Chuck English
President and Founder
English Marketing Works
Author of Marketing that Works blog
What
many people regard as the Gucci of school website design may actually
be driving away prospective parents and ticking off your current ones.
You probably know what I’m talking about. It’s the website with the
breathtaking full width photos of beautiful students on a backdrop of
resort-like panoramic shots of the campus. It’s the one that many
admissions and marketing people look at wistfully and say, “If only we
could afford that.” But the true cost of this kind of site might be in
enrolment and not dollars.
In a recent post,
the always-insightful Gerry McGovern maintains that websites reflect
the nature of their organizations. Based on that, he comes up with three
customer service profiles. Applying those to independent schools
provides a useful perspective. Here are his (wisely constructed)
organization/website categories and my (admittedly arbitrary) take on
the way they are reflected in schools.
Overflowing with vanity and ego.
This is the website I referred to above. Beautiful students. Gorgeous
campus. Gerry points to sites “full of meaningless jargon and constantly
telling your customers how much you care about them.” This translates
into a school website loaded with ad copy talking about things like 21st
century education, global citizenry, and graduates that are making a
difference in the world. At the same time, the path to practical
information is obfuscated. Links are hard to find and when you finally
get where you want to go, the most essential information isn’t there.
Thriving on control and hierarchy.
In Gerry’s view these sites, “tell customers what you want them to
hear.” I bet we have all seen our share of a school websites so full of
Edu-speak that you need an advanced degree in education to get through
them. This is also the site with the detailed school history that would
take ten minutes to read. Add to it comprehensive curriculum documents
and long-winded statements of philosophy, and you have a site that makes
faculty and administration proud and prospective parents scarce.
Genuinely customer centric.
This, Gerry says, reflects an organization that, “likes to serve.” This
is clearly what schools should aspire to be and what their websites
should reflect. This would include some or all of the following:
- The ability to inquire online
- An application process that can be completed online
- Knowledge products and resources for parents
- Easily accessible contact information
- Stories/testimonials to which that prospective parents can relate
- An effective parent portal that delivers essential information
To
that last point, a school that I worked with recently developed a
parent dashboard that, on login, delivered to parents the most critical
information about their children such as teachers’ names and contact
info; class lists; important forms and learning resources.
These
categories and attributes are clearly stereotypes and it is unlikely
that any school website would fit perfectly into any one of them. But if
you’re willing to be honest, you will likely see aspects of your
school’s site reflected in each category. If nothing else, the
categories provide a different set of criteria by which to evaluate a
schools website. It’s clear that the customer centric site is the most
effective approach and that whatever you can do to implement some of
that profile will yield greater results.
You might argue that a
school’s website is an inevitable reflection of the nature of the
organization. Until some deep change is affected, there’s nothing you
can do and there’s no point in taking a further action. But I’m a great
believer in the ability of the tail to wag the dog. Implementing
customer-centric web strategies and tactics may in fact have an impact
on the gestalt of your school. By changing your online approach you just
might be guiding administration and faculty to a more customer focused
perspective. And the resultant positive feedback from both current and
prospective parents may indeed validate that change. It’s admittedly a
gutsy approach but it’s better than the paralysis of waiting for change.
So,
put yourself in the shoes of the visitor and take a cold hard look at
the attributes of your school’s website. Then, do something about it.
What do you think?
Do
these categories make sense to you? What are you doing to make your
school’s site more customer-centric? How are you evaluating your
website?