SIG Reports
Marketing & Comms SIG, 5th March 2020
Love Day
At the Marketing & Comms Special Interest Group (SIG) at Ravenswood, nearly forty people heard Deanne O’Shea, Director Marketing, Communications, Enrolments & Engagement, showcase the details of their award winner Love RAVO Day.
The Love RAVO Day was an opportunity to embrace the colloquial terminology that is used by students, alumni and families when talking about Ravenswood. Inspired by the LOVE statue at the University of Pennsylvania, Principal Anne Johnstone mobilised to create a RAVO statue in the same style. Relevant copyright permissions were secured and the statue was commissioned.
The unveiling of the statue was an opportunity to bring the school together to create a Love RAVO Day, which is becoming a regular highlight of the school calendar. This statue and event provided an opportunity to create a secondary branding of the school that resonates with the community.
An engaging video, featuring almost the entire school, was created to celebrate the day and showcased the unveiling of the statue.
This year Love RAVO Day followed up with a day to pay tribute and raise funds for bushfire fighters and victims. The day also contributed to a new Ravenswood forest where trees are planted to help provide biodiversity and reduce carbon dioxide. The school assembled on the oval in the shape of a heart around a HOPE sign.
The key takeaway was to consider what are some of the unique aspects of your school or institution that you can bring to the fore and create engagement around.
Questions
Following the presentation various questions that affect marketers were asked:
Managing privacy in regards to visuals was discussed. Some schools have chosen to allow families to opt in while others continue with the opt out option. It was also mentioned to let parents know what the impact will be regarding how the images are used and if their child will miss out on being included in the visual records of the school.
Also given the bushfires, floods, power outages and COVID-19, communicating during a disaster was addressed. Having an offsite communications system for texting, emailing, website and social media was reiterated as an important strategy. This includes multiple people having remote access to cloud based databases.
Alumni and Community Engagement SIG 17th March 2020
Celebrating 125 years
On 17 March, just before everything went on line, Santa Sabina hosted the NSW Educate Plus Special Interest Group (SIG) morning tea, focussing on their award-winning celebrations for their
125th year.
Yvette Graniero, Director of Community Relations and her team presented some of the highlights of Santa Sabina’s celebration. The year brought the entire community together: students, parents
(present and past), staff (present and past), alumni, their neighbours and the Dominican sisters who founded the school. It was a wonderful unifying year that strengthened their community links,
enlisted a sense of excitement and pride, and showcased the school to each other and the wider community.
Using the theme ‘a golden thread’, Santa Sabina ran an entire year of special events and celebrations including an anniversary mass, high tea, concert, dinner and anniversary fair. Each celebration was one of the “golden threads”.
The concert was a wonderful opportunity to highlight Santa Sabina’s stellar music program. It included a special commissioned piece for the year, and the highlights were filmed and shared with the community and can be used for future marketing opportunities.
The dinner brought together their P&F Association and their Ex-students Association as the organisers. As well as pooling resources, this provided an excellent opportunity for both groups to form strong bonds with each other and the school, laying the foundations for future joint opportunities.
Archives were also used as an excellent engagement tool, in particular their set of before/after photos which copied some lovely archival pictures re-enacted with current students.
A unique aspect of the Santa Sabina celebration was how the stories of the past were interwoven into the drama curriculum, with students retelling Santa Sabina’s own stories in dramatic presentations in different parts of the campus. Santa Sabina also put together a stunning hardcover pictorial book named Weaving the Golden Thread Through 125 stories, featuring a mix of informative, heart-warming, funny stories.
The Santa Sabina team shared some of the challenges, including facing inclement weather during the special filming of everyone on the oval forming the numerals 125, and the need to take over the publication
of their book as outsourcing had resulted in the essence of the community not truly being understood and reflected.
Those attending had the opportunity to ask questions, look at all the anniversary publications and seek clarification on any presentation points while enjoying morning tea. A recording of the meeting is available here on the Educate Plus website, please ensure you are logged in to view.
