Marketing
In 1999 there were no public signposts to indicate where Bishops was located. The entrance was also set well back from Campground Road. People ‘inside’ the school knew how to get there; people ‘outside’ not so much. In 2024, there are signposts on the road; there is a wall proclaiming Bishops Diocesan College outside the Haddon Gates. The Prep also has a striking sign on the corner of Belmont and Fir Road. Signage inside the school also now allows visitors and guests the chance to find their way around the large estate.
Marketing in the commercial domain involves four key components: product, price, place, and promotion. The product in marketing a school is obviously the quality of the pupils who leave the school, having been through both the official and the hidden curricula. Price is an issue for all schools, but a large issue for independent schools, and the school has to maintain a viable balance between what the school offers and what it charges. Location needs to be presented as a hidden benefit – urban school, country school, virtual school. And promotion, as in making known the best qualities of the school, that’s the aspect which can repay the maximum benefit. The question is how has Bishops dealt with marketing over the years, and how has the school moved from a grand isolation to a visible and amicable institution?
In 1999 marketing the school was primarily focussed on admissions. There was a Prospectus rich with photographs of the amenities (already slightly out of date), and admission forms which were available to prospective parents. The College held Open Days to which traditional feeder prep schools were sent invitations. The bulk of the College entry came from the Prep and from Western Province Prep, and a smattering of sons of ODs from further afield. During the 1990s, the College had expanded from 600 to 660 boys, more by filling the classes than by increased marketing. The Pre-Prep each year took in its agreed number based on class-size, and as the Pre-Prep classes moved up more or less intact to the Prep, the Prep had little room for accepting any other boys.
With the arrival of a new Principal in Grant Nupen, and the decision to hold the 2010 conference, a number of key decisions followed which focused the school’s attention on the need to embark on a strategic marketing campaign to bring about one of the key insights, articulated by Helen Zille, the WC MEC, who urged Bishops to moved out of its ‘gilded cage’ into a ‘friendly planet’ state – terms advanced by Clem Sunter following the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York. One of the eight action groups, the Finance and Funding group, identified the need for additional sources of funding to meet the increasing needs and demands of the school in the future. The Development Office was set up in 2004 to achieve this, and the strategic model adopted was called the Advancement Model, which relied on a long-term continuous funding campaign, made possible by communication capacity and building relationships with potential donors both within the school and outside.
After the decision to hold the 2010 Conference in September 2001, the school contracted with a PR company, called HWB, to drive the PR campaign before and after the conference to make the findings widely known.
Marketing therefore had to come to achieve a lot more than admissions, and so marketing the school in an entirely new way was going to be required. Melvyn Wallis-Brown was appointed Marketing Manager, and he gained a certain notoriety as the man in the deerstalker hat who took visitors and potential parents on school tours. Linda Dinan was appointed to manage the communications structures, and Sandra Pole was taken on to capture data from the three separate databases into one consolidated school database. In 2008, Rosemary Wilke was taken on as Marketing Assistant along with Yolanda Raman.
New documents were created both for the fundraising campaign and publicity for admissions, following a newly updated branding model. As with the earlier Appeals, teams were set up of individuals prepared to go out and engage with potential donors and friends, with back-up available through the communications capacity of the Office. At the same time, the school also enhanced its admissions processes by inviting to the Open Days schools other than the traditional feeder schools. Bishops also sent its marketing agents to the Learning Point gatherings in Johannesburg to fly the Bishops flag. The Marketing staff, Rosemary and Yolanda, would go on road trips up the West Coast and the Garden route, visiting primary schools and dropping off printed promotional material and application forms. For a couple of years, trips were also taken into Botswana. The Marketing staff also assisted with the Pre-Prep admissions where appropriate. It can be said that the approach was successful both in terms of funding raised as well as maintaining a full school with a waiting list.
When Jessica Setterberg resigned, the Marketing and Fundraising section of the Development Office was transferred to the Principal’s Office. When Grant retired, Guy Pearson became the 14th Principal, the combined model of marketing, communications and fundraising was dropped, and marketing returned to being primarily concerned with admissions. Fundraising continued, but was initiated and carried out by smaller sections within the school for their own benefit – boarding houses, sports tours and so on.
In 2013, Rosemary Wilke was appointed to the position of Marketing and Events Manager. She became the co-ordinator for all events set up by the school or within the school either for fundraising or just bringing people on to the campus. Hiring out buildings or spaces within the school brought in revenue, but involved disruption to school activities, and this practice was largely stopped. Rosemary was involved in the upgrading of the old branding manual, and branding became a much more prominent feature on and off the campus – and the Bishops brand became much more public.
Marketing started focusing more on public relations – admissions were going well and the established functions for bringing boys to the school were working well. These include ‘Experience Bishops’ – an Open Day usually run in February, initially as two separate days; one for the Prep, and the other for boys from outside the Prep. In time, these two events which underlined the insider/outsider division were combined, and the Marketing office would have applications for up to 400 boys to be included. Another change which worked well was involving staff (ex-House Directors whose term of office had finished) and the PR boys after they had received the necessary training, in tours of the College.
Social media were brought into play as well very much as part of public relations. Rosemary Wilke, with the help of IT, looked after Facebook, and the IT department published news and reminders in other social media. The use of social media – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – became a significant vehicle for heightening awareness of what Bishops was achieving and what it was offering.
When was appointed to the Marketing position, a number of changes were introduced. For a start, everything went digital – admissions, information on the Bishops website, the increased and co-ordinated use of social media to transmit information about what was going on at Bishops, increased use of video material, especially material created by the boys themselves and published on the Bishops channel on Youtube. She also conducts tours of the school for prospective parents. There was a virtual tour of the school on the website. was appointed to a similar position to serve both Prep and Pre-Prep. There was not much need, if any, for attention to be paid to admissions – the school was full, and there was a waiting list. The marketing activity thus operated more at a strategic level – with understated marketing, usually addressing school policy imperatives such as the school’s sustainability targets.
