Intro
James Calvert Spence College is a community-focussed 9-18 state school based in Northumberland in the North East of England. I worked at the school for just over three years, handling all marketing and communications including copywriting for school marketing materials, social media and web copy.
As you can imagine, in this relatively long time period, there were many projects and goals – not least handling crisis communications and adapting content production, parental engagement and admissions marketing for the COVID era. But delivering the school’s brand new website, writing the school prospectus and creating other content assets helped shape the school’s marketing.
Who
James Calvert Spence College
The Starting Point
There were lots of good things happening in the school but information and celebration of activities and achievements within the school community wasn’t always reaching parents or stakeholders. The school blog wasn’t being updated regularly.
Despite being just a few years old, the school website had also become quickly out of date. Key information was harder to find than it ought to be as the site navigation and information was not user focussed and the CMS was clunky.
Over time, the school values and branding had lost meaning and no longer connected or conveyed the vision of the school community. Some of my key achievements were:
- Building content and marketing processes and developed a marketing calendar
- Introducing new tools, ways of working with brand and marketing guidelines
- Developing relationships with local and national media and the local authority and securing coverage online, in print and on TV
- Growing the social media audience, celebrating achievements
- Auditing content and re-mapping a redesigned website (using data)
The school and sixth-form prospectus
The development of video and image assets for marketing
What we did & challenges
Working alongside the school IT department I oversaw the redesign of the school website, remapping the site to improve user experience based on user needs and analytics. I also installed processes for maintaining content in line with school governance, wrote website copy in collaboration with subject experts and ensured the school brand was consistent.
This project included developing new school brand values with the senior leadership team, writing brand guidelines and commissioning photography and video to be used on site and in other marketing materials.
Results
Delivering the new website using an in-house team meant saving thousands of pounds for the school budget. It also meant the website was developed by a team that understood the needs of the school community. The website was received well by stakeholders and most importantly, the new navigation and content made key information easier to find.
Key Outcomes
- Press coverage on the BBC and ITV
- Developed relationships with local press
- Increased audience for school blog and social channels
- Content developed to meet the needs of parents and students
