Schools talk about brand, but how does one differentiate in a crowded market? That’s the challenge top of mind for nearly 30 percent of SAIS marketing and communications professionals (Pulse Perspectives, May 2025). Though nearly 20 percent of MarCom pros feel their school has been successful with brand development this past year, more than one-third want to grow in their understanding of brand storytelling.
Two SAIS member schools – The Heritage School in Newnan, GA, and Sandhills School in Columbia, SC – attest that, for schools looking to strengthen the connection between their brand, audience, and action, your brand messaging isn’t just about informing – it’s about inspiring. Here, Dana Browy, director of marketing for Sandhills School, and Emily Kimbell, director of communications for The Heritage School, share in their own words how brand is really a reflection of mission.
Defining the Brand
For The Heritage School, which serves 457 students in early learning through twelfth grade, everything is guided by the four pillars of our mission statement: mind, body, spirit, and camaraderie. Every message shared – whether it’s a newsletter, social post, event, or press release – intentionally aligns with these core principles.
Each pillar shapes how we tell our story. When we highlight mind, we showcase how we’re expanding our students’ learning, like through our state-of-the-art Innovation Center. Body is reflected in our strong athletic programs for older students and our developmental program for younger students. It also extends beyond the field: we have a director of wellness who works directly with our coaches, staff, and students to teach healthy eating habits (supported by our lunch program), build sustainable exercise routines, and foster a genuine love for caring for your body. Spirit comes to life through schoolwide service projects, from our Day of Giving to our active role in the local Can-A-Thon.
And camaraderie is something we intentionally weave through every corner of campus. We encourage connections between grade levels, classes, across divisions, and between students and staff. It’s seen in Interim Week, where classes travel to other cities for hands-on learning and shared experiences. You see it in Jubilee, our weeklong, field-day-to-the-max competition featuring everything from musical chairs and tug-of-war to skits and team bonding. And you see it in Grad2Grad, where our seniors and kindergarteners partner throughout the year for special events like kite flying and Valentine’s Day parties – moments that build lasting, meaningful relationships.
These four pillars serve as our sounding board for every decision we make and help us build a community that is strong in these missional values. They ultimately shape our Profile of a Graduate: an intelligent, kind, collaborative, and curious student who’s ready to take the next step and make a difference in the world.
What sets us apart is that our messaging doesn’t start with goals like raising funds or growing enrollment – even though those are important. At the forefront, it’s always about how we’re investing in the core of our students. When it comes to creating marketing strategies or managing social media, it really just becomes about sharing what’s already happening on campus. It makes it easy to tell our story because our daily activities naturally reflect our mission. That’s our brand.
Though serving a smaller population, the Sandhills School, a college-preparatory school with 116 bright students with dyslexia and related learning differences, also intentionally aligns brand and mission. As the only Orton-Gillingham-accredited grades 1-12 school for students with dyslexia in South Carolina, what sets Sandhills apart is that Orton-Gillingham is not just a teaching approach but is the foundation of the brand and the lens through which every student is taught and through which every decision is made. This makes our brand inseparable from the daily experience of our students, faculty, and families.
Our brand is also reflected in the culture of Sandhills. From intentionally created traditions such as Spirit Fridays filled with students donning our school color (purple), to the annual Founders Day celebration held in October during Dyslexia Awareness Month, to College Decision Day when seniors announce their post-graduation plans each spring, our identity is lived and celebrated through traditions that highlight both dyslexic strengths and community pride. Families describe Sandhills as warm, welcoming, and empowering: a place where bright students are seen for both their challenges and their strengths, and where they gain the confidence to thrive in college and in life.
Understanding Your Audience is Key
To understand the motivations of prospective families, current families, alumni, and donors, Sandhills focuses on relationships rather than formal surveys or data collection. This relational approach gives us a deep, authentic understanding of our audiences and allows us to keep our messaging aligned with what truly matters to them.
Every prospective family meets personally with our director of admissions, which gives us a clear picture of their hopes and concerns. We hear consistent themes, especially around confidence, literacy progress, and executive functioning support.
For current families, feedback is woven into everyday interactions: drop-off, pick-up, conferences, and community events. Our Parent Council also serves as a sounding board, offering insight into parent priorities and perspectives.
With alumni and donors, connections are often maintained through faculty, staff, and family ties. Donors, many of whom are parents or grandparents, share informally why they give. They consistently tie it back to the transformation they witnessed in a child’s life. Others reflect on their own difficulties with learning and wish they had experienced a school like Sandhills.
Similarly, at Heritage, understanding motivation starts with genuine connection. Our administration sets the tone by being an active part of daily campus life rather than operating as a detached entity. In many schools, administration can feel separate from the classroom, but when they’re the ones making decisions that shape students’ day-to-day experiences, that separation just doesn’t work. Here, just as at Sandhills, our team shows up in daily campus life. Our admissions director helps with morning carpool, our advancement director coaches football, our director of communications is present at student events taking photos, our admin team helps with lunch service, and our head of school knows every student by name. When you engage with students and families every day, you get to know their needs, values, and motivations on a personal level. That kind of familiarity turns your community into trusted friends, and you start to anticipate what matters to them most.
