Three Creative and Compelling School Marketing Videos

Videos are a very important component of your school’s marketing and enrollment strategy. A video can provide an emotionally compelling overview of your school that will help draw the prospective parent to your campus. It can tell the story of your school in a way that can’t be shown in pictures or written in words.

I have seen many school videos in my educational consulting experience. While we live in the YouTube world where homemade, in-the-moment videos are appealing, there is still a place for a professionally produced video for your school.

If you are going to go this route, it is important that you develop a video that is creative and will capture the short, online attention span of your prospective parents.

There are three videos I have seen in the last year that stand out to me. The common thread is that each video tells the story of the school through the perspective of students sharing why they love their school. The approach for each video is also very creative which captures the attention of the viewer.

ODA Pass it on videoThe Out of Door Academy: Pass It On

My favorite school video is the “Pass It On” video by The Out of Door Academy. The video begins with a student writing, “What do I love about ODA?” on a white board. Then, the video quickly moves to a variety of clips from all facets of student life at ODA. The video seeks to answer this question without narration by creating a compelling impression of the school. It leaves you with a feeling that ODA is a great school that every parent would love to send their child.

The video concludes with the student writing the answer to the question asked in the beginning:  “What do I love about ODA? Everything.” This video very works well and has recently won several well deserved local and national awards.

Bentley School videoBentley School On: What’s it like to go to school here

The video for the Bentley School is front and center on the homepage of their website. I really like how the focus of the video is on the students to answer the question: What is it really like to be a student here? The video creatively captures the student’s perspectives through the power of posted words. Each small group of students has a stack of words to use to paste in a sentence or phrase on the lens of the camera. For the viewer, it’s like we are peering in on the students putting sentences together to describe what it is like to attend Bentley.

It’s a brilliant concept that works and concludes with quick clips of student life. The video is also short and keeps the viewer’s attention waiting in anticipation for the posting of the next set of descriptive words.


Deerfield Academy: 10 Things I Love About Deerfield

Even though this video is very long, I really like the concept that was used. The video focuses on students talking about the 10 things they love about Deerfield. It is a simple concept that has stood the test of time (I still like to watch David Letterman’s top 10 list). While this isn’t an attempt at humor, the beginning of the video uses funny out-takes to lighten the mood and create realism in the video.

The video gives a comprehensive overview of the school told from the student perspective. Any school marketing director could use this same concept to produce a marketing video. You could even create 10 short video vignettes that could be selected on a page featuring each of these top areas at the school. By doing this, the parent or student could select the individual areas that are of most interest instead of watching the entire video.

Do you have a promotional video for your school that you think is really creative and compelling? If you do, please post a link to your video in the comment section.

Have you seen any other videos that you think are really creative and compelling?

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