It’s week three of our summer spruce-up series, and today we are talking about brand. What is the brand of your school?

“Wait, we aren’t selling anything,” you say. “We aren’t like Pepsi or Under Armour, so why are you talking about branding?”

Your school is a brand. Whatis.com defines it this way:

“A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so that it can be easily communicated and usually marketed. A brand name is the name of a distinctive product, service, or concept. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name. Branding can be applied to the entire corporate identity as well as to individual product and service names.”

So in this context, your school is a service that must be distinguished from others. Your school needs to stand out. The idea of your school should be easily communicated. Your community should easily identify your school when they see it.

After working directly with dozens of schools, I’ve realized schools need some help in this area. So let’s start with the basics. A simple system created to ensure that everyone who is celebrating your school and students is doing it in a consistent way.

Here is a quick three-step branding checklist to help ensure your visual brand:

1. Logo – You should have one primary logo that you use for your school. The image should be in a high resolution format (1 MB or greater) with a clear background so that it can be used in print, on t-shirts, on your website, and of course on your social media pages. Larger districts may have a district logo, along with logos for each school.
2. Colors – Your school colors need to be defined in better terms than just “blue and gold.” The colors should be defined in terms of a color code. For example, there are RGB, HEX, PMS and more scales that you can use. Here is one way to document the colors in a variety of formats.

• If you’ve never had official colors, you could use your logo and assign the color through an app. I use a Chrome extension called the ColorCode Eyedropper.

3. Access – Once you establish your official logo and colors, you need to allow your school and community access to them. If the various sports teams, the PTA and others in your school don’t have access to the branding, can they follow it? Of course not! We recommend putting this information on your website! The School District of Reedsburg puts it right under its District header on the website.

There are many more aspects to your brand beyond these three initial steps, but this is a great start. If you can check these items off as complete, you will establish so much more consistency as you start school next fall. You and your school community will be able to see the difference!