Electronic Toolbox

I have a meeting with the Board of Governors in less than hour.  Why wouldn’t I be working on a blog post??  Well, frankly, my head and my notebook are so full of stats, charts, quaint stories, tales of woe, and predictions for the future that my brain needs a rest before I go in the big room.  But one of the things I will be addressing today is our plan to step back and do a serious communications audit this summer.

We have certainly jumped with reckless abandon onto the social media and in-bound marketing wagon.  In the last two years we have launched a very active Facebook and Twitter account.  They are updated almost daily.  We have launched a new website, built for maximum SEO.  We have an equally active blog up and running and we have over 100 videos on our YouTube Channel.  We even have a full-time employee dedicated to the maintenance of all these media.  Our proverbial toolbox is full.  Our proverbial cup overfloweth.

But two statements in the last month have been ricocheting around in my head.  The first comes from the famous columnist Peggy Noonan.  Whether or not you agree with her politics, she is a brilliant writer and her books are wonderful.  The other comes from my dear friend JT Hanley at Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California.  He does not have the fame of Peggy Noonan but he should.  He is an educator and a coach without peer.

Talking about President Obama and how his campaign has become expert at mining the internet and the data to be found therein, Noonan, who is not a fan of the president, asks in this column, “If you have fabulous new ways to reach everyone in the world but you have little to say, does that really help you?”  And then my friend JT, speaking on a topic I honestly don’t remember (we were a few martinis and glasses of wine into dinner at that point!), asked, “If you don’t have focus, isn’t your camera just a plastic box?” 

All this got me thinking of our electronic arsenal.  Now that we have built up these resources and filled our toolbox, what do we do next?  We have spent the last two years creating and staffing for this 21st century world of recruitment in which we must be successful but I will admit we have not figured out exactly what to do with it now that we have it.  Or more accurately, we have not figured out the best use of what to do with it.  How do we harness their power, craft the messages, maximize the potential, and build a strategy?

Ask me in September what we accomplished this summer.

In 500 words.

As I start this post, I expect it to be short because I’m not sure what to think of this article from the Wall Street Journal about changes in admissions essay questions to elite MBA programmes. I’m really just sharing. Some of the questions are interesting and even the formats can be intriguing, like the school that wanted the response limited to a tweet. (I guess they assume any MBA applicant worth their trouble has a Twitter account and “tweets”.)

There is some noted concern that paid consultants influence their essays although that’s not much of a stretch from our own concerns that parents influence the essays that we read. I like the essay topics that are grounded in the mission of a school better than the generic ones about challenges, role models/mentors, and what should we know about you. I just spent the last half an hour looking for some good examples from independent schools and what I found was that most of us now have our applications and questionnaires hidden behind logins and online applications. But that’s another topic.

One school did make a nice statement about itself but then followed it up with the pedestrian “how will you contribute?” question. It started well enough but the actual question could be copied and pasted from most other applications. On the other hand, how much does it matter?

I hope they are out there but I don’t really know any colleagues who place so much emphasis on the essay that it can sway a decision one way or the other, despite all other measurable evidence to the contrary. If that is true and the essay can’t win admission for an otherwise weak candidate or deny admission to an otherwise strong candidate, then why bother?

I always read the essay and it is actually one of the first things I go to when reviewing a candidate. But I admit it’s not going to make a paradigm shift in my thinking or decision-making. It is just interesting.

So why require it? I don’t quite know.