Hone your storytelling skills
About the series
Whether you’re a classroom teacher, a staff member, or an administrator, you serve as a leader in your educational institution. Part of any good leader’s job is to tell the story of their institution; a good story can highlight success, mitigate challenges or crises, and garner support for necessary change. But for most of us, media and marketing skills have not been a part of our training. Getting the good news about our work out there is not always top priority, and can often be downright intimidating.
However, effective leaders like you know that you cannot simply abstain from engaging in a dialogue about your work. You can rest assured that someone is telling the story of your institution — online, in print, and in the community — whether you are or not. This five-part workshop series will help you craft your story, develop a plan for telling it, and create simple pieces of digital media that you can use to share your story broadly.
There are five workshops in this series. You’re not required to complete them all, but we do recommend that you work through them sequentially as they build upon each other in terms of skills. The workshops are as follows:
- Telling the Story of Your Institution: The Basics — Identify a story to tell and create a marketing strategy.
- Telling the Story of Your Institution: Images — Learn to select, edit, and share digital images that tell your institution’s story.
- Telling the Story of Your Institution: Video — Learn to shoot, edit, and share video to show, not tell, your message.
- Telling the Story of Your Institution: Web — Conduct a review of your current website, learn the basics of modern web design, and create wireframes for a redesign.
- Telling the Story of Your Institution: Presentations — Polish your in-person talk track and develop a killer presentation deck that leverages your images, video, and web assets.
About this workshop
This workshop focuses on helping you define the basics of your institutional story and brand. Who are your audiences? What do you want them to know, think, or believe about your institution? How might you tell that story broadly?
By completing this first workshop in the series, you will:
Identify a story you want to tell about your classroom or institution.
Review basic marketing and communication strategies.
Create a marketing strategy for your institution’s story.
