By the time Belmont Christian College reached its brand relaunch, we’d landed the purpose and the values, and the school needed a moment that gathered all of it into one place and said it out loud. So we built a manifesto. The way I think about a manifesto is a creative call to arms, a poetic one: it pulls together parts of the school’s story, parts of the purpose and the values, parts of the lived experience, and ties them into a single flag in the ground. A this-is-who-we-are moment.
Then we did something with it that I’ve now done across a few schools, using the manifesto as the base script for a film. I tend to keep my distance from the phrase brand video, because it’s a creative agency word, and this isn’t a promotional piece about a product or an offer of the school. It’s centred on who the school is, meant to carry an emotion and plant a flag: we’re unashamedly this.
For Belmont, we chose a range of people connected with the school, students, staff, and community members, and had each of them read a line or a phrase of the manifesto. We matched the different parts of the manifesto to what we saw as their realisation, the imagined picture of those words lived out, and the whole thing kept returning to the purpose: shaping people the world needs.
We brought the values in too, deliberately, and held them alongside the purpose. This is what I mean by a brand world, the values and the purpose holding together as one picture. The values are the outworking of the purpose: when we say engaged people, when we say purposeful people, when we talk about lives that impact families, communities, and culture, those things happen because of the values the school instils and holds close. So the film doesn’t just state the purpose. It shows the values doing the work underneath it.
We won’t roll that exact structure out for every school. But the part I keep coming back to is what the many voices did: instead of one narrator telling families who Belmont is, the people who actually are the school each said a line, and the manifesto landed as something the community owned rather than something it was handed.
A manifesto that gathers the school's story, purpose, and values into a single this-is-who-we-are piece.
A film built straight from the manifesto, each line read by a different student, staff member, or community member.
An emotive anchor for the brand that lives on the website and across the launch, centred on who the school is rather than what it sells.
The part it’s easy to forget to plan is the launch. For BCC’s big brand rollout we sat down and built it like a shopping list, phased and lean, working through the hard bits like uniform and bringing the community along so the change felt like a good-news story.
A coffee-table book for Belmont’s 40th, gathering four decades of stories and photographs to honour the people who made the school, kept outside the brand on purpose so it felt like a treasured community artefact, not marketing.
