A fitting followup to my recent Q&A with David Willows is another conversation with Willows — by blogger Lorrie Jackson. This one focuses on the recently released book Willows co-edited, Effective Marketing, Communications and Development in International Schools. As Jackson notes:
One of the threads that unites each contribution to the book is an
emphasis on telling the story of a school. But while storytelling itself is timeless, the tools which we use to tell these tales have evolved. Take for example the web. For Willows, the digital world opens doorways into new ways to share our story. As he notes, “No longer limited to printed words on a page, we have access to rich and varied media that provide new dimensions to the stories we are seeking to tell. This opens up for us huge new opportunities. However, there are also new challenges; such as the importance of ensuring that the stories we tell remain coherent across a variety of media platforms.”
“Rich and varied media” evokes another effort that helps tell a school’s story — the Witness to History project at Georgetown University, described as
a state-of-the-art video oral history project to record and celebrate the stories of Georgetown alumni who have been history makers and witnesses to history. The goal of the project is to create a historically valuable product — a rich collection of alumni stories that further tells the story of Georgetown and the impact graduates are making around the globe.
This idea of telling a school’s story through its people is a little more subtle than many school marketing efforts. It also strikes me as an approach that many organizations — not just schools — could use.
[Thanks to Terrence Gargiulo for alerting me to Witness to History.]