So what are Digital Magazines – after all they’re not websites and they’re not print. Is it a lazy way to get online without investing in a really good website? You may have been led to think so by the proliferation of PDF / Flash whatever replicas of print where you take your Prospectus and simply turn it into a page turning edition. Some simply convert their Prospectus into a PDF file, which loads at a snail’s pace, even on the fastest computers. Others convert their printed Prospectus into page turning online magazines using Flash based software – simple and low cost and many schools have them. However many of these printed online replica’s are clunky to use, slow to load and have type so small that you have to constantly zoom in and out. Not to mention the photograph quality is often blurry. So the PDF or simple Page turning printed equivalents have major shortcomings – although on the upside they are still environmentally friendly and lower on cost than printed Prospectuses.

So what’s a REAL Digital Magazine you ask yourself? Well firstly they are formatted to easily be read on a computer screen, secondly the good digital magazines – not all – offer outstanding visual quality and thirdly they make clever use of interactivity within the content to bring your school to life with video, audio and animation. The best digital magazines for readers are the ones created as digital magazines specifically rather than taking the printed prospectus and converting it into a page turning magazine. The Prospectuses created as true digital Prospectuses also offer clickable tables of contents, clickable links such as “Contact the Registrar” and forward to a friend and reader statistics which no printed Prospectus, PDF or simple page turning printed Prospectus replica can ever achieve.

So now you know the difference in digital magazines and PDF and page turning printed Prospectuses. But why have an online Prospectus or School Magazine when you have a website? Well, the two have different functions. The website is designed to be highly navigable and offer information in brief, easily digestible pieces.  Some school websites boost of having over 500 pages for the viewer to look at and you have no control in what order the Prospective viewer sees the information. For example, they may decide to go from the home page to the admissions page to the junior school news page to the fees page in 3 jumps. They may miss the page that lists your best features. So web sites are fantastic information repositories for parents, prospective families, alumni and the school community where all the info, the small print, the bullying policies and the news about the school are held. But your Prospective Families don’t always want infinite and constantly changing, and they don’t always have the time or desire to explore your 500 pages. The digital Prospectus however takes your readers by the hand and takes them through the best features and benefits at your school in a linear fashion in exactly the way you want them to see your school. So readers enjoy the same, familiar experience as thumbing through a print magazine, dwelling over stories, following the flow of the magazine’s layout and looking at quality pictures.  Except the digital Magazine can be viewed immediately by Mum and then forwarded on to Dad in the office at the click of a mouse.

But here is the sweet spot for digital magazines. Unlike print, true digital magazines provide a rich, immerse environment with video, animation and interactive features that provide much more depth. Rather than being the worst of both worlds—neither a good Web site, nor a good print publication—digital magazines can and should be the best of both worlds. They can be fantastic publications that provide a defined, engaging experience for readers, and a much cheaper, and way more environmentally friendly message by the schools themselves. After all what message does a school give, when they send out hundreds of printed Prospectuses but then put tag lines like “Please consider the environment before printing this mail” at the end of every email?

So what do readers of digital magazines think? In surveys taken over the last two years from over 30,000 digital magazine readers worldwide, * their big reasons for loving digital magazines, in order of importance are as follows:

1. More environmentally friendly than printed magazines. (Allows your school to really walk the talk).

2. Easy to save (Download it onto your computer so that you can view it offline if you want.)

3. Ability to search (Particularly useful for large yearly School Magazines)

4. More convenient than print (No more me too Prospectus piles in the lounge).

5. More timely than print (Allows viewers to read it the moment they are researching different schools)

6. Easy to forward (onto Mum, Dad, child, Grandma etc)

7. More convenient to read on my computer (remember more time is spent on the internet now than anything else.)

And nearly 70% of readers value video content as a valuable and positive impact on their overall impression of subjects discussed within the digital magazine.

So readers who read Digital Magazines love them. As a school, you will make huge savings on print and postage. Perhaps the best thing of all is that unlike the printed prospectus you can analyse the readership statistics over every page to see what works and what does not. So that next year without worrying about the cost of reprinting you can decide to redo page 3 or 4 or 5 with very little headache at all.

So digital magazines are not traditional – they won’t sit on the coffee table along with all the other me too Prospectuses – but they will make a more lasting impression with your Prospective family, on their computer where they spend most of their time. And Digital Magazines do meet the requirements of how today’s changed society,  researches and make their decisions.

Join the debate today and post your comments about the merits of Printed Prospectuses versus Digital Prospectuses.

“We have moved away from the expensive and environmentally unsound printed prospectus to the new digital interactive Prospectus from mlsMEDIA. We have been delighted with the outcome and overwhelmed with the positive response it is already getting. The savings on print and postage will continue to add benefit to one of the best marketing decisions I have made.”
Nick Irvine, Director of Marketing, Bloxham School

Peter Anwyl, President of the Association of Marketing and Development in Independent Schools, representing over 400 members throughout the UK, has no doubts about the significance of this exciting new breakthrough: ‘Once I had seen the mlsMEDIA interactive digital Prospectus at work, I needed no convincing that this was the way forward for those schools who wanted to communicate with their parents and alumni/ae in a modern and immediate way. It should be high on the ‘to do ‘ list of any school and is undoubtedly the way forward. ‘

* More engaging and immediate than print. Don’t have your clients just read your prospectus or school magazine – have them experience it. The mlsMEDIA digital interactive page turning prospectuses, school and alumni magazines read like the printed equivalent but enable you to have interchangeable video, audio, animation, online forms and 3D images of the school to really engage your readers.

