Your School’s Marketing and Admissions Needs 101 | User-Generated Content for School Promotion

In a sentence, user generated content (UGC) is amateur content that is created by your existing community. More and more, UGC is becoming an important tool in your digital marketing toolkit as it is a low-cost way of providing your marketing team with plenty of material that can be turned into engaging community content. UGC is an especially good option for schools - in particular videos and photos - as it complements your polished professional portfolios with authentic and engaging content that shows your community in action, and allows you to tell the thousands of day-to-day stories that occur in your classrooms, sports fields, playground, and beyond!

When producing UGC, it is important to keep in mind that your students and your community are your brand drivers; your content should focus on “how” they experience the school and how it is reflected in the content that you share online.

Where to Start?

Before you start creating user-generated content, it is important to remember that it requires some important planning steps. This means getting consent from students and their parents, and also making sure you're following any rules or policies set by the school. Before you start the actual process, you can also produce some examples within your team and share it with your wider community and address any concerns or questions they might have.

After you complete these steps, you should get your community on board and tell them why UGC is important —it's a great way to show off the school's atmosphere and highlight the awesome things students are doing. Finally, it is important to decide on what you want to focus on whether it is academic achievements, spotlight extracurricular activities, or building a sense of community. Once you complete all these steps, you will have a clear direction to follow while creating your UGC for your school.

In terms of editing and distributing your UGC, you can combine the creative strengths of your internal team with the specialised knowledge of your marketing agency in order to optimise the effectiveness of your UGC campaigns.

Encourage your community: Invite students, parents and your staff to share their unique experiences at your school. You could try to get written testimonials, photos or even encourage them to make short videos using their phones and then deliver them to your marketing agency to have them professionally edited and get them ready to use on social media platforms – and you can always ask them to add animations or texts to make it more engaging and visually appealing!

Provide clear guidelines: While encouraging your community to start generating content, it is important to provide clear guidelines on what kind of content is appropriate and how it should be shared. This ensures that the content aligns with your school's values and messaging. For example, specify the type of content you’re interested in creating, communicate expectations regarding the quality of content, encourage content that reflects the diversity of your school community and set expectations regarding the language and the tone of the content.

Share diverse perspectives: Make sure that the UGC aligns with the diversity at your school which means that you should highlight stories and experiences from students of various backgrounds, interests, and achievements. Remember that you can generate content about many different things such as field trips, school camps, science experiments, art performances, presentations and workshops. 

Run contests: To give your community more motivation to create content for your school, you can organise UGC contests or challenges that encourage creativity and engagement such as a photo contest or writing challenge! 

Different Styles of UGC

From emotional testimonials to engaging videos, UGC offers different formats to showcase the essence of your school. In this section, we'll explore a range of UGC ideas that can powerfully convey your school's ethos and excellence, creating a more authentic and relatable connection with prospective students and parents.

Testimonials: You can use written testimonials from students, parents, and alumni about their experiences at the school. If you want to do something more engaging than just a text, you can also try making video testimonials where individuals share their thoughts and feelings about the school.

Day in the life of students: This is a great video format that your community can easily make. All you need is a phone with a camera and you are ready to give a glimpse into a typical day at school from the perspective of students, teachers, or your staff.

Student projects: If you want to show your school’s academic excellence through UGC, you can try showcasing exemplary assignments, projects, essays, or artwork created by your students.

Alumni success stories: Getting in touch with your alumni while generating content for your school is always a great idea! You can simply share stories or interviews with former students who have gone on to achieve success in their careers or personal lives.

Interactive Q&A sessions: You can make live or recorded sessions where members of the school community (students, teachers, administrators) answer questions from prospective students and parents.

Tips on Sharing Your UGC Across Platforms

Email campaigns: Include UGC in emails sent to prospective families or alumni. Remember to use visuals and engaging stories while sharing it!

Social media: You can try experimenting with platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to see where you UGC performs the best as all those platforms have different user profiles. Always remember to engage with your community through comments and shares.

Blogs: Share student essays, parent testimonials, and success stories in your blogs to provide deeper insights into the school's community. This is also a great way to keeping your website up to date with the latest news from your school.

Use hashtags: You can create a unique and catchy hashtag that represents your school’s spirit. Encourage students, parents, and staff to use it when posting about their experiences or achievements related to the school.

It is important to remember that consistency in branding and messaging across all platforms is crucial. Your school should tailor the UGC to suit the audience and purpose of each platform, and always encourage interaction and engagement from your community. Once you’ve done all of these, another important point is to measure the effectiveness of your UGC for which you can use several methods to make sure it resonates with your audience. If you want to learn more about those methods, stay tuned for our upcoming blog posts! 

 If you have any questions or need more tips on how to effectively use UGC, get in touch with us here!