Social Media Marketing Plan for MHS

Over the past several years, my school MHS has done an excellent in building up its advancement and communications staff, as well as envisioning overarching communications goals through its strategic plan that was published in 2016. Increased fundraising, deeper alumni engagement, more effective branding, and a burgeoning capital campaign are among the successes of these changes. Prior to this shift, development efforts were inconsistent, and communication both internal and external was split among various staff members, with little coordination or long-range planning. Even though MHS has been successful as a school for all of these years, we are starting to see signs that we need to be more aggressive as well as creative in our marketing strategies in terms of admissions, which includes rethinking advancement and communications efforts. In particular, the school needs to craft a comprehensive social media marketing plan which would work to enhance the presence and profile of the school to its various constituents.

Our school’s strategic plan, in Operational Vitality Vision Statement #5, highlights communication as a key component. The document calls for a communications plan, the creation of a Standards of Practice guide, and gives the mandate of pursuing innovate communications methods. However, it does not prescribe a plan around social media specifically, which means that, to me, step one towards a social media marketing plan needs to be crafting a plan that fits into the vision statement from above. Much like we have done with other portions of the strategic plan, I would like to bring together key people over summer 2019 as a working group to lay out the plan and decide specific action steps. This group would require certain staff members who would later be in charge of implementation: our Communications & Events Director, Chief Advancement Officer, Admissions Director, and Headmaster (along with myself, name of role TBD). Others, such as our Principal, Vice Principal, Athletic Director, International Program Director, Chief Business Officer, Director of Guidance, and Campus Minister, would be invited to participate, but not required. In addition, other constituent groups will be engaged through focus groups and/or surveys after a general framework is developed, including faculty and staff, the Board, students, parents, coaches, and alumni. As Brent Barnhart said in his article How to Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2019, “social media planning is a marathon, not a sprint” — if we want to move away from our disjointed and reactive social media usage of the past, we need to have a solid strategic foundation that encompasses the ideas and buy-in of our community.

Once this strategic vision/action step document is complete, I will work with my key group, especially our Communications & Events Director, to lay out a timeline for goals over the 2019-20 school year and beyond. I will also want to establish parameters for what we will consider success for each goal. In the spirit of Finalsite’s Creating Your School’s Social Media Plan: A 10 Step Guide along with its Goal Setting Worksheet, I will want to focus on three specific social media goals — the strategic plan will be more comprehensive, but I want our first year goals to be measurable and attainable. Currently in my head, those goals should increasing be admissions applicants, better engaging current constituents (students, parents, etc.), and increasing alumni engagement and online giving. I also have a harder to measure goal of creating a mindset shift within the school — that we should be more innovative in our approach to communications, and as Successful Catholic School Marketing noted, not throw up our hands after one failure and revert to our old ways. Digital technology and social media rapidly evolve, and we need to try to stay on top of it.

Finalsite’s guide and worksheet (linked above) also provide a great tip of breaking action steps down into tactics. For my school, most of these specifics will be decided later on, as we collaboratively lay out our ideas (also, our Communications & Events Director is very social media savvy, and could easily have her own internal plan already laid out, which we can incorporate into the larger strategic document). Examples of tactics I would like to see would be frequency of postings (perhaps 1-2 per day per website) and the proactive creation of content. Brent Barnhart’s tip #5 (linked above) is to create and curate social media content, a great tactic that we currently take for granted. While we do a good job of remixing content we already have for social media consumption (Kelly, 2016), we do not allocate resources towards creating new content just for our social media platforms. If, as Kelly states, interaction is encouraged in our tech-immersed world by providing content and postings for people to engage, we need to ensure that we provide content that constituents want and will benefit from. A final tactic I will include in the plan will be designing our platforms to be user-friendly. Specifically, as Howard Stribbell from Edutopia lays out, that means mindfully designing our website and our Constant Contact e-blasts to be mobile friendly, to match our branding and style, and to have current, engaging content.