A school video is worth so much more than photos... or words!

“90% of parents say video helps their decision process, so let us create a film that brings your school to life.” Blue Apple Education

In today’s crowded school marketplace, competition is rife and your school needs to find something that will give you a competitive edge to attract prospective parents and pupils.

At Blue Apple Education we know that videos can provide an intimate glimpse into a school’s life and can enable parents to get a better feel for a school’s individual strengths, ethos, and success. Videos are a perfect way to tell your school’s story and provide a different perspective – one that you don’t necessarily get from photos or words alone.

Turning the old saying that a picture paints a thousand words on its head, this post aims to show you the difference a video can make to your school’s website.

It is important to remember that what is included in your school’s video is entirely up to you – what works for one school, may not necessarily work for another!

Two ways that videos can be incorporated into your website

• Full screen background videos – these often incorporate footage taken by drones and show your school buildings, grounds, and location within the local community. They can provide an eye-catching first impression for visitors to your school’s website and usually do not have any sound.
• Talking heads videos – these videos usually involve someone talking right into the camera, or slightly to the side. The videos can be used to introduce your school and/or record the views of members of your school community, such as staff, pupils, parents, or school governors.

How videos can be used to promote your school

Videos can be used in a variety of ways in a school and the following are just some examples of how they can be used to showcase and promote your school to prospective parents and pupils:

• Video footage of sporting, musical, or theatrical events can show the wide range of opportunities your curriculum offers.
• You can use video to show off your facilities – this might include footage of your amazing gymnasium or swimming pool, your athletics facilities and sports pitches, your library or state-of-the-art IT suite.
• Videos can be used to give an insight into everyday lessons in school – children busy at work in a classroom, working on a piece of art, or doing experiments in a science laboratory for example.
• You might decide you would like a video of children enjoying themselves at break or dining together (it can provide an opportunity to show off your school’s fabulous menu as well!)
• Videos can also show what your school offers in terms of more out of the ordinary activities – children enjoying themselves in their forest school, or on a camping trip for example.
• Each school has a unique set of facilities and opportunities on offer for its pupils and video techniques can show off your school’s best features.
• Using drone footage, you will be able to show off your school’s impressive grounds – it can fully capture the scale of your what your school has to offer in terms of its buildings and outside spaces.
• Video can not only be effective in capturing your school’s physical attributes, but can capture subtle aspects of your school’s personality and perspective – at the end of the day it is the pupils and their activities that really matter and you can use video to capture their emotions as they go about their day.
• Your video can capture your pupils talking about things that are important to them or proudly showing their participation in school events such as at Easter plays, Nativity services at Christmas, school discos, school fetes, and sports day etc.
• You can use video footage to show pupils talking about their work, or editing their writing and any other aspects of academic life that is important to them.
• You can use video to promote your school’s after-school activities which are also important to children and parents when they are trying to decide which school will suit their children.
• Following on from the above point, videos provide a great opportunity to show that your school supports programmes that are designed to keep children safe in life such as school swimming lessons or cycling proficiency programmes.
• If you decide you would like a video embedded on your homepage, rather than having the video as a background to the site, it provides a great opportunity to have text and perhaps music alongside any talking in the background.
• As far as creativity is concerned here, the sky is the limit…

Please get in touch with us if you have a video that you have created yourselves that you would like us to embed onto your site, or you would like us to create a video for you.

We can also create a wonderful background video for your school’s site using drone footage and high-quality videography. Blue Apple’s professional in-house team can also offer bespoke animated graphics and background music.

You will be amazed at the difference a video could make to your school’s website, but don’t just take our word for it… here is a testimonial from one of our clients:

“Loved it, I cried! – We had a whole school showing of the video this morning and there were tears and clapping…. Thank you so much, the whole team agreed that it really captured the essence of ‘us’… We all loved the experience!”

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Blue Apple Education are School Communication and Design Experts. We believe each and every school is remarkable and unique in some way. We see it as our duty to unearth what this is and to convey the essence of this both beautifully and convincingly.

We’d love to Unearth Your Remarkable, contact Mark Davis at [email protected] or call 0330 223 0766.