Branding in the Hastings Area Schools

These past two weeks, I have been doing a lot of research and digging into what branding is, why it is important to schools, and how to brand a school well. For my project, I decided to compare and contrast the branding efforts of the Hastings Catholic School system with the Hastings Public School system. I was interested in finding results in terms of quality of posts and reach. To find out about a school's branding efforts, I focused completely on social media for this project, because this class is focused on technology.

Both Hastings Catholic Schools (HCS) and Hastings Public Schools (HPS) are K-12 school systems. HCS has two buildings (one middle/high and one elementary), while HPS has seven (one high, one middle, and five elementary). Because enrollment is much higher at HPS, they automatically  have a larger reach, because more people are interested in following them on social media. However, quality branding of a school is about more than just number of posts or followers. It should instead be focused on the quality of the posts. The ultimate goal of branding is to tell the story of a school, and to do this, schools need to have a variety of well-rounded posts on social media.

HPS does a much better job than HCS in terms of telling the story of the school. For example, the most recent posts made by HCS include mostly high school extracurricular highlights, with a few mentions of the elementary school. Meanwhile, the most recent posts from HPS include a teacher highlight, technology updates at the high school, as well as updates from the high school and middle school extracurricular activities. Overall, it is important that social media coming from schools tells the story of the school by sharing well-rounded, accurate, and positive posts about what is happening at school. In this way, people involved in the school system, as well as those from outside, can learn the story of the school by the way it is portrayed on social media.