Public Relations Spotlight: Establishing educators as thought leaders
Nicola Rutzou, PR Specialist
When Macarthur Anglican School approached Icon Visual Marketing to help raise awareness of the school as a premier education institution in Sydney’s south west region, our team of PR specialists got to work.
We conceived a thought leadership media campaign that set Macarthur Anglican School apart from its competitors, while also establishing its senior staff as opinion leaders.
Thought leadership demonstrates that an organisation and its people have authority and reliability. Industry thought leaders are seen as go-to people both for their expertise, as well as for their reputation for excellence.
It’s not a popularity contest; rather, it is about building a solid relationship of trust. It’s something that cannot happen overnight. It takes a conscious and committed effort to establish an organisation as a legitimate thought leader, so after six months of the program with Macarthur, we’re only at the beginning of the journey.
Multiple thought leaders
The school’s headmaster, Dr David Nockles, is already a well-known leader within the education sector in NSW, having authored a book on education research. But while Dr Nockles is a key part of the thought leadership program, we also wanted to involve other senior staff members, such as Dean of Studies, Kylie Elling, and the Head of Innovation and Research, Rebecca Fitzpatrick.
Key audiences
The thought leadership program that Icon developed and is currently rolling out for Macarthur is aimed at reaching several key external audiences. These include:
· Parents, carers, and grandparents of students,
· Potential students and their parents,
· Potential teachers and staff,
· The general community,
· Media, including local news media and education sector publications, and
· State Government departments and agencies.
“Thought leadership demonstrates that an organisation and its people have authority and reliability.”
COVID provided a catalyst
As much as the COVID pandemic created many challenges at Macarthur Anglican School, it also provided an opportunity to show how the school was proactively handling a very difficult period.
Our first media release focused on the home schooling that all schools were forced to adopt almost overnight. This was covered in local media and education publications.
We followed this up with a piece about bringing students back to school as the pandemic eased, showing that Macarthur was acting responsibly – but also in the interests of its students. This again received local media coverage.
From there, we talked about the preparations the school had in place for any COVID outbreak, which again demonstrated how the school put its students and teachers first in any planning.
We then turned to the work the school and its teachers had done during the pandemic to streamline the curriculum. Within this media release, we quoted the school’s Dean of Studies Kylie Elling. Her quotes were picked up in an article about the same subject in the Australian Financial Review – quite a coup.
Beyond media coverage
The story we placed for Macarthur about streamlining the curriculum was also noted by NESA, an influential NSW Government agency, providing Icon with an important contact for future work.
To round out the COVID series of media releases, we focused on the results of a survey of parents and their views of COVID online learning. Once again, we gained local media coverage.
Our final stories for 2020 moved away from the strong COVID issues that highlighted the early stages of our PR campaign. The final two stories are focused on the value of student wellbeing and the importance of a good teacher/student relationship to learning.
The latter part of the campaign is now gaining traction and will continue to be rolled out across 2021.
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