Your school’s magazine is one of the best marketing tools you have to showcase what makes your school special. There’s no better way to share your value proposition than to share the authentic voices of your community.
We finish up our two-part series on school magazines with an in-depth look at crafting powerful and engaging profiles of your school’s students, faculty, staff, alumni and donors. Check out our first post on Making Your Magazine a Must-Read.
The Power of Profiles
When you include profiles, you broadcast to your readers several important messages:
- Current and prospective parents see outcomes for their own child, which deepens their emotional attachment to your school.
- Alumni feel pride in the accomplishments of current students and fellow alumni, which can translate into increased giving and engagement and a more robust alumni network.
- Prospective students and families often see themselves–and their values–in the profiles, which deepens the connection and interest in your school.
- Word-of-mouth marketing is strengthened as your audiences share the accomplishments they read about in your magazine with family, friends and co-workers.
Writing engaging, fresh magazine profiles that your readers want to read and that highlight your school’s culture, mission and outcomes is a critical part of your magazine content. There are lots of ways to craft a great profile but each requires some planning.
Mine Other Magazines for Great Ideas
Pay close attention to how your favorite magazine handles personality profiles for ideas and inspiration. Each month, Vanity Fair’s last page asks a celebrity to answer the Proust Questionnaire, a French parlor game of questions popularized by Marcel Proust.
Even though Vanity Fair asks the same questions in every issue, the person’s take is always different. What questions could you ask your profile subject about your school? And how could you incorporate this as a recurring department (regular content that’s consistent in look and tone from issue to issue)? Perhaps:
- How has the school’s motto inspired you?
- For a student or faculty/staff member, what does your typical day look like?
- What’s your favorite school memory?
- What do you love/hate about the school uniform?
- What unexpected lesson did you learn at school?
- Or ask questions about a school tradition that connects generations.
It’s a great way to showcase a person in your community whose accomplishment you want to highlight, like a retiring, beloved teacher, an award-winning student, an alumni author (or company founder, Olympic coach, etc.) or donor. You can use a short intro to share the reason they are being featured and then let their voice and unique memories and reflections flow.
Having someone answer questions via teleconference or on a phone app like TapeACall allows you to record the interview, transcribe it digitally and edit. Avoid asking profile subjects for email responses to questions, since the answers can be stilted. Hearing someone’s authentic answers is the charm of the questionnaire format.
Highlight Your School’s Experts and Relevance
Your school graduates smart, caring people. And smart, caring people like to read about topics that are timely and relevant to our world today. Use the profile to feature your school’s experts on those topics.
Social media and student mental well being continues to make headlines. It’s an issue your readers, alumni and current families, care about. Profile your school’s guidance counselor about the topic, what they do at your school to help students manage social media, offer suggestions for parents, recommend favorite resources on the issue, etc.
A nice complementary profile might be of peer mediators or mentors at your school and ask the students questions about how they make friends, deal with peer pressure, encourage teamwork, empower each other, and make sense of their own digital diet. Questions like these respect the person profiled and the reader–and showcase the comprehensive, intentional way your school approaches your students’ social-emotional development.
Showcase Your Unique Students, Alumni and Community Members
There will be people you need to and should profile: the legendary coach who is retiring, the faculty member who just won an award, the sophomore who competed in the national STEM fair. But there are lots more voices at your school and countless creative ways to share these stories.
Think beyond the classroom. Your students and alumni do really cool things outside of class. These passions make great profiles and fun reads.
Brown Alumni Magazine’s “Five Minutes With” series is a short, first-person interview with great photography (think action photos and full bleed across the top of the page). Here are two to inspire you: The Zen of Woodworking and Climbing the Walls.
Johns Hopkins Magazine offers a new take on the standard profile. After traditional running copy on the subject, there are five or so quick answers at the end to questions related to the subject. Here, a profile of a guitar-playing oncology professor ends with a few tidbits, including naming his favorite Beatle.
Embrace a variety of voices, too. Profiling your faculty is important, of course, but staff members—the school nurse, division secretary, dining hall manager—are the heartbeat of your school. These heroes often go unnoticed and deserve the spotlight.
Lists make great content and a fun, quick way to profile what happens at your school. These types of profiles are mission-centric, speaking to how your school respects and celebrates its community.
You can ask your subjects the Top 5 Things They Love About Your School. Ask your dining hall manager to name the favorite student meals and a short answer why (and include a recipe). Or ask for their playlist and why those songs are important.