That same approach extends to alumni, donors, and prospective families. We focus on building personal, meaningful relationships – whether that’s current students giving prospective students tours and spending the day with them, inviting alumni back for campus traditions they loved, or connecting donors with projects that align with their passions. It’s about creating touchpoints that feel authentic, not transactional. When people feel seen, valued, and included in the life of the school, their motivations naturally come to the surface, and we’re ready to meet them there.
Tailored Messaging Leads to More Effective Communications
By building meaningful relationships with their communities, both Heritage and Sandhills are able to share stories and details with their constituents that resonate. At Heritage, one of our most successful campaigns we’ve implemented is our re-enrollment “Welcome Back” boxes. Following the post-COVID years, we set a goal of re-stabilizing re-enrollment numbers. We realized that while we were doing a strong job marketing to prospective families, we weren’t putting the same energy into celebrating our current families – the people already invested in our community.
The idea was to shift re-enrollment from a routine task into a personal invitation to continue being part of the Heritage community. We wanted families to feel seen, valued, and wanted. To make that message tangible, every student who re-enrolled received a “Welcome Back Box” as part of our “We Saved You a Seat” campaign. Each division had its own age-appropriate items included inside the box: spirit wear, stuffed animals, socks, candy, and other fun surprises. The box itself became part of the excitement, featuring a custom art piece created by one of our alumni.
The impact was immediate. By tailoring our messaging specifically to current families and celebrating their continued commitment, we created genuine enthusiasm around re-enrollment. We also introduced a due date for the first time and saw record-breaking re-enrollment rates, ultimately maintaining a 93% re-enrollment over the last two years.
This campaign worked because it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all message. It was designed for one specific group with a clear emotional goal: to make our families feel appreciated and invited back.
Sandhills utilizes storytelling for both current and prospective families to incorporate brand messaging that resonates. For prospective families, our storytelling often centers on transformation and hope. Parents arrive to our school worried about their child’s confidence and progress in reading, so we share alumni and parent testimonials that highlight growth in literacy, independence, and self-esteem. These stories allow families to picture their child’s growth and take the first step toward joining our community.
For current families, our storytelling shifts to pride and belonging. Through social media highlights like Way to Go Wednesday and traditions such as Spirit Fridays and Awards Day, we showcase student achievements and community moments. These stories reinforce for families that they made the right choice of school for their child, strengthen their connection to Sandhills, and reinforce our brand as a place where students are celebrated for who they are.
Audience Segmentation Can Be Complex
Managing mass communication for schools with multiple divisions presents its challenges. Sandhills decisions start with how they prefer to connect. For current parents, we know they need quick, reliable updates, so we prioritize the Week at a Glance email and daily social media posts that highlight life on campus. For prospective families, our website and admissions communications are designed to be welcoming and mission-centered, helping them envision their child in our story.
When communicating with donors and grandparents, we lean into personal letters, phone calls, and face-to-face events like Grandfriends Day. These audiences value relationships and seeing the impact of their support firsthand.
For alumni, we are in the early stages of building engagement through storytelling on our website and social channels, highlighting how Sandhills shaped their journeys. Our 50th anniversary year gives us an opportunity to expand this work and build stronger connections with alumni through shared stories and celebrations.
Every platform and format is chosen with the same filter in mind: does this meet the audience where they are, in a way that feels authentic to Sandhills’ mission and voice?
Heritage also reflects a wide range of experiences while still maintaining a cohesive school identity. We segment strategically where it makes sense: lower school has its own class webpage, middle school runs a private Instagram account, each division receives individualized emails from their director, and alumni have their own newsletter and social space.
But what the Heritage School does especially well is balance segmentation with connection. We’re intentional about keeping our broader community – students, families, alumni – connected to the full school experience. Younger families want to see what’s ahead for their children in middle and upper school, while parents of older students love reminiscing about lower school traditions. We see this directly at play when we’ve had alumni parents request to stay on the weekly parent newsletter simply because they still want to feel part of the community.
So, while audience segmentation is important, we’ve learned not to over-segment. Some content needs to be tailored, but many stories resonate across audiences. Sharing moments from all divisions helps build a shared identity and sense of belonging.
Consistency Builds Trust
How do you ensure your brand feels the same across touchpoints—whether someone is on your website, touring campus, attending a parent night, or receiving an alumni appeal? Marketing best practices play a role in ensuring consistency at Heritage. We rely on a clear style guide, consistent use of colors and logos, and a review process through our communications team for anything shared with our broader community. But for us, true consistency goes beyond visuals and language – it’s rooted in the culture that everyone on campus helps create: one of caring, curiosity, independence, and collaboration. It’s what we call The Heritage Difference – our culture naturally shapes every touchpoint. We think of our brand not just as what we say, but how people feel when they interact with us. Whether it’s the energy of a campus tour, the joy radiating from our social media photos, or the personal tone of a fundraising appeal, each interaction reflects the same sense of who we are. The consistency we strive for isn’t just about a unified look – it’s about creating a shared experience that feels unmistakably ours.
