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Things to Consider When Branding Your School

on September 16, 2021

Like any other business, schools, universities, and other learning institutions depend on branding to help differentiate them from competitors and encourage new students to enroll. Branding is important on a number of different levels. Not only does it play a role in advertising your services and offerings to the parents of potential students, but it also helps to communicate your values and mission. Branding isn’t simply your name, logo, and color scheme. It’s the way in which you present your school’s character on every level of communication, from your emails, newsletters, signage, and even invoices. Branding also brings together all the separate elements of your school and allows it to communicate with one clear voice in order to make a lasting impression on your community.

Below we’re going to examine in detail things you should consider when thinking about your school’s brand.

Defining your school’s brand

A school’s brand – that is, its personality, its culture, and its voice – starts with its messaging. As a school, you’re going to be doing a lot of communicating, and so building and maintaining a consistent voice is critical to defining your brand.

Determining your school’s voice starts with your branding communications statement – a message springboard that serves as the wellspring from which all other communication strategies emerge, and one can be used over and over again when creating any sort of school correspondence. It also serves as the basis for any style guides and brand designs that you may use throughout your organization.

Creating your brand identity

Now that you’ve got your communications down pat it’s time to focus on the visual aspect of your school’s brand. At this stage, you should start designing visual concepts, logos, and color schemes that will represent the expectations and culture of your school. These designs should be impressionable and memorable as they’re likely to be the first thing people see when encountering your school. If you don’t have one on your team, it’s a good idea to work with designers who specialize in schools so that they can visually represent your brand as something fresh and unique.

Creating a brand style guide

A brand style guide should address all of your school’s fundamental visual design elements including color palettes, logo use, approved typography, sizing, and more. If you decide to open up multiple branches of your school or other facilities, this style guide can be used to build distinctive sub-brands that fall neatly within the parameters of the parent school. A brand style guide also helps to maintain uniform brand identity across all different communications and moving parts.