Profile a student club, say your school’s championship Robotics team, and ask them to list the 5 Things People Might Not Know About Robotics. If your boarding school has a lot of faculty dogs, make a cheeky list with photos of the Top Best-Smelling Places on Campus, as told by the dogs.
Lists keep things light and fun (and shouldn’t reading be fun?). Kenyon College’s magazine recently included a list of things in the college’s lost and found, which the writer culled from email postings. Quirky and very interesting.
Most schools highlight student winners in national or regional art competitions. Go a step further and ask each winning artist about their inspiration for the piece, why they like a particular medium, etc. The images are the work itself, deepened by the smart, thoughtful responses of the artists.
Use Photography to Make Your Profiles Pop
Some profiles should be image-driven. Visit classrooms to find that teacher with that desk or bulletin board. You know the one: jam packed with interesting memorabilia, etc. Take a photo of the teacher at the desk or bulletin board, make it a full-page photo, and do a large, boxed caption where your subject explains what the items are and why they’re special.
For students, there’s no better, more authentic way to highlight who they are than to look inside their locker (with permission, of course). Visually, it can be a portrait of the student beside the open locker with a description of items (text book, sporting equipment, photos, fun souvenirs) to show the breadth of their activities at your school and their passions. Or you could photograph each item with a caption in the student’s words why it’s important. Include a photo of the student with a short intro for a very engaging way of sharing what your students do at your school.
Get creative when it comes to imagery. After all, images tell the story in a powerful way. (The phrase isn’t “a picture tells a couple of dozen words.”) Pick up any magazine on a magazine rack and you will see larger images: full-bleed (extending to the end of the page); often printed across the spread; maybe just a photo filling one page with no copy. You’ll see typography used in interesting ways.
These treatments elevate your magazine and excite your readers to keep reading and turning pages. Check out some of these creative magazine layouts and use of imagery curated from Canva. When you find layouts you like, share them with your designer.
You need to keep other things in mind, though, when considering the images for your profiles:
Avoid repetitive photos. For profiles, you may need a few photos for the article, but how many images do you need to see of that person? Ask for photos of the person’s craft or career (in their studio, at the hospital, etc.) for a better variety.
Mix up photography issue to issue, article to article. Alternate a full-bleed photo with another with white margins to give it some negative space. If your articles and profiles are page after page of the same “scrapbook-type”–smaller photos on a page with captions that look like a 1990s newsletter–you need to shake up the design.
Watch your use of color. What colors will your readers expect to see? What colors should you avoid, like those of your rival’s? Work with your designer to create a color palette for consistent use that includes more colors than your branding color palette. Include hue options from all the colors of the color wheel.
Focus on fonts. Use a too-trendy font and you’ve dated your magazine. Work with your designer on creating a font palette that includes families of a sans serif and a serif that allows you options for various weights and usage. Include one or two complementary “decorative” fonts (the trendier fonts) with more personality like a hand script for use as a highlight font. You can replace these easily in future issues while keeping the overall design in place.
Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose
Don’t assume if a story is on one platform, it can’t be on another. The beauty of print allows you to go more in-depth with a story. Not everyone read the web news story you wrote about your several National Merit Semi-Finalists, for example. Profile them in the magazine, just choose another angle.
The profile allows you to go deeper into that Semi-Finalist’s love of cello, 19th-century Japanese prints and sinking the perfect lay-up as center for your school’s basketball team. Delve into the aspects of your school that inspire the student. Maybe frame the profile around the student’s schedule for the day with images and a quote from the person profiled about a specific class, club, even their favorite car magnet (with a photo of them in the student parking lot).
Ask your designer to create a PDF of just the profiles, which can live on your website as downloadable content under a “Meet Our Students” section. Your admissions staff can also email them to prospective students to personalize outreach. If a prospective student is interested in lacrosse, sending them a profile of a student who plays on the lacrosse team offers a real example of what student-athletes are like at your school. If they are well-designed one pagers, what about printing them and framing them in the admissions office?
Of course, creating social posts about your profiles with a link to the PDF or your online magazine are great. If you have profiled a student who wrote and performed an original play, link the profile to the video you post of a performance excerpt. Include a QR code to the video in the printed magazine.
Writing engaging, fresh magazine profiles that your readers want to read and that highlight your school’s culture, mission and outcomes is a critical part of your magazine content. There are lots of ways to craft a great profile but each requires some planning.
Need more inspiration? Check out the recent magazine winners chosen by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
How can Kalix help you elevate your magazine content and your school? Let’s talk.
