The start of the new academic year is almost upon us!
And so we thought it would be a great time to share some ideas for stories that we think every school, college or university should be telling.
Students
This might seem really obvious but we don’t think that we see enough student stories. You might have done really well in the national student survey or won an award for your student experience but no one is going to bring those accolades to life better than your students.
It’s also important to think about the potential for stories throughout the student life cycle. For some students, simply making it in to education is an achievement. This was brought home to me recently when I had the chance to interview and photograph a victim of human trafficking, who thanks to some serious hard work and a supportive university, is now working in computer science.
Obviously there are lots of stories to tell about our students during their studies but it’s also important to show where their education has taken them. For example we are currently working with a client to highlight the impact of their learning and teaching on their students graduate prospects and it was great to see Universities highlighting the achievements of their students and alumni over at the Olympics this summer.
Staff
You’ll see from our portfolio that most of our work here at Story focusses on people and in education the other group of people that’s really important to hear from are your staff.
Filming and photography often involves a lot of downtime and this inevitably leads to us having a chat with a wide range of staff. We are often finding ourselves uncovering remarkable stories about the impact that staff have or perhaps a great story about their earlier career that’s now instrumental to their current job. After hearing some of these stories recently, we took them back to the marketing team and we’re now looking at profiling some of our clients remarkable staff and we think you should too.
Community
Lastly don’t forget the impact that schools, colleges and universities have on the wider community. It’s safe to say that from small villages to major cities, places of education are often at the centre of the community and have a remarkable impact. We’ve just wrapped up a project promoting a government funded scheme, being delivered by one of university clients to help small businesses to grow.
We were so impressed with the stories of previous participants on the programme that we’ve enquired about getting ourselves on to the course in the future.
So hopefully that gives you some inspiration for the new academic year. If you’d like some help finding and telling your fantastic stories then please get in touch and if you’ve got other story ideas or perhaps some creative examples, we’d love you to share them in the comments below.