* Economical – Printing and posting 10,000 prospectuses could cost a school £20,000 or more, and if there are significant changes to the school staff or infrastructure they all have to be printed again! The mlsMEDIA interactive digital magazines cut your printing and distribution costs down to zero and allow your readers to view it instantly rather than wait for the post. When changes happen you can update it immediately, making your digital prospectus or school magazine more current and relevant than a printed document ever can.

* Save Resources & Energy – A growing imperative for every school is to reduce their carbon footprint.  As schools start to add footnotes to their  emails to say “Do not print out this email message unless entirely necessary”, the traditional paper Prospectus and School Magazine give the wrong message.  E publications save trees, eliminate superflous printing, eliminate packaging and eliminate transportation. All around, it reduces energy consumption and CO2 emissions and gives out a positive PR message about your School’s environmental policies. Eliminating your huge paper consumption from printing expensive Prospectuses and School Magazines will be a big step towards your carbon reduction.

* Know what actually interests your audience. Unlike your printed material, with the mlsMEDIA digital magazines you get detailed insights about your readers’ behaviour, ranging from simple statistics such as readership to detailed analytics and heat maps to show you which content is the most popular and which is not, enabling you to continually refine your content ensuring that it is more relevant and more interesting. 

See for yourself

In order to experience a school prospectus digital interactive magazine for yourself, go to www.mlsmedia.com/prospectuses . Bloxham School in Oxfordshire is the first UK independent School to launch a totally interactive online Prospectus. Nick Irvine, Director of Marketing at Bloxham says the school are delighted with the response they are getting from prospective families. Do give us a call if you would like to learn more.

Daily Keyword Searches in the last month on Google in the UK:

• Private Schools – 3,616
• Independent Schools – 2,975
• Private School – 2,433
• Independent School – 1,627

And while I’m on the subject of customer language, it is a fact that your visitors are more interested in what you write than any other aspect of the page, including the design! The problem is that most web writing is dreadfully boring and oddly self-gratifying. If you would like tips on how to write better web copy, please email me (Jeanette@mlsmedia.com) and I will send you our complimentary White Paper on creating better web copy!

In the current economy where families are looking more closely at the cost of sending their children to independent schools, they are not as trusting of glossy prospectuses but are rather seeking out real people reviews on the information superhighway where views good or bad about your school can spread in a matter of hours, (witness the undoing of Tiger Woods’ perfect character very recently.) So your customers of 2010 may be more sceptical and criticising and who are now not only happy to pass their opinions along to other parents at the school gate but also just as happy to share their opinions with friends, “followers” and the search engines.  The fact that negative opinions about your school could spread globally in hours means you must have a plan in place for monitoring what’s being said and have the tools to respond and be part of the conversation. At the very least, you should make sure you have Google Alerts set up for your school name for example so that you are emailed when your school name is mentioned on the net.

According to the latest twice-yearly Nielson Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries, recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. The Nielsen survey, the largest of its kind, shows that nine in every ten internet consumers worldwide (90 percent) trust recommendations from people they know, while seven in every ten (70 percent) trust consumer opinions posted online. What does this mean for you? Make sure you get those current pupil and parent testimonials on a prominent spot onto your website…

Social networking influence will continue to rise. Witness the current great example of how Skype, Twitter and Facebook helped the British Red Cross “ An appeal to help victims of the Haiti earthquake is breaking all records, fuelled by the power of social media…. In less than 48 hours, the American Red Cross had received more than $35m in donations – including $8m directly from texts.” BBC News Jan 15th 2010.   However some predict that social networking will become more fragmented as for example teenagers abandon Facebook to stop snooping parents and others from knowing too much about their personal lives and people will start forming private social networks to keep their personal lives just that – private!

Give prospective parents and students a live virtual presentation of the school with FAQ session; conduct parent orientation sessions over the Internet; and with the threat of school closures for snowy or bird flu or H1N1 flu related conditions, teachers can use this for class delivery. You and your attendees can join meetings in seconds, without having to set up complicated video feeds or Webcams. Your viewers can see your desktop and whatever application you choose to show such as Powerpoint or videos etc. You can even record the meeting with audio for future review and reuse. Post recordings on your Web site or email them for on-demand viewing. Your attendees don’t even have to register for an account. For the best performance, we recommend GoToMeeting. For the link to their website, click here. They even have a free 30 day trial!

If your website is listed in the local results, it will be listed above the regular results on that page and people will also see the exact location of your School. You can submit your website to Google Maps through Google’s Local Business Centre. Login to your Google account or follow the simple instructions to create one if you don’t have one, and click “Add New Listing” to enter your School information.

There are several things that you can do to get a better listing on Google Maps or to make your listing stand out. You can enter your business information in Google Maps for free but to be listed at the top of the list, you have to optimize your entry.

• Enter as much information as possible about your school. Include important keywords in your description and choose the best possible category for your website.
• If possible, include images and videos to help your listing stand out. The more information you provide, the better.
• If your school’s location is in the center of the town, it is more likely that it will appear at the top of the list.
• Submit your website to other local directories. Google Maps compiles its local results by crawling and parsing data from other online directories and databases. A good position in online yellow pages can cause your listing to be placed higher on the list.
• Optimize your web pages for local content. Add your nearest town and county name in your web page title.
• Get positive reviews. Encourage a few parents to write positive reviews about your school on Google Maps. More stars can mean a higher position.