64. Elevating Your Brand and Website with Chelsea Janke
Do you want to enhance your school’s brand messaging and increase the effectiveness of your website? Look no further, because our guest, Chelsea Fanke, will be sharing the key to achieving that desired outcome. Join us on The Mindful School Marketing Podcast as she unveils the strategies and techniques needed to transform your brand and website, ultimately resulting in a stronger presence and heightened appeal for your school. Listen in as Chelsea explains the vital role branding plays in establishing your school’s reputation and trust within the community and find out how a solid brand can leverage your website and influence audience perception positively.

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About Chelsea Janke:
As the Vice President of Integrated Marketing at CEL Marketing PR Design and #boymom of two, Chelsea is a school advocate while helping organizations bridge the gaps between communications and technology. She is always on the go working to enhance SchoolPR, marketing strategies and design websites that are creative, effective and lasting. She is respected within the field for helping schools tell their story and interact with stakeholders by using effective communication tools and technology.
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Enquiry Tracker is the all-in-one solution for schools to easily manage their future families. From inquiry to online enrollment, you can automate personalized emails, run events, and virtual tours and get key insights to manage and grow a robust pipeline. The built-in broadcast communications tool allows you to reach out and proactively engage future families in their unique interests. With all data captured in one user-friendly centralized database that you can easily transfer to your school management system and at long last end those spreadsheets forever!
Show Notes
Books
Be Our Guest, Disney Institute: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/205979,
And other books about the Disney Way
Leadership Two Words At A Time, Bill Treasurer: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/62065689
Apps
[00:00:00] Aubrey: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing, your go to podcast for personal and professional growth.
[00:00:07] Tara: We’re school marketers, business owners, and moms, passionate about connecting other school professionals with tools and strategies for success.
[00:00:14] Aubrey: We love solving problems, exploring new ideas, and thinking outside the box.
[00:00:19] Let’s transform your school and life starting right now.
[00:00:23] Tara: This episode is brought to you by Enquiry Tracker. Easily manage all your inquiries, tours, open houses, and applications with a system designed by K through 12 education, marketing, and admissions professionals. Welcome to Mindful School Marketing.
[00:00:38] I’m Tara Clays.
[00:00:39] Chelsea: And
[00:00:40] Aubrey: I’m Aubrey Bursch. Today we’re joined by Chelsea Jenke. As the Vice President of Integrated Marketing at CEL Marketing, PR Design, and Hashtag Boy Mom of Two, Chelsea is a school advocate while helping organizations bridge the gaps between communications and technology. She is always on the go working to enhance school PR, marketing strategies, and design websites that are creative, effective, and lasting.
[00:01:06] She is respected within the field for her for helping schools tell their story and interact with stakeholders by using effective communication tools and technology. Welcome, Chelsea. We’re so excited you’re here today
[00:01:17] Chelsea: to talk with us. Thanks. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to talk more about branding, marketing, and websites.
[00:01:24] Tara: Yeah, thanks for joining us. I’ve enjoyed following you and seeing all the great presentations you’ve been giving. And, uh, and I love to talk about websites all the time, so we’re really glad you’re here, but let’s start out. If you can just tell us a little bit more about yourself beyond the bio that Aubrey
[00:01:38] Chelsea: just read.
[00:01:39] Yeah. So I’ve been with CEL for, I guess this year is 16 years. So I’ve kind of really moved up through from doing more on the project management office management side, um, to really filling out the team on integrated marketing right now. And so my background was a little bit different. Um, getting to the school education arena, I was in the equine industry actually, and ran a few writing facilities.
[00:02:05] I worked for an equine lawyer for quite a few years, and then I worked for a
[00:02:13] three, four years, um, working with her and some of her people, as well as she focused on adults with special needs that had, um, some behavioral issues or would have like severe ADHD or OCD. And so a lot of the background that I brought is coming into it. To really think about how marketing integrates with everything that you do and how different people in the way that they process information impacts how you have to market to them and communicate to them.
