“Our caring principals, teachers and school staff work hard to provide a quality education and safe learning environment.”
“Our programs support our students’ passions and invest in our students’ futures.”
“Our students are grounded in their faith and become leaders in the Church and in the community.”
These points and others are highlighted at www.catholicschoolshawaii.org, a website launched by the Hawaii Catholic Schools office this month. The new site is part of a reinvigorated marketing effort by the office to increase public awareness of Catholic education and boost Catholic school enrollment, which has declined significantly in the past decade.
The “System for Success” strategic plan, adopted in 2011 by the diocesan Board of Education’s school planning task force and then-superintendent Carmen Himenes, listed a statewide marketing campaign as a priority. Current superintendent Michael Rockers and his staff have been making strides in this area heading into the new academic year.
A lot of planning required
“Marketing” is a broad term that comes from the world of business. The website Investopedia.com describes it as “everything a company does to acquire customers and maintain a relationship with them.”
For Catholic schools, substituting students for customers, this can involve print advertisements, radio and television commercials, news releases, social media, events and personal outreach.
Rockers spoke with the Hawaii Catholic Herald Aug. 4 about marketing Hawaii’s Catholic schools and projects in the works.
On the surface, the task of spreading the good word about Catholic education seems simple, he said. However, a lot of planning is required to reach the intended audience and achieve enrollment goals, Rockers said.
“Marketing is a little bit of a science,” the superintendent said. “It isn’t just something that you can throw information at people once in a while and call it ‘marketing.’ If your messaging isn’t right from the beginning, then all this stuff, it doesn’t hit home.”
Several local Catholic schools have hired people with marketing and public relations expertise. Rockers lauded their initiatives, as well as the myriad measures taken by all 42 Island Catholic schools to shine a spotlight on their individual institutions.
The Hawaii Catholic Schools office, Rockers said, is freshening up its state-wide push for Catholic education. It also hopes to help smaller schools that are struggling with their marketing efforts.
‘Our brand doesn’t change’
The schools office employed the local marketing firm Orange Roc, gleaning from it research tips, branding concepts and best practices.
The Orange Roc team first did a “brand audit” — a look at “what our competitors are doing” and national trends in education, Rockers said. They also assessed how local Catholic schools fit into this context.
“We’re going to have faith formation and quality academics,” Rockers said. “Our ‘brand’ and the ‘base brand’ doesn’t change.”
To refine their branding “message,” the schools office sent a survey to the parents of Hawaii’s Catholic school students. They were asked why they chose their particular school and whether curriculums have been satisfactory, among other questions.
More than 700 parents responded. Their feedback “helped us frame our marketing to match what the people are looking for, not just what we do well,” Rockers explained.
The marketing group honed in on the top three reasons parents chose a Catholic school: Quality of teachers, academic excellence, and a safe and disciplined environment.
“When we go out to the general public, that’s really highlighted in their minds,” Rockers said. “We need to highlight that too.”
“Target audiences” for the marketing campaign were then identified. The System for Success strategic plan underscored the importance of first getting connected with “active Catholic families” at local parishes.
According to Rockers, other audiences they hope to reach are “practicing Christian families” that may not be Catholic, military families and local business leaders.
“(Catholic schools) contribute to so many aspects of Hawaii,” the superintendent said.
The new schools website
With a foundational message and audiences established, the next step for the Hawaii Catholic Schools office is to “formulate a messaging matrix” — industry jargon for applying a consistent tone and method to marketing efforts.
An inaugural look at this comes through the new www.catholicschoolshawaii.org website. The site, produced by Orange Roc, is clean, easy to navigate and full of bright graphics and photos.
It provides a quick look at statistics, such as “98 percent of Catholic school students enroll in college,” and “1 in 4 private school students in Hawaii receive a Catholic education.” Users can also browse lists of Catholic schools by Island regions and connect to each school’s website.
More features will be added to the new site in the coming weeks.
Refreshing the Hawaii Catholic Schools website has been a project on Rockers’ mind since he took the superintendent post in 2011.
“I feel badly that when I came in four years ago, the website was four or five years old already,” Rockers said. “We’d done a few things to try to update it, but we never updated it and used the information that we got from our survey and our research.”
The website has links to Hawaii Catholic Schools’ social media portals on Facebook, Instagram (@hawaiicatholicschools) and Twitter (@mrockers2).
Rockers has been doing most of the posting on these networks, which lately have included inspirational Catholic tidbits and photos from school events. He acknowledges that updates have been done “a little inconsistently.”
The schools office is looking for a full-time “communications/marketing specialist” to remedy that. Rockers said this specialist would be tasked with keeping marketing channels up-to-date, providing them with “the messaging that we know is best and will put our schools in the truest light of the great job they’re doing.”
The ideal candidate would have “some background in Catholic education” and “like to work collaboratively because they’re going to be doing that with my office, much less the other schools.”
The job posting can be found at http://www.catholichawaii.org/about-us/careers.aspx.
‘Omni-channel engagement’
Going forward, Rockers aims to establish a good rapport between his office’s marketing efforts and those already in place at individual schools.
“A big part of our marketing is going to be delivering ‘omni-channel digital engagement’ and really having one voice across all those social media channels,” Rockers said.
“There’s going to be monthly activities and daily posts” schools can use “if they wish, or they can use as kind of a model of messaging to promote their individual school in an effective way.”
Viewership statistics on marketing projects will be monitored, which Rockers hopes will gauge how interested folks are about enrolling in Catholic education.
“The more people engage and the more people connected, the better,” Rockers said.
“We have a goal of increasing enrollment each year for the next several years,” he added. “I think with the electronic data we receive, we’ll have a good understanding if our marketing efforts helped in reaching those goals.”
