Background

Sedbergh School has an impressive history dating back to 1525 and stands out among the UK’s other leading boarding schools.

Sedbergh already had a presence on Facebook, but it was an ‘old style’ group and wasn’t utilised appropriately or integrated in to the school’s marketing activity.

Our remit was to devise a social media strategy that seamlessly integrated all the relevant platforms creating a highly usable and engaging presence.

Strategy

Our strategy was to combine the social media activity using one ‘hub’ which linked the campaign across the social networks.

Facebook became the ‘hub’ and WordPress was used to power it, pushing content through the channels.

One main Sedbergh School Official page was created and content divided for the Senior School and Junior School. Senior School content was then be channelled by Houses, Sport, Music and Drama.

The other social media channels, including Twitter and LinkedIn would receive content from this Facebook page, making the whole system easy to update in one go.

Using the WordPress platform to power Facebook meant that we could embed branded pages. We designed layouts for the main page and sub-pages, based on the Sedbergh School brand.

Facebook became the ‘go to’ place for updates on Sedbergh – daily goings on, fixtures and results, school trips, musical performances, videos and photos of the Houses’ activities.

We devised a comprehensive three month content strategy. Using key dates in the school calendar, fixtures and performances, seasonal hooks, and national trends we created a day-by-day content planner.

The Sedbergh School Official Facebook page is the most accessible and visible facet of the school’s entire communications strategy. We set up individual Facebook adverts for the Summer sports academies – hockey, cricket, rugby and netball – targeted at over 13 year olds living within a specific catchment area of Sedbergh. We ran the adverts for a month prior to the residential courses starting.

Result

Sedbergh School Official is now a fully branded and multi-faceted Facebook page with a rapidly growing community. In the past month, new ‘likes’ are up 633% and post impressions are up 1,425%.

The content planner has been adhered to rigorously. The result is rich and varied content being updated daily by a variety of users, creating a mix of voices.

Facebook advertising reached over 2.5million targeted users for an investment of £300, with all summer sports academies being fully subscribed as a result of the marketing activity.