If your district is among the 70% of Wisconsin public school districts with declining enrollment, you likely are trying to reverse that trend by attracting new families and increasing open enrollment. Video storytelling is one of the most effective ways to attract potential new families and students (as well as new employees amid staffing shortages).
Many districts shoot enrollment videos in December or January to roll them out for Wisconsin Choice Week in late January and Public School Open Enrollment in early February. But the best time to capture outdoor b-roll footage of students and teachers, sporting events, and fans in the stands is in May and September when kids aren’t in winter coats in the muddy snow, the grass is green, and flowers are blooming.
If you want to use video in your enrollment marketing plan next school year, you need to start planning now to set up interviews and video shoots this May and September.
Before you grab a camera and start shooting, you should do some smart thinking to plan your video timeline and understand the 4 pillars of storytelling (or "the 4 Ps" for short): People, Place, Plot, and Purpose.
If you plan the 4 Ps, you will create a strategic vision that drives results.
Who is your enrollment’s video’s target audience? You want to be as specific as possible by creating imaginary personas of who you want to reach, inspire, and persuade. Are you speaking to families who live outside of your district or in your boundaries? Are you looking for students and parents interested in certain academic or extracurricular opportunities that may not be offered in neighboring districts? The more targeted your audience, the more successful you can be at gaining their attention and interest.
You also need to plan the people who will be featured in your video. Do you want to create a testimonial video with multiple interviews? Do you want to highlight a single student experience? Do you want local voices to narrate your background audio?
Think about who is the main character of your video. Choose someone who wants the video to be successful, understands why it matters, and can speak authentically with emotion from the heart. Choose someone who is unique, stands out from the crowd, or is a key influencer in the community.
Finally, choose the people who need to review the video and provide feedback and edits to ensure the proper voices are reflected.
Every story takes place somewhere. The people in your video have stories that take place somewhere. Using their places as backdrops helps build connections and add life to their characters.
Film students and staff in their places of interest—theater stages, agriculture or tech ed rooms, football fields, science labs, marching band practice, etc. You need to strategically plan your video schedule to take advantage of these live events or set them up for “posed” video opportunities.
Plan for athletes to wear their uniforms and have their equipment, theater actors to don their costumes, or staff and students to wear school spirit shirts.
You also need to think in advance about where you will place, house, or distribute your videos. What format and ratio size will you need based on where videos will be placed? Do you need vertical or landscape format? What are the time limits, such as 90 seconds for Instagram vs. a longer video for a website banner or on YouTube?
I sometimes shoot in extra wide format so I can use both landscape and cropped vertical formats.
The best stories have a beginning, middle, and end - a hero who has a moment of conflict and either rises or fails to meet that challenge. Basic storytelling structures include a main character who has a struggle internally or externally that disrupts their happiness.
Do they accept that challenge and find the answer to their problem? What is the character going to do? Without mentioning that conflict, your story will fall flat. For school enrollment marketing stories, the concept can mean a family who has a fork in the road to decide where to send their first child to school.
What will be the best place for their child’s unique needs? How do they figure out the best district to trust?
As an example, a New London mother whom CESA 6 interviewed and videotaped for the district’s enrollment marketing video series shared how her children could have gone to five different school districts that were all within the same drive time from their home.
She did her research, and “this one district just kept being mentioned.” It was New London. She explains the specific reasons why she chose New London and how it has worked out for her family.
Perhaps the most important pillar of the 4 Ps is purpose. Before you create a video, you need to decide what is the core purpose of your video.
What problem is your solution (your school or district) solving, and what makes your school or district different and better than others? Why should they choose you? Why does it matter? What do you want your audience to feel at the end of your video, and what do you want them to do?
It could be to take action to enroll or apply to work at your school. It could be to advocate for school funding. It could be changing behaviors by reading more at home with your children, increasing school attendance, becoming involved in sports and fine arts, or trying new career paths. It can be as simple as an ending message to “enroll today” with a link to enroll.
If they walk away from the video thinking, “Well, that was neat,” but don’t take the next step, then your video project will not deliver the strategic results you desire.
While teachers, administrators, coaches, and students can use their smartphones to capture video (and that has a place in your social media strategy), to achieve your district’s enrollment marketing goals, you should plan your video project around the 4 P’s.
If you don’t have an in-house videographer, you should hire and schedule one now. Consider CESA 6 for your video services.
See recent videos CESA 6 created in partnership with the: