Our Lady of Sion School Worthing
Branding| Research | School Marketing Strategy
The brief
Communitas won a three-way pitch to help this independent 3 to 18 co-ed day school to maintain and then grow its market share in the face of new challenges from both the independent and state sectors.
Our response
We devised a school marketing strategy, underpinned by a market research programme which fundamentally examined the core strengths and weaknesses of the school from the perspective of key stakeholders. Detailed analysis of the competitive environment led us to recommend positioning of our Lady of Sion as a cost-effective choice for parents looking for a family-oriented independent education. The school accepted the majority of the recommendations in our strategy and went on to:
- Commission our design team to undertake a brand refresh, including shortening of the school name to Sion (to reflect how current parents refer to the school and giving it a more contemporary feel). This included rolling out our concept of the ‘Sion story’ to showcase how children progress through the school (retention being as important as recruitment for this 3 to 18 school).
- Re-visit their original website brief (already commissioned when we were brought on board) to take in our recommendations around content and user experience.
- Re-launch significantly more engaging social media channels, adopting our recommendations on improving interaction with the audience and improved use of visual content.
- Introduce a guest speaker programme.
The Communitas team provided us with invaluable support and detailed recommendations around the rebranding and repositioning of the school. We were impressed by their understanding of our school’s context, and their research, including with both current and prospective parents, which offered us vital intelligence. The team at Communitas are very easy to work with and always quick to respond with advice and ideas.