[00:02:45] So a little different background than some people come out of, but I find it super valuable in all the work we do every day, not just on the technical side, but also on the people, the communications and the storytelling side. Wow. I think that’s so cool.
[00:02:58] Aubrey: I love how all those different pieces and, and that, I mean, equine and all everything just came together to give you such insights into your current, you know, what you’re currently doing.
[00:03:09] So, um, as you can guess, being, you know, marketers, we are super excited to have this conversation with you today. Uh, especially around like branding, you know, that’s the big question school to ask all the time. Right? So we’re going to talk a little bit about elevating your brand and carrying it. into that, into your school website.
[00:03:27] So let’s kind of back up and start for those in our audience who might not have like a clear definition of branding, or maybe, you know, branding can mean a lot of different things to different people. What
[00:03:37] Chelsea: is branding to you? So branding, a lot of people think of branding as your logo. They just think about that physical element, but branding is really like, What you embody when you think about your school, your district, the organizations that are a part of you.
[00:03:51] It’s what you feel the stories that come out really worth the essence of you as an entity is. So it’s the messaging. It’s the stories. It’s the visuals. It’s Thinking about the accessibility of your website. Are you translating? Are you using colors that have good color contrast? So people that have visual or hearing, uh, visual impairments can still be able to see what you’re marketing and what you’re doing and how they’re able to access information.
[00:04:20] So it’s kind of everything that embodies who you are and really giving you that. Kind of business calling card feel, um, that tells people what you’re about, what you truly love, what your mission vision values are. It’s everything, not just the logo, not just the way you look, but also how you make people feel.
[00:04:42] Yeah,
[00:04:43] Tara: thanks. We, I love talking about branding for schools specifically too, because there is so much personality and it’s so important to think about it holistically. We’ve had a few other branding experts on the show who’ve talked about experience, marketing and different ways that a brand translates into not just a visual even, but to a whole experience.
[00:05:04] So, um, so I appreciate your kind of. Jumping on board with that same philosophy, uh, and I also love talking about websites, as I mentioned, and strategies for websites to make them more successful. So I know that you help schools build websites as well, develop them and strategize for them. So, can you talk a little bit about how branding impacts a school website success and the relationship between the 2 in terms of communicating to perspective and current families?
[00:05:33] Chelsea: Yeah, so every community is very different and some schools have a brand that they’re rolling out because it’s newer to them and so they still need to work through that rollout plan and may need some more custom design features. Others really need to focus on the content and the meat more and have a really established brand and so they could use more of like Attempted look that then they can focus on actually utilizing those elements.
[00:05:58] And so if you think about bringing the brand to life with what you need, every community is different. And so there may be really strong needs in the engagement side. There may be really strong needs in the enrollment marketing side. And so you want to take into account. What your long term goals are and not just build for now, but build for the future and think about those expansion capabilities.
[00:06:22] And as you more of how can you utilize the different branding elements or the different pieces that you build into your site to be able to bring those expansion needs into what you’re thinking about. I always like to think about when we talk about websites, it’s not just taking the different visual branding components, but also where are those top Items that people come to on a regular basis.
[00:06:46] What are the key audiences and how are you making your site map tailored to those needs? Because a lot of times we get into more of like a departmental looking website because of internal organizations, which in turn is not really embodying the brand because you want to think about the audiences that are coming to the site and what they need, not what your org chart says.
[00:07:09] and where people, um, need to, like, update information. Truly bring it to your front end user experience and utilize your brand to tell better stories, show visuals, um, make a sitemap that’s effective for them.
[00:07:24] Aubrey: That’s so, um, interesting. I, I love how, hearing you talk about how, um, schools can really implement, like, where their brand needs to live out and how they can do that.
[00:07:34] I’m curious, though, like, If, if we’re rolling back, it’s like, how does one even figure out the brand? Like we talk about brand, but how do, how do I, how, where does a school start?
