Creating a Brand with Feelings of Belonging
Developing your district's brand is essential in building school spirit and community pride, recruiting both students and teachers, and creating a recognizable legacy to build over time. While visual elements like your mascot and logo are part of your brand, there are other things that matter. More importantly, your brand sets you apart from other districts and all its unique qualities and services. Your relationships with your community and the stories within your district create pride. Here are a few ways to make your brand more relatable and interactive rather than surface-level and hard to connect.
Utilize Consistent Visuals
While your visual identity isn't your entire brand, it is an outward representation. It's crucial to use consistent visuals across all your platforms and in all district communication to create a strong visual identity that is easily recognized. These visuals include utilizing a consistent logo across the website, communication marketing pieces such as letterheads, email signatures, social media platforms, athletic uniforms, and all other district logo uses. The district mascot also needs consistent usage. District-approved Pantone colors used in your visual identity reinforce your brand.
Tell Genuine Stories
Making your brand relatable comes from sharing relatable human interest stories. These stories focus on the people in your district and are essential to making your brand relatable. It is an opportunity to bring people inside your community and show them why they should be proud supporters. The stories you share should be genuine and show people the behind-the-scenes of what is going on in the district. These stories highlight your values and demonstrate what separates you from other districts. Highlights such as a student or teacher's success, a team's triumph, or the whole school coming together to support one another are fantastic stories to share.
Build Relationships
Lastly, building relationships with your audience and stakeholders will help them relate to your district brand. A great way to build relationships is through social media. Allowing parents, guardians, and other stakeholders to comment on the content and stories you share will enable them to create a personal connection with the district. Taking the opportunity further could include responding to the comments, if appropriate. Additionally, asking members of your community to tag your district accounts in their posts and reposting their user-generated content to the district's official social channels allows that person to feel like they are a brand contributor themselves. Another way to build relationships is by promoting and supporting your community. If members of your community are hosting community-wide events, supporting a family in need, or an organization needing volunteers for an event, promoting those ventures is a great way to build mutual support while creating lasting relationships.
Your district's brand is more relatable to your community when you engage them in its inner workings, where it is not about the buildings or things but about the people who are making a difference.
Let us know if you're looking for help developing your district's brand or making your brand more connectable. We are here to serve!
Center for Communication & Engagement provides services tailored to the unique needs of schools and educational organizations. Our passion is what propels us in providing teachers, students and classrooms with $1 billion in resources to date. We have more than 22 years experience in school Public Relations and are battle-tested when it comes to the challenges, needs and opportunities facing our schools today.