The wind speed is just right, the water is calm, the sun is glorious and the sails are filled. This is it, the maiden voyage of a yacht I’ve lovingly built myself by hand, it floats and even more it sails effortlessly. This is the stuff of the America’s Cup - a pure bred racing machine lovingly built for harnessing the wind and speeding over the waves, the epitome of grace and style. Only my boat is less than a metre long and I’m watching it from the side of a pond with a radio controller in my hand – yes, I’m that guy you see in the park who looks and is too old for toy boats.
I could build that, I just needed to research, plan, gather the right materials and build
It must be written into my DNA or at least hard wired into my brain; the hunger to learn new skills. A foolhardy approach to challenging what I’m capable of creating, to me, nothing is impossible to make. I never knew how boats even sailed let alone knew how to build one. But building and sailing a boat was the challenge I set myself, so I began by burying my head into research, finding a plan to build from and gathering up the necessary materials.
I’d like to reluctantly point out that my original intention was to build a full-size sail boat until the impracticality of this was pointed out to me by friends and family, so a model boat it was then. It's only until recently that I have realised that this was the same approach I took in my job at St David’s College. We desperately needed a new website and in fact a whole new digital strategy and approach, just like the boat adventure my brain sparked into life. I could build that, I just needed to research, plan, gather the right materials and build.
In February of 2017 the St David’s marketing department suddenly found itself empowered with the challenge to improve the school’s recruitment performance*. Effectively we had to rescue the situation the school was in. We had the wind in our sails, captains of our own destiny and sailing into the unknown (I promise that is the last of the sailing puns). We decided very early that digital marketing was going to be our focus, it would require the most amount of investment and resources.
Okay you may be thinking that the previous statement isn’t revolutionary or game changing, it’s not, but what we did next possibly was. My office quickly became an extension of my shed as my creative mind began to fixate on the idea that maybe I could build the new website and from it build and develop all of our digital platforms and activities. The building process began just as it had in my shed, it was an unknown process but with a clear goal and a creative drive.
Now, I could have easily gone out and bought a pre-built off the shelf boat, it would have got me in the water quicker and wouldn't have taken up my spare time. But what would I have learned doing that? I’d have a boat, sure, but I wouldn’t have known how to sail it effectively and I wouldn’t have know how to adjust things to get the best performance. After all by building my own boat I had to learn what each component did and how that contributed to the boat’s performance, I was learning to sail by osmosis.
It’s the same with school websites, you can find agencies who will provide you with a pre-made website almost ready to go. Just like the shop bought model boats they’re good at what they do, they’re relatively easy to get going and a designer has spent time doing all the hard work. But just like the off the shelf boats you never really know every component, then you're left with the challenge of making it work effectively and learning how it fits in with the rest of you marketing strategy to get your money's worth. When something is your own creation you know how to make changes and improvements, something pre-made takes a lot of reverse engineering even if making changes is possible. But at St David’s I’m allowed to be ambitious, foolhardy and pursue my love of learning new skills and so the building began.
I built every piece, I know it intimately and how every component works with one another and I can adjust to keep harmony
When my boat doesn’t sail right, when something doesn’t work how it should or if I need to upgrade parts, I can easily. I built every component from the keel up, every piece had time dedicated to it and that gave me time to understand it and how it worked. Boats don’t work perfectly every time; the wind is an uncontrollable force and every trip to the pond is different but I know how to tweak and how to adjust parts of the boat to wring out the best performance. It’s exactly how the St David’s website and all our digital platforms work with our marketing aims. I built every piece, I know it intimately and how every component works with one another and I can adjust to keep harmony.
When we run a social media campaign or a targeted AdWords campaign I can create a landing page to support it designing one thing in conjunction with another. This ensures the right audience see the right information and its relevancy score stays high. I can react quickly to immediate needs on the website and beyond. What this has meant for the school is a record number of new visitors to the website in the last 16 months, record numbers of open day visitors**, a massive increase in prospectus requests and naturally an increase in recruitment numbers*.
That level of control allows us as a department to work smartly, in a more targeted way and more cost effectively with an incredible amount of synergy. When my boat refuses to sail well or at worse something breaks (see photographic evidence above) I'm not having to ring customer service lines or send emails to manufacturers I know exactly how to sort the issue even if that means getting a little damp. This is the same for our website, if its performance is poor or an issue causes us trouble I can diagnose and adjust immediately.
If building everything yourself isn't an option
So, my challenge is this – build your school website in-house, get to know every component of your digital platforms and understand it at an intimate level. Okay so before you think I've lost touch with the real world I know how much school marketing departments are under pressure both financially and in terms of resources.
If building everything yourself isn't an option I would like to make this plea, please don't go with the off the shelf, same as the next one, one size fits all option touted by creative agencies who market only to independent schools. Find a creative agency that hasn't worked with a school before, give them the creative challenge to push their knowledge, get to know each other. When we couldn't give social media advertising as much time as it needed we found an agency who we felt we could work closely with. We had many conversations with them, we got to know them and more importantly they got to know us and our unique needs, we challenged them to work with a whole new industry.
Afterall when a creator is challenged they are inspired to build something at the edge of their experience, the conversation naturally becomes two way as they learn from you and you then learn from them. In the world of real boats there is a famous design called the Bristol Pilot Cutter, it's interesting to know that these boats weren't built from a common plan but each one was built to perfectly match the needs of the skipper who commissioned and sailed them, each one was unique and at the peak of performance. So the more you build yourself the more you will achieve a result that perfectly suits your needs, or at the very least find a builder who lets you become truly part of the creative process. I wanted a boat that sailed fast, that fit in my car, that was the right size for my local boating lake and that I could customise and the only way I achieved that was to build it with my own hands.
When you are the creator of something you know it intimately
Don’t buy a boat and then be stuck wasting time learning how to sail. Build one to suit your individual needs and learn to sail in the process. When you are the creator of something you know it intimately, you understand it on a deeper level and there is no mystery to its inner workings. With limited budgets and resources we have to make every investment count, it has to be effective, only you know the individual needs of your school. Maybe it’s time your office became a workshop?
Notes:
* In January 2017 St David's College predicted a total school roll of 180 pupil, 66 of which would be boarders for the 2017/18 academic year and further loss of numbers in following years if the situation stayed the same. This would have necessitated the closure of one boarding house and a cut in staffing numbers. In the 16 months of the marketing department being given a their new remit and greater operating powers that number now sits at 251 pupils, 102 of which are boarders and the school is now planning more development and growth.
** The average numbers of Open Day visitors over the previous 5 years was around 25 families meaning around 75 visitors on site. The first Open Day of the 2017/18 academic saw 40 families attend with a total visitor number of 140.
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