[00:07:45] Chelsea: Yeah, so we actually have an entire checklist. That’s kind of like an audit of your brand. You can download it on our website if it’s something that you want to kind of look through yourself.
[00:07:55] But every school needs to take it at a little different aspect. So it’s bringing all the different stories, the different groupings of elements, how things are being done and how they look and going around and just. Seeing also what the buildings look like, what are the schools doing and find the light concepts and bring them together and then start to establish consistency and that you can always have a lot of fun and creativity.
[00:08:20] But you want to think about what are those elements that always sustain your brand, especially if you’re a district, you kind of. sometimes have that district brand, especially if you have multiple um high schools that are feeder schools for elementary, middle school um and beyond instead of one high school that everyone feeds to you will have a bit of competing brands.
[00:08:40] But if you think about co branding things, how can you find an element? How can you find stories the words you use how you speak about things? How can you find those? succinct tailoring of those to be able to see consistency, no matter if it’s in one or two different high schools that have different mascots, but that succinct branding across it.
[00:09:04] And so a lot of times what happens is when you start to look at everything and just. Think about like visually spreading it out, start to bucket things that are alike and find those consistencies together. And that’s super helpful. Find colors that are complimentary to each other. Um, we just had two recent larger districts that wanted to do one, did more of a brand overhaul and the other one wanted to create more of a style guide, kind of bring their brain together and really uncovered that there was this missing.
[00:09:35] overarching consistency. They had elements of it, but they were really wanting to push their brand to expand them to make more consistency in there. So you could see the district within the schools and vice versa and be able to work smarter, not harder. And so we looked at that and added some very preliminary complimentary colors that would work throughout all of the different brands within the district that could be subtle and then also picking more of like A decent, bigger, bold color that was complimentary and could transcend all the other brand colors that helped create that.
[00:10:08] And then pulling out pieces of those visual elements, as well as thinking through the words we use when we talk about our students in a certain way. How do we talk about them? What are the words that we use? So we’re being consistent when we talk about our staff. When we Are we in more of a team mentality?
[00:10:26] Are we in more of a mascot mentality? Are, do we have some other branded term that really, um, embodies who we are as staff and faculty and coming in? And then what are our families called? And how do we speak with them, speak about them? Is it more conversational language? Are we a little more, um, plain terminology?
[00:10:48] And then are we thinking about different? Types of people. Are we thinking about the cultures that make up the community? And are we speaking to them in a way that they understand whether it’s translation, cultural needs, diversity? Are we showing people that are truly within and true live people within our district so people can see themselves and even as the leadership?
[00:11:12] Are you, are students able to see themselves in the leadership and where people are coming from? I just had a great conversation the other day. about how they intentionally were bringing together a leadership team so students could see a path that they could follow if they were interested in staying in the schools and felt comfortable being able to have those conversations or have a place to go.
[00:11:34] And so that really brings everything out of your brand. Again, it’s not just the way you look. It’s not just the way you talk about yourselves, but it’s how you make people feel.
[00:11:45] Tara: It’s so comprehensive and I love that you have a sort of a template or a guide that schools can use to go through all of this because it could be scary and overwhelming to undertake something, you know, so comprehensive.
[00:11:57] What are some mistakes that you see schools make them when it
[00:12:00] Chelsea: comes to branding? I guess the biggest one that I run into pretty much on a daily basis comes around color. So color contrast, in terms of accessibility, if you’ve never taken your color, and it would be what is called a hex number, and it’s the numbers after like a pound sign or a hashtag sign.
[00:12:19] Um, if you take that color and you put it into any of the color contrast checkers, It tells you whether or not you need to use a darker color or a lighter color on top of it. There are a lot of colors that are picked because, um, there are many branding experts out there that don’t focus on the accessibility side and our design director.
