting to share that we began our work with consultant Michele Levy yesterday. After a comprehensive tour of our campus and the opportunity to observe and meet our faculty, a steering committee – Colin Mathews, Paige Orloff, Cara Vermeulen, Sarah Pitcher-Hoffman, Tim Gore, Pia Norton, Susan Gebhard, and me – met with Michele to discuss a broad range of topics and to review our process.
Michele’s core charge: to help us create and implement a comprehensive integrated marketing plan for BCD which successfully identifies the school’s unique opportunity for students, and explicitly and succinctly articulates how and where the message will be delivered to the groups we target to receive it. BCD wants to better state the school’s value proposition, to help differentiate it from the competition, and to tap new markets.
Michele has outlined three major phases to her work that she will facilitate and complete during the next few months. In addition to beginning her work by reviewing a large collection of our marketing and development collateral, our website and online presence, relevant data, and documents related to our strategic planning efforts over the years, she will be meeting with and soliciting the opinions and ideas of members of our various constituency groups (parents, faculty and staff, students, alumni, and trustees). Expect to learn more soon about how you, as valued community members, can participate in this important undertaking.
Meanwhile, what can each one of us do right now? Every opportunity a prospective family has to engage with an advocate for BCD may be regarded as one of the most important parts of the process when they are considering BCD. As current community members, we are all primary spokespeople and ambassadors for the school. Promoting the vitality of BCD, the quality of our teachers and the excellence found in their programs and relationships with students, and the value and outcomes of a BCD education is our collective concern at all times. Building a culture of shared responsibility for advocating the value of BCD to the broader community is a strategy to support our vision for the future of the school.