Consistency is intentional at Sandhills. After our 2021 brand refresh, we created a comprehensive branding guide that outlines everything from logo usage and typography to our color palette and photography style, just as Heritage does. This ensures that whether someone visits our website, sees a social media post, or attends a donor event, they experience the same recognizable look and feel.
Equally important is the voice behind the visuals. We have a clear brand voice that defines how Sandhills communicates: knowledgeable, optimistic, encouraging, and passionate. Faculty and staff are trained on this Sandhills voice during professional development and in-services, so our brand is reinforced not only in marketing materials, but also in conversations, tours, and classroom experiences.
Teachers also share photos and classroom updates that feed into our communications, ensuring authentic glimpses of school life are woven into our channels. Students carry the brand forward, too, through moments like Founders Day in October. The combination of a strong visual identity, consistent language, and active participation from faculty, staff, and students ensures that our brand is cohesive across every touchpoint.
Faculty, Staff, and Students Are Brand Ambassadors
To help members of the school community “live the brand” in their interactions with prospective families, expectations for representing Heritage are clearly defined and regularly reinforced. For faculty and staff, those expectations are outlined in The Qualities of the Heritage Professional. This framework defines how employees engage with students, parents, colleagues, and the broader community. It emphasizes respect for the trust inherent in their roles; confidentiality in their work with families; and a proactive, positive approach to all interactions and communications. These qualities are central to professional growth and help ensure that every touchpoint reflects our school’s values. For students, we set clear expectations through our Profile of a Graduate mentioned earlier.
Of course, it’s not enough to simply state expectations. We believe the school must model these traits from the top down (board and administration) and create an environment where all can truly flourish. That begins with intentional hiring and enrollment processes – including campus visits and shadow days – to ensure mutual alignment between families and the school. We then reinforce that shared culture through professional development and training; community-wide events; and opportunities for faculty, students, and parents to connect meaningfully. In this way, living the brand isn’t just something we ask of our community, it’s something we build together.
At Sandhills, living the brand starts with Orton-Gillingham training. Because every teacher is trained in the same approach, families hear a unified message no matter which classroom or teacher they encounter. As Head of School Erika Senneseth explains, “Everyone here is speaking the same language, and that is literacy through Orton-Gillingham.”
We also weave the brand into professional development and in-service training, where faculty and staff are encouraged to use the Sandhills voice: optimistic, encouraging, and mission-centered. Teachers share classroom photos for social media, which helps bring authentic glimpses of learning to our broader community.
Students serve as ambassadors through celebrations like Awards Day, College Decision Day, and Spirit Fridays that reinforce the culture of pride and community that defines Sandhills. Students naturally embody our brand as they participate in and lead these moments.
Data Are Critical to Shaping Approaches to Marketing & Communications
To track the effectiveness of brand and messaging strategies, Heritage distributes several yearly polls and surveys to gauge parent and student reactions to things like policy changes and overall satisfaction. One of the biggest insights that’s directly shaped our strategy has come from a single admissions question, “How did you hear about our school?”
As is the case with more than half of SAIS schools, the top answer has consistently been “word of mouth” (Pulse Perspectives, May 2025). Because we’re located in a close-knit community, people tend to connect with a brand through personal interaction, not traditional marketing channels. That insight told us that many standard approaches such as print advertising weren’t the best use of our resources.
We shifted our focus. Instead of relying on passive marketing, we intentionally put ourselves in the community. Our students pass out candy at the downtown Trick or Treat, we have a float in the Christmas parade each year, our art students participate in downtown Art Walks, and we host a table at local golf tournaments. We go where our target audience already is instead of waiting for them to find us.
An added benefit is that these events also allow us to interact with our current families in casual, joyful spaces. They love seeing the school show up in the community, and those interactions strengthen their connection to the brand too. In the end, messaging and branding have to be built around your audience – you have to understand them and adjust how your message is delivered based on their values and how they actually engage with your school.
Sandhills measures effectiveness in a few key ways. On social media, we pay attention to which posts spark the most engagement, whether that is through likes, shares, comments, or direct messages from families. On the development side, we track donor participation rates and look for connections between specific campaigns and increases in giving.
The insights behind these numbers are what guide us. Our highest engagement posts consistently highlight our faculty and staff or celebrate student accomplishments. This has been true since 2019, when we shifted our social media strategy from avoiding student photos to sharing authentic stories of our people. That change transformed our channels into a vibrant reflection of community and confirmed that putting faces and voices at the center of our storytelling is what resonates most.
We also see strong responses to traditions like Founders Day and Awards Day, where families and donors are reminded of what makes Sandhills unique. These insights reinforce the importance of linking our brand storytelling to authentic moments of pride and celebration.
Brand measurement for us is not just about numbers. It is about listening to what families, students, and donors respond to and adjusting our messaging to stay true to our mission while also keeping it relevant to our community.
Ideas Into Action
For schools looking to strengthen the connection between their brand, audience, and action, The Heritage School and Sandhills School share their advice for what has made the biggest difference.
Related Resources
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