Case Study
School Promotional Video
The Client
Clitheroe St. James’ CE Primary School, Clitheroe. Lancashire
I originally reached out to Clitheroe St. James after I heard about their new ecozone and ambitions of adding a “forest school” to their classes. I suggested video would be a great opportunity for them to shout about it in an engaging, easily digestible and sharable format. After speaking with the staff, it was clear there was concern over the intake numbers for the current school year and we felt a more appropriate video would be a school promotional video to help show the community why they should choose St. James over the other schools in the area.
The Brief
Produce a short promotional video to showcase the benefits of the school and increase next year's school intake.
The Proposal
We proposed a short 5-minute video combining interviews of teachers, students and parents, talking about the unique selling points of the school, with visual cutaways of a variety of activities the students and staff perform regularly. The filming was to take place over two days. The first day would be dedicated to the interviews, with a second date to be scheduled for the “in-school” filming covering a variety of school activities while focusing on visual cutaways that complement the story extracted from the interviews.
The Challenges
This project represented a few challenges. The first of which surrounded child privacy, I needed to understand the school’s policy for children appearing in photos and videos.
Most children were permitted to appear in the video in some capacity, but there were some children we were not allowed to include, and we needed to consider the impact on filming while not excluding them from activities taking place. The school provided high visibility tabards for these children and kept them together where possible. This made it easy to identify children we shouldn’t film, and if we incidentally captured them, it was possible to identify shots during the editing process which we should either not include or modify to protect the individual child’s privacy.
The school is a religious school at its core, We used a combination of probing questions during the interview process and built the story during the editing process To embrace this while showing the diversity of the school and its values, ensuring that non-religious parents would not feel excluded or unable to participate in the school’s family.
We were filming the school at a time of year that would not be ideal for showing the happy, warm, summery vibes the school might have and would have made it look the most inviting. We were dealing with bare trees and cold weather. There wasn’t a great deal we could do here as it wasn’t going to be possible to delay filming to spring/summer as the school needed a video producing before parents started making their school choices in the new year. To help with this, when filming exterior shots, we kept the focus on the children as much as possible, shot with longer focal lengths to make the remaining trees with leaves more prominent and including additional elements in the frame to introduce colour.
The Results
Success for this video was measured in two ways. First was the easiest to measure; the performance of the video relative to other videos the school produces and shares on social media. The second metric was whether the school intake increased after publishing the video, for this we had to wait until April of the following year.
Performance
The video was completed and published on the School’s Facebook Page at the end of November 2021. The video performed extremely well compared to its other videos and posts. The typical metrics for videos posted to their Facebook page are 200-300 views, 10-20 likes, 0-3 comments and 0-2 shares. In contrast, as of April 2022, our video had 2,500 views, 80 likes, 31 comments and 38 shares, approximately 10 times their usual metrics, across the board.
Intake
Last year’s intake was approximately 25, not all of the parents put the school down as their first choice and some were assigned the school after losing out on their first or second choices. The school can take 45 children each year, this discrepancy was the motivator for producing a promotional video.
In mid-April 2022, the school found out their allocation for the next school year; for the first time in several years, the school was over-subscribed. Almost 50 parents had put the school down as a first choice and a total of 90 had put the school down as either a 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice. This represents a massive increase from the previous year. This performance is impressive when you consider the wider implication of this year's intake representing a lower birth year and fewer children applying for places.
Using a conservative 20-student increase in the school intake this year and a grant of £4,000 per pupil, this represents additional funding of £80,000 this year, assuming the children continue the journey through the school, this would amount to additional funding of over £500,000 for the school for these 20 pupils as a result of this promotional video.
This result represents a fantastic return on investment for the school and is a perfect example of how schools can benefit from professionally produced videos in the modern age of social media.
If you would like to discuss how I can produce high-quality videos to showcase what your school has to offer, please get in touch.
Testimonial
“Fantastic, professional yet friendly, Christopher did a wonderful job creating a promotional film of our school. He worked incredibly hard, using his skills of marketing and publicity but also having time to find out about us and learning what we needed to advertise our school and it all came together just perfectly. Christopher has a great attention to detail, yet offering a personal service. We were over the moon by the finished product and the promotional video clip has been greatly viewed and talked about. We would highly recommend Christopher. You can see the amazing results for yourself”