[00:12:40] came from actually an accessibility company and has done a lot of research and teaches the whole team even more about that. And we ensure that we’re continuously learning and expanding and improving. But when you think about that primary color you’re using that goes on everything, if that’s not a truly accessible color, that the contrast is very high scoring.
[00:13:03] So you really want to look for about a 4. 5 and above. Um, we try to get up to that like eight, nine range or the seven and above range. If you don’t have that color contrast, you’re making it harder for people who may have minor visual impairments. Or have really strenuous or using accessible technology.
[00:13:24] They may be colorblind or other things. It makes it really hard for them to see that. And if you have no visual impairments, I usually bring up the color red. Red is an awesome color. I have a really great grouping of clients that actually have red as their primary. But if you don’t really focus on color contrast when you use the color red, It can be very blaring, but it can also make you feel that stop and it comes from our society, right?
[00:13:52] So you think about a stop sign. It’s that stop mentality of red means stop, but that doesn’t mean red’s a bad color. I actually love the color red and it’s one of our family’s favorite colors. There are reds on a variety of scales of the color palette that work really well and still give you the feeling.
[00:14:09] Of comfort and things that you like and stories that you like to hear without having that stop mentality. And so when you think about the colors and you’re looking at those, that’s probably the thing that I run into and have conversations about the most is. Were the colors ever checked and how are you using them to ensure that we’re utilizing them in an accessible way?
[00:14:31] Because there really isn’t any color on a color palette that can’t be used, just how you use it. So
[00:14:37] Tara: interesting. I think I, I, I faced this a lot as well. And of course, red is a color that’s used in a lot of school logos and brand, right? Um, and, uh, I also find that it is a struggle sometimes because you can have a really beautiful color palette that does not really work on the web in terms of accessibility.
[00:14:59] And so determining where you can use those colors so that they can still. Be effective in terms of communicating your brand, but not using them for elements that need to have that contrast, right? Like a border or something like that versus using it as your button color when it’s not enough contrast, it can really impact the brand that.
[00:15:22] And, you know, most schools have already have their colors and their brands established before they’re doing a website refresh. And so you have to really, you have to create either an alternative version. Do you do that or, um, do you throw the whole entire color palette out and start over just with accessibility first?
[00:15:41] I’m wondering how you address that. I face that a
[00:15:44] Aubrey: lot.
[00:15:45] Chelsea: We rarely would ever say to throw out the color palette, especially if it’s something that you have worked really hard on. You can easily tone and modify colors to be in a more accessible palette or like minimize or raise up different colors. And so I would not say to dice, slice and cut as your first step, but truly evaluate how you’re using them.
[00:16:08] I think commonly websites are the catalyst to talk about this, but what people forget about is it’s not just about being accessible. It’s not just about the website. It’s about truly doing things that are in the best needs and intent of all users, all people, families, community as a whole. So if you’re having color contrast, needs on the website, you probably also need to have those same needs in print, in posters, in flyers, and other things you’re doing.
[00:16:39] Building signs, um, I’ve seen quite a few building signs where they have like a darker gray background with black text over them. That’s not an accessible contrast. Even if we backlight them during the day, we have other issues with that. And so when you think about doing buildings, are you adding good contrast to things that you’re looking through them and thinking about that and not pushing the builders to do something just because it’s in your brand color, you can still bring the integrity of your brand to the forefront by adding different backgrounds to it or doing different, um, creative ways of being able to utilize that and then bring that into your.
[00:17:16] So people better know how to utilize those colors by either minimizing or raising up those. So I would not say there’s any color that we can’t make work and work well and be able to expand upon. We might just have to get creative of how we use those together.
[00:17:31] Aubrey: This is such a good conversation. I don’t think we talk enough about accessibility and branding and all these elements that I really think we oversimplify branding sometimes when we talk about it with schools.
