Identify Your Unique Selling Points

In Florida, Orange County Public Schools (Orlando, FL) has identified their unique selling points.  It's a fairly easy exercise but needs to be done.  Your unique selling point is whatever it is that you want to use to distinguish yourself to advertisers.  Whatever you think would make your school district more attractive than the next.

First, all school districts have unique selling points when talking to potential advertisers that should convince your advertiser that you are a better option than radio advertising, billboards, direct mailings, etc.  You should have a pretty solid list, but is should include:

• Ability to reach a targeted (and often hard-to-reach) audience of parents, educators, and students.
• Ability to segment these groups (by school, grade, zip code, etc)
• Ability to create an emotional connection with the community through the advertising sponsorship.

It pays off though to highlight your school district in more specific ways.  For example, Orange County uses  past athletes who have gone professional in their respective sports to highlight the history and pride in the county.  Last year, they had the ability to boast that they had the NFL MVP and the MLB Cy Young Award winner (Chris Johnson, Olympia grad) and Zach Greinke (Apopka grad).  

The next step is to push that information out to the public.  Here's what the ridiculously good video that theOrange County Public Schools Video Services team came up with to promote their programs:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqzs-ILp2jU

If your school district has done anything similar, send them my way.  I'd enjoy the chance to see them.