In our work with Catholic schools, we find that more and more Catholic school leaders are familiar with the concept of a value proposition and its importance to their school’s marketing and recruitment. A value proposition is a series of statements that clearly communicate the benefits of your school to prospective families. Simply put, it is your promise to deliver value to those families.
Many schools we have worked with have found it helpful to remind themselves about a couple of key ideas related to value propositions. One of them is a question of perspective. Schools can sometimes think of their value proposition as how they convey to prospective parents the benefits of what the school cares about most strongly. The value proposition becomes about what the school values. When schools remember to flip that around, focusing the value proposition on what the parent values and how the school delivers that, the schools regain some of the power of the value proposition.
For example, we worked with a Catholic high school that focused a lot of its marketing on the fact that it is an all-girls school. In our surveys of parents, however, we discovered that the single sex nature of the school was actually fairly low on the list of decision-making factors for the parents. Many more of them chose the school because they believed it would deliver academic excellence or because they believed it would provide a safe and secure learning environment. We helped the school shift its emphasis. Rather than focusing first on its all-girls identity, which was a lower priority for most parents, they began to focus first on the academic excellence the school could provide and the safe and secure learning environment, which were higher priorities for most parents. Being an all-girls school became the second thing they talked about – an element of how they deliver the excellence and the environment that parents are looking for.
This key idea about value propositions (Whose value?) leads to another key idea (Which proposition?), which will be addressed in part two of this blog post (coming soon).
