Web Site Communication: Web 2.0 for Christian Schools
By: Rob DiMartino

Gone are the days of old school marketing with great viewbooks or DVDs for potential families, getting invited to the head’s dinner to get a feel for the leader of your school, and having alumni socials to network and mentor. Today, you’ve got admissions videos on YouTube, heads of schools blogging, and alumni connecting and networking on Facebook.

You control the education of the paradigm shift, and the sooner you can educate students on what to expect, the better. Before you know it, they will be parents and alumni. Make the switch; the “The Way We Have Always Done It” (TTWWHADI) effect does not have to factor in with you. There are many schools that I visit that this effect is still being utilized in full force.

I have been part of the paradigm shift from normal media channels: print, radio, and TV to the Internet.  Long before I had children, I realized that this technology is a great way to connect people with the same interests, especially schools. In every facet of existence, from marketing and enrollment to retention and communications once they step foot off campus, the Internet, when planned correctly, can become the virtual bridge between all constituents and your institutions.

My test to all of you would be simple. Is your Web site helping you forward your mission or hurting you?

Does your Web site tell a good enough digital story to families to come on campus and truly experience your school? After all, this is not shopping for an iPhone, plane tickets, or even surfing online for a great restaurant; this is, in my eyes, the most important decision for a family:  finding the school that offers the best fit for its children.

Also becoming more and more on the way to extinction are backpacks full of important items home from a busy day at school. Yes, my friends, more and more people are finding out that the Internet is not just a fad; it has some staying power. If you don't get on the bus soon, you are going to be playing catch-up with the other schools that have embraced the concept of working smarter instead of harder.

Isn't that the reason that we use technology in the first place, to create efficiency in the way we do things on a day-to-day basis? Of course it is. As I say while speaking to schools about technology, the technology is the means to the end, not the end itself. It is how you apply the technology to work smarter and harder for you that should be on the top rung of the ladder.

In my eyes, there are three types of schools: the ones that make it happen, the ones that watch it happen, and the ones that say "what just happened."

In this case, we are going to focus on one school that decided to make it happen within the communications and marketing environment: The Regents School of Austin, www.regentsschool.com.

Rod Gilbert, head of school, really gets it.  Take, for instance, his Weekly Word from the Head blog that has the ability to get RSS feeds from his blog and even alerts you via e-mail or text message to your cell phone when the new Word is posted.  This is one example of really making an impact on trusted communications from school to home. 

Let's look into a couple other “must haves” for school Web sites:

A Great Digital Story
Your Web site is your face to the world, offering you the ability tell your story. Make sure you grab every bit of mission, spirit, and essence of your school because this should be your school brand. As they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so make sure your first impression to the world is the view that you want to give from the front porch looking in. 

Create Passionate Users
This starts with valuable content that is intuitive to find and customizable to the individual.  Make sure you have an intuitive navigation structure so that everyone from prospective families to alumni from 50 years ago can find exactly the information they are looking for in a great user experience.

Athletics/Calendar/News
These dynamic areas are the bloodstream of a school. Make sure people can trust these in real-time. A great example is allowing for your athletic director to cancel your game on your Web site, and, once the save button is hit, it goes automatically to 18 different places on the site and then triggers automatic e-mails and text messages so that you will cut down on the number of parents who show up at an event that is cancelled.  On that note, automatically tie in Google maps to all locations of events, so that people show up to the correct field for each content.

Media
Have the power of YouTube, Flickr, and iTunes at your fingertips. Schools like Regents are using robust applications to manage video, podcasts, photo galleries, and more. Now you do not have to be a techie to code anything, with the new devices out there. Anyone can create great media (especially your kids).  Just make sure it goes along with your digital story.

eNotify
Simply put, blast e-mails to students, parents, alumni, and any other constituent group you deem worthy of proactive marketing of newsworthy events on campus, to annual fund appeals, to a mix of both.

First, you need a great process to collect e-mail addresses, and then you need to be able to send segregated messages to anyone from the booster club to the alumni class of 1959.  Personalized communications is going more digital as we speak, and tracking of opens, click-throughs, and, most important, e-mail bounce-backs are critical in streamlining a great management process for push communications.

Analytics
I am a big fan of data and data-driven decision making. This will allow you to look at search engine optimization and marketing, as well as who is coming to the site and how often they are staying.  You need to know what regions of the world are looking at your school and what pages they are hitting the most on entry and what page(s) on which they are staying the longest.  You can never have enough data to drive how you can maximize your user’s experience on your site.

What's coming down the line?

Cloud Computing
This is outsourcing to companies that truly are trusted partners within the education space.  Again, we are talking business efficiencies in these exponential technology times. No longer do you need a Webmaster to manager a server and chase content.  This goes for more robust applications, and that is only within the Internet realm. 

More and more schools are looking to outsource major things such as their student information system to companies that have secure hosting, redundancy, and a proven track record. 

Mobile Experience
This is customizing the user experience for the iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, and more. It gives data on the go, wherever and whenever.

Portals: Parents, Students, Teachers
This is creating the learning landscape online with drop boxes, blogs, media, resources, and more.  It is one-stop shopping to effectively use the technology to enhance the teaching and learning environment.

Data Integration
This is creating a single sign-on experience for viewing data from your legacy student information system or alumni database.  It is making data flow streamlined to get best of breed applications talking to each other in real-time feeds.

Rob DiMartino’s experience as a communicator includes media relations, public relations, alumni relations, marketing, and publications. He has worked with more than 350 independent schools and colleges during his time with Finalsite.com, a Web software and services company for independent schools.