Celebrating your way to stronger connections

Simon Hepburn, founder of Marketing Advice for Schools, talks us through how you can use an upcoming school anniversary to connect with your community

Read the full article below or read on page 36 in our October magazine

How old is your school? Is it coming up to a special anniversary? If so, this could be a great opportunity to connect with your community while helping you achieve goals including student recruitment and income-generation. Here are eight tips and a great example of one school that did their ‘80^th’ well…

• Start well in advance

Engaging your whole community successfully will take time, so ideally start planning a year before the actual anniversary if possible. Assign a project leader and create a project team from across the school, looking to involve students, teachers, support staff, governors and more. 

• Set ambitious long-term goals

Once assembled, your team should agree goals for the project. You might think immediately that you want to engage with local community groups, current parents and future students, but you could also kickstart a fundraising campaign or set up a network of former students who could help your school in the future in areas such as career advice.

• Write a plan

With so many people involved in a school community, it’s important to have a formal plan that you can share are refer back to as you approach the special date. The plan should set out actions, timings, resources needed and responsibilities. However long the actual plan, it’s also always worth maintaining a one-page summary for school leaders. 

• Launch the anniversary to different stakeholders at different times

It’s effective to hold a series of launch events for different stakeholders to build up interest – you could do this as part of existing events such as assemblies or open days, hold a community coffee morning or host an exhibition at a local community venue. This will also enable you to gain more volunteers to help you.

• Get in touch with people both on and offline

While much of your community is local, there will be many who have moved from your area. Creating a simple website, or dedicated social media channels, will allow you to engage with these people. 

• Gather information

The best way to sustain interest in an anniversary is to keep finding and sharing information about the school’s history. Former students and teachers and local newspapers are great sources of information – ask them for photographs, newspaper articles and school publications as well as personal memories. Share this information with your community on a regular basis so they know how the celebrations are going.

• Engage your community

Once you have great stories, use the information you’ve gathered to persuade people to visit your school (either in person or digitally). Could you put on a play, create a video or write a book? Do you have any ‘celebrity’ former teachers or students who could launch or host an event, plant a tree or bury a ‘time capsule’?

• Reflect and move forward

At the end of an anniversary period reflect on the new links and ideas you’ve had. Have you achieved your initial goals? Have you made new contacts that you can use in the future? Have you discovered new skills that your staff or students can use in the future?  

Case study:

The Joseph Rowntree School in York was founded in 1942 and is currently celebrating its 80^th anniversary. Adam Harland, IT, marketing and communications manager, worked on the project with assistant headteacher Rachael Clarke. 

“To launch the anniversary we used the local village hall and their noticeboard and made an eye-catching display. We also featured in the local ‘What’s On’ magazine and ran an article in the local newspaper, the ‘York Press’ https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/20138022.joseph-rowntree-school-york-celebrates-80th-birthday/) to let people know about the event – we promoted this through Twitter and our parent engagement App, Weduc” explains Adam.

‘We then built our ‘Memories’ website (very simply, using Google Sites – https://sites.google.com/josephrowntreeschool.co.uk/alumni-memories/) and were able to host an eclectic collection of artefacts, photographs, video and more, including the school’s original prospectus and a video from the 1940s. We shared some of these stories with the York Press who ran another article. 

‘On the day of the anniversary we had a lot of people visit the school – a lot more than we thought there would be! In the end I think our plan to create an environment where people could just spend some time simply catching up with old friends, or dipping into the activities we created, was the right approach; it felt very inclusive and fostered some really positive reactions from people. We also had three people taking photos, as well as students videoing the event as part of their Media Studies class, which we can use in the future.’

‘Going forward, we’re going to continue promoting the Memories website and we will keep using the 80th branding we created throughout the year within other events.’