Retention and brand

In this month’s issue:
> Retention and brand: finding your school’s narrative
> Feature highlights: My Favourites and Upload
> NSW Roadshow in March – book now
> Your feedback

Retention and brand: your school’s narrative

At some stage, every school will face the task of creating and revising its student retention plans. As parents with children of various ages, the team at SchoolBench undertook roundtable discussions regarding the key factors they considered when choosing their children’s schools.

POINTS RAISED

• How was the school presented? Examples: were the facilities modern; open spaces for sports and playing?
• Are the classrooms clean, bright and airy?
• Is there a historical connection with the school?
• What is the school’s teaching philosophy?
• Does it promise a quality education?
• What was the NAPLAN result?
• Does it engender sound values with a sense of community?
• Ultimately, could we see a positive experience for our children?

The list was extensive and no doubt a process most parents go through. As school fees may not be a true indicator of value due to the personal nature and differing capability of families, we elected not to include price in the discussion.

We discovered that a school with clear and consistent messaging, that resonated with our core values, won our attention.

Why is CONSISTENT MESSAGING around your BRAND important and can SCHOOLBENCH help?

A school is a brand. The more consistent the messaging, the more consistent the branding, whether via words, design, offerings or imagery. Your school, your brand, should build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with your customers: the parent community.

A visual identity, created from your archival photos, your current sports carnival media, your STEM awards, senior school wins, comes into play – as does consistent messaging around a school’s brand values, for example, sporting or academic leadership. Tapping into the soft and hard values that resonate with a school’s target market doesn’t have to cost a fortune because the tools are already there for you to use. You just need to know how to tie it all together.

In the background there will always be a group of dedicated administrators and educators working to ‘sell the story’ that will become the school’s story. By utilising invaluable stories and experiences from existing and past students, the community and partners, this allows for a rich narrative to be constructed and forms the nucleus of that strategy.

Images, video and audio are powerful tools that support a robust brand. An example of this is Seymour College, a valued customer of SchoolBench, who often uses powerful imagery that supports their values of sports, arts, science and academic achievements.
Visit https://www.seymour.sa.edu.au/

The images stored in SchoolBench have a limitless life span. This means that today’s photos become lifelong historical photos. Imagine the historical comparison and use for your school’s brand strategy not just today but also in the future. SchoolBench makes the ease of accessing the current as well as historical media assets a task that takes mere seconds.

All SchoolBench customer schools know that one of the key benefits of storing a school’s digital media in SchoolBench is that the school owns the media and it resides at the school. This information lives for as long as the school lives and beyond. No dusty shoe boxes housing rusting DCM cards or faded coloured prints with brownish spots eating through faces and places.

You can use your own history to create a new one. That’s the simplicity of SchoolBench.

Learn more about SchoolBench.

Feature highlights

This month’s highly anticipated features are My Favourites and Upload on the SchoolBench desktop.

The My Favourites feature provides users their own space in SchoolBench to easily store, find and use images all in a single view.

Users can easily filter and see which media is most important to them, used on a regular basis or waitlisted in preparation for an upcoming project or event. This is a real time saver!

To favourite an image:

• highlight the image to select, then right mouse click
• choose Add to My Favourites

The Upload button is designed to make uploading from a network drive or an external camera into SchoolBench even easier. Previously this was only achievable through a drag and drop function.

The Upload button, located on the top right hand side of the menu bar, simplified the task by removing the need for:

• Reducing your desktop windows to drag and drop into SchoolBench
• Using 2 screens to drag and drop assets and photos

Check your SchoolBench online documentation for full descriptions and speak with your administrator to ensure you have the latest version of SchoolBench.

We are focussing on continuous improvement for SchoolBench functionality and in the latest version, you will notice minor enhancements to improve the overall functionality.

This makes your life easier and directly aligns to our cultural value of responsiveness to our customers’ wishes. It is also intuitive in ease of use. Our job is always to make your job easier!

If you want to know more, simply email us at contact@parashift.com.au or call your friendly SchoolBench team on 1300 769 809 or click here.

March NSW Roadshow

The SchoolBench roadshow is coming to NSW in March.

With dates yet to be finalised, all NSW schools are invited to attend the second national SchoolBench roadshow for the term. Oh, the Roadshow comes to you!

An individual and in-person discussion with Managing Director, Kieren Fitzpatrick and our Artificial Intelligence specialist and Technical Lead, Desline Simon, will focus on the following:

- Live demonstration of SchoolBench in action

- High level view of upcoming SchoolBench features for 2020

- Machine Learning – the future of SchoolBench

< Secure your visit – Express your interest Now >

Please note this is a limited roadshow in Term 1 and excludes already booked demonstrations and client meetings.

Your feedback

We love hearing your stories about your digital media management experiences within your school community.

If you have a success story you would like to share with the SchoolBench community,
drop us a line. Have an idea for an UpVote Feature in SchoolBench? Chomping at the bit to submit a case study?

By sharing you could win a Gold Class movie voucher for two, redeemable in your state.

Contact our Marketing Team to discuss.