JENNIE WINTON

Let’s face it. You can market until the cows come home, but you need to have two things in place first. One is a great product to promote. (Your school is pretty stellar, so no problem there.) The other is a clear, concise, focused brand that separates you from the competition and gives (a certain set of) parents what they want.

Our guest for this episode of the Sparkcast is Jennie Winton, founder of Mission-Minded, a branding agency that focuses on non-profits including higher ed and independent schools. I’ve admired Mission-Minded from afar for years through its blog and treasure trove of free marketing guides that are available on their website. I finally get to talk one-on-one with Jennie in this podcast that centers around independent school branding and the impact it can have on your school’s enrollment and development efforts.

“Our work and joy is helping a school find that thing that makes it unique, but that is getting buried and not shown to families as powerfully as it could. We help to excavate that, clarify it, and find simple language to express it, so the school can send stronger signals to parents and students that are right for the school.”

What You’ll Learn

How and why Mission-Minded recently helped SSATB successfully rebrand itself into The Enrollment Management Association.
What brand is in relation to independent schools and how a strong one can make marketing and communications focused, easier, and more effective.
The best time to embark on brand development, and how often your brand changes.
How great branding gives the school a way to talk about itself that it hadn't unearthed before.
How to know if your brand is working.
What enrollment marketing and campaign marketing have in common, and how to motivate donors through your brand. Jennie's formula for effective capital campaign marketing is: "Reason + Emotion + Urgency = Strong Capital Campaign."
How Marin Academy developed and integrated their brand effectively across multiple channels and a case study with their head of school.
Why the strongest brands come from leadership's backing.
Jennie's wish for directors of MarCom at independent schools.
One of Jennie's proudest moments in her work with schools. (Hint: It involves Crane Country Day School.)

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Liza Fisher Norman

Master Electrician, InspirED School Marketers

Master Electrician isn’t just a fun title for me. It’s how I feel about sparking school marketers to do their best work, connecting them to one another, and helping to make their jobs easier. In 1991, I founded Turnaround Marketing Communications, a branding and marketing firm that serves independent schools exclusively. After working with close to 100 schools, I realized that school marketers needed a marketing and communications community to call their own — a place where they can find brilliant ideas and brain food to take their school marketing to the next level and feel supported in their jobs. InspirED School Marketers was born in 2014 to fill that void and with the help of my fabulous Best Boy, Rob, we are on a quest to make InspirED a resource you can't live without.

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