[00:17:41] And so this is such a great conversation about like what schools might need to be start. They definitely need to start thinking about when they’re considering branding and all these elements. So thank you for really diving into that. Um, so having worked in schools and worked with small teams in schools and multiple departments, um, let’s say you finally get your brain, like you got your brain.
[00:18:03] Okay. But now you have that fun, fun time period of trying to make sure everyone is actually using things the right way. And you’ve got departments over here. You have teachers, you have turnover, you have. All these things going on in an independent school. So how, like having worked with schools, like what are your recommendations to schools when they are launching their brand?
[00:18:25] And then how do they keep it consistent and make sure everyone is kind of aware of what to do and
[00:18:31] Chelsea: why? Yeah, great question. So if you’re waiting until the point of rolling out your brand, you honestly are too late. We need to engage all stakeholders in the branding process. So when you get to the actual rollout, it’s about celebrating the collaborative work that everyone has put into this brand, because it’s not about my design director coming up with an element or a story.
[00:18:54] or our team coming up with a story that really helps to embody who they are, what’s inside of this organization and the school district. But it’s about all of the stories and the people and their ideas and thoughts and input coming together and then celebrating that because it is a team effort to truly make a brand because a brand is not a single thing.
[00:19:16] It’s a grouping in a community that comes together for like minded. ideas. And so as you roll it out, you want to do little kind of drops of celebration. We call it there are times when fiscally responsibility, fiscal responsibility needs to run at the forefront. And so we can’t just throw out all the letterhead and throw out all the business cards.
[00:19:37] redo all the signage that’s not always capable, but how can we start to roll things over to the new brand? If we’re thinking about doing a new run of print, it might be a good time to roll to the new brand instead of doing old things. Or how can we almost make the old brand morph into the new brand? How can we collaboratively have those things work together to create excitement?
[00:20:01] Or have, um, one of my absolute favorite stories is, uh, a superintendent loved the rebrand so much. And so they, because they were being fiscally responsible, they needed to finish out something, utilizing some pieces from their old brand that they did have. Well, she just loved it so much that she went and purchased stickers on her own with her own money.
[00:20:23] to be able to brand different things she had, whether that was putting on her car or putting on her laptop, um, the backside, she had like a, a thing that keeps it from getting broken. And so she put it on there and she actually got called out for it. She. was like, why are you guys spending money on stickers for your laptops?
[00:20:43] And she said, actually, I love this brand so much. I paid for it myself. Like I did not use school money. And the family was so impressed. They were like, we actually love the brand. We just didn’t realize why money was being spent to do these things when You know, you’re having kids that need meal assistance or other things like that, but that’s awesome.
[00:21:04] And so that family actually enrolled in that district because of that, because they just, they felt the love around the brand and how, and she talked about the process and how it had really brought communities together that were very siloed before. And so thinking about what you’re doing and empowering people to want to utilize their brand.
[00:21:24] that brand in the way that they feel best. You can only do so much within the budget that you have, but you can empower other places within your community, your schools, your staff, your students to want to take the brand and make it their own while still staying true to the brand. And, you know, students are designing clothing that is coming out in school stores or through DACA.
[00:21:49] Giving the brand and making them able to utilize those as they’re making different shirts and also using it as a teaching time. What are the elements within the brand that they can and can’t touch? And how does branding truly work? We have a couple of districts that we did branding overhauls with and we actually brought in the design student group and use them Thank you so much.
[00:22:09] First as a focus group and then walk through the whole process to teach them how branding worked and allow them to ask questions. And then they were able to go and teach the student body those things and help kind of what we call police the brand, like find things like, Hey, we should put this here. Oh, we, we really shouldn’t do that.
[00:22:26] That’s really going outside of the brand. And we need to like, let’s add these elements around it or something like that. So,
[00:22:35] Tara: yeah, I love the sticker story. That’s great. Um, thanks for sharing that. I want to follow up going back, even kind of to the idea we were talking about with the colors and being accessible with them.
