You’re a team of a few doing the work of many.

A reflection for school marketers

You’re a team of a few doing the work of many. The website, social media, the prospectus, events, photography, the speeches, the crisis that lands at four o’clock on a Friday, the open day that has to run like clockwork. And somewhere in the cracks, the actual thinking about what any of it is for. One way or another, you are the person responsible for how the school is seen, said, and felt.

It is a bigger job than the title suggests. You carry enrolment targets, and at the same time you carry families, holding them and caring for them through one of the more anxious decisions they will make. You often sit on the direct line between school leadership and families, which means it is your words, your language, your thinking that parents are actually meeting. That is a real responsibility, and much of the work that goes into it is never seen.

Here is what I have come to believe about that work. Storytelling matters far more than the job’s reputation suggests. A school telling its story well, and honestly, can do more than fill places. It can help a community see itself differently, and reimagine what it could be. That possibility often sits in your hands. And yet the people holding it are usually stretched thin, pulled in too many directions, rarely with the time or the headspace to think strategically. It is easy to get bogged down in the day to day, and hard to lift your head above the parapet long enough to put a stake in the ground and say, this is the direction we are going. The days keep rolling on, and the deeper work waits.

I have watched what happens when someone in your seat stops thinking in marketing and starts thinking in experience. It tends to be a turning point. The job stops being a treadmill of outputs and becomes about the moments that decide how a family feels. The work gets more honest, and, oddly, easier to do, because you finally have something true to point at.

The plainest thing worth saying about working with me is this: schools are what we do. We get it. I am not an external vendor who turns up with a brief and leaves with a deliverable. I do the journey with you. For the length of a project I embed into the school, in person where I can and closely from a distance where I can’t, and by the end I usually know five, six, ten people across the place by name. I am the one who gets a “good to see you, Jacob” at the front office, because I have actually been there. I take that part seriously. I care about the people I work with, and day to day, that is often you.

The rarer thing I try to do is hold the messy middle. School leadership has its drivers. You have yours. Families have theirs. A lot of the real work is joining those up: getting teams that don’t always talk to pull in one direction, mediating the tricky conversations, and protecting the work from becoming something it shouldn’t be. I am not interested in bog-standard B2C marketing, or in a creative agency churning out attractive flyers that say nothing. The work I care about is deeper than that, and doing it well means caring about how honestly a school speaks to families, not only how it looks. That instinct is built into how Bolsta works.

I should be upfront that I have sat where you sit. In the early days of Bolsta I worked a marketing role inside a school, on site at Belmont Christian College as a long-running contractor for a few years. So I know how it feels to care this much and still feel like the work is misread, and how close that can get you to burning out. None of this is theoretical for me.

What I most want to give a marketing team is hard to put on an invoice: a sense of coherence, a sense of place in the school, a reason to show up that is bigger than the next deadline. I can’t promise that outright. But it tends to come from shaping the work well, and from making your job a little easier.

There is a pragmatism underneath all of it, too. There are real, concrete problems I can help you solve: getting your team aligned, finally articulating the story you have been circling, reaching design and development of a quality you can’t always find in-house but that still thinks like a school, bringing project management to work that has been drifting, and holding a sense of vision that pushes you to do more and better than you might have alone. Some of it is closer to coaching: helping you see possibilities, connections, and ways into a problem you simply wouldn’t have reached on your own, because the day to day never leaves the room for it.

If I had to put it in a line: your school is worth experiencing, and your real job, the one under the title, is to help families feel that. Mine is to make that job possible, give it coherence, and make it a little less lonely.