Blog
Connecting to Digital Natives (and some great ads!)
17th June 2011
I spent yesterday at the Annual Conference of the Institute of Development Professionals held in Oxford.
It is an event that has grown rapidly as more schools attempt to build fund-raising campaigns and funds for bursaries and other ambitious schemes.
The Keynote Address was given by Kevin Roberts the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi and it was a truly outstanding presentation marrying some fantastic recent adverts from his global advertising business with some hard hitting, contrarian views on the future for brands. I link to some of his ads at the bottom of this blog.
I gave a talk in the afternoon available below about using social media tools to share content and grow an online community.
For some reason many schools seem reluctant to fully embrace social media tools as a way of sharing their fantastic stories, successes and ambitions.
Perhaps it is a fear of losing control? Perhaps governors are paranoid about the lurking dangers of a school connecting with the digital world or that someone will post on Twitter or push some great news on Facebook but make some heinous error in punctuation that will destroy the school’s development campaign?
My short talk was really a call to arms - get your Headmaster to tweet! Get your teachers to share their passions for what they do in school through subject blogs and twitter feeds! And try to avoid businesses who offer clunky and really expensive “tailored solutions” to link all of your social media channels together.
You can build a social media prescence for FREE! All you need is a little help (bring younger tech-savvy teachers into your development office or employ gap year students) and a lot of passion and emotion for the job. Surprise yourself with how quickly a network can be built even allowing for the inevitable trial and error!
For now, here are some terrific ads - some for enjoyment, others to make an impact
South African Ostrich has a moment of pure joy
Amy Biehl (South Africa)
Kooperativa car insurance ads (Number 1) and (Number 2)
and my favourite
Geoff Riley
Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for over thirty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD conferences in the UK and overseas.