Model High School Athletic Marketing Plan

Abstract

Beacon Academy, like many schools in the Indonesia, has a small marketing team dedicated to recruiting students in a highly competitive market. Many competitors rely on their brand name and/or test results to recruit and retain students-Beacon has neither. As a newer school that just finished its first year of major examinations (IGCSE), marketing of the school has been limited to philosophy and facilities. Fortunately, some very creative individuals head the school and the facilities are some of the best in the area.The school is aesthetically pleasing and has great facilities, but athletics is poorly marketed. Part of that stems from the poor performance in athletics, but this is primarily due to a very small student body, a high staff turnover, and the use of internal teachers (who lack professional coaching experience) as coaches. The other and most important reason for a poorly marketed athletics program is the lack of creativity in marketing. Indonesian schools and their marketing experts stick with a series of preordained marketing techniques: open houses, a quarterly newsletter, major events (Founder's Day, etc.), and the like. There is a lack of ingenuity and desire to promote athletics (or the school, in general) creatively and effectively.The dynamic of Asian schools is still predominantly academically based, but there is a growing trend to incorporate sports in the students' school lives. Like many trends, the understanding that sports could teach students transferable skills or help them develop traits valued beyond university was late coming to Asia. However, this poses a great opportunity for Beacon Academy to get ahead of the curve and woo prospective students from other competitors.Creating the Marketing PlanIn forming a marketing plan, the Beacon Academy Athletic Department first had to lay out objectives to use as a guideline. After talking to the board director, the athletic director laid out the following objectives:* generate a website for Beacon's athletic conference to be used by Beacon and participating schools,* develop and standardize the awarding of an athletic scholarship from Beacon, and* create a plan of action for photographing, marketing, and writing up athletic events.The latter highly depends on the students' interest in taking photographs and creating weekly write-ups as part of their requirements for their IB (International Baccalaureate) Diploma or Duke of Edinburgh International Award (DofE). Many of these marketing tools could be student led, with the athletic director and the marketing department overseeing these activities.Customizing the athletic scholarships was a time-consuming process, not because of the difficulty of setting up a structure, but because of the precedent that the board had laid out prior. Because of the size of the school, the board wanted to push the scholarship program to fill seats (understandably so). Beacon Academy had just opened its Senior School and needed to fill its freshman and junior class, respectively. However, the fish market-style of haggling for the percentage of tuition covered by a scholarship does not aid in implementing this system effectively. The parent community is small and thoroughly interconnected, so offering a lower percentage to a student athlete with similar skills and qualities of a student athlete who received a higher percentage prior to these matrices would be an uphill battle.Figure 1 shows the school profile (brochure format). One challenge was creating a matrix that flowed with the existing profile, that could be easily understood, and that was aesthetically pleasing. With school colors being a violet and orange away from a rainbow, the matrix needed to have flair yet not throw off the flow of the rest of the profile. Figures 2 and 3 show the newly created Middle School (Grades 6-8) and Senior School (Grades 9-12) scholarship matrices. The school had previously used percentages for tuition awarded and, for the sake of consistency athletics created an award program with levels of percentages in increments of 10%. …