[00:22:47] We also hear sometimes schools come and they, they want to increase their enrollment or they feel like there are some issues. And so one of the first things they think about is we need to do a rebrand. We need to do a rebrand. Right. Um, so what are your thoughts on how often a school should. Update their brand, um, how it, how it, what calls for it, I guess, right.
[00:23:09] Just because your enrollment’s down is we know that changing your brand is not going to solve that problem. Right. Um, so what kind of process do you recommend for determining whether an update to a brand is needed? And then, and you already talked about this a little bit, but, you know, creating brand consistency across all of your different media.
[00:23:30] Chelsea: Yeah, I think it really depends on how fast your community is changing and where your goals lie, especially in your strategic plan. If you haven’t looked at your brand in the last like three to five years, it’s definitely a time to kind of evaluate and audit your brand and see, and just because you are thinking about a rebrand doesn’t mean that’s actually what you need.
[00:23:49] It could be a refresh. It could be an expansion. Maybe it is an overhaul and a complete rebrand. And so the term rebrand sometimes gets used loosely because that’s just how they people know to talk about it and how they hear it talked about because we market with the term branding and rebranding. But maybe it’s just that we need a little expansion or a reboot in how we utilize the brand.
[00:24:12] Or we have just kind of gone rogue and we need to pull together the style guide and truly give some parameters on utilizing the brand. And so if you really haven’t, we always say like every five years you should do a pretty intense evaluation of what your brand is. I would not start with automatically jumping into the rebrand process.
[00:24:31] Start in more of the evaluation. It’s surveying, it’s asking, doing focus groups, thinking about what the needs are and then looking at your community going forward. Do you have a big growth population? Have you had a major change over in your community of what their needs are, how they interact? Do you potentially have a mascot that came from a period where it really is?
[00:24:56] Culturally inappropriate. Maybe you need to really evaluate that. I know that’s a common, um, throughout the U. S. It’s commonly being looked at. And so it’s not that you need a rebrand, but you need elements within there that need to be rethought so that we are being inclusive and we are telling the stories that are truly within our community.
[00:25:16] And we’re not pushing someone out. Because of something that was done in the past, we can still honor the history of where we’ve come from, but we also need to honor where people are at and be inclusive and truly understand our communities and who are serving. That’s
[00:25:32] Aubrey: such an important one. I’m so glad you brought that up because it is, it’s.
[00:25:37] It’s, it’s, it’s looking at it and asking, is this, is this appropriate? Is this in alignment with where we are right now? Is this reflective of our community? Such great questions. So thank you for sharing. Um, I’m going to kind of switch here. We’re going to switch to questions we ask all of our guests. So we’re excited to ask you, um, what are the most important things that you do to help yourself grow professionally
[00:26:02] Chelsea: and personally?
[00:26:02] I think that would be learning. Always being open to learn. Um, technology, especially it changes at rapid fire pace. And so we talk about as a team, it’s not about hierarchy or organizational structure. It’s not asking the question why we have a really hard time not asking why, why does it have to be that way?
[00:26:26] Why are we doing that and trying to figure out behind the scenes? What led to that? Because the answer typically isn’t no. It’s just that we need to think differently or do differently. And so I would say learning just always being open to learn different ways and Amen. Um, the other thing that I try to think about and we as a team think about a lot within learning is getting outside of the mentality of jargon internal speak.
[00:26:58] And so our organization actually doesn’t work just with schools. We work with organizations, businesses, etc. So it brings an outside perspective of. We do this with a business or a company we’re working with. Why can’t schools do that? Why can’t a district do that? It doesn’t have to be the way it’s always been.
[00:27:19] So being open to change and just learning other ways of doing it or thinking outside that box, because there really is no box that we have to stay within. We just have to ask the questions.
[00:27:30] Tara: Excellent. Yeah, I love that. We’re going to move on to The rest of our rapid fire questions, my favorite one. If you could put one book as mandatory reading in the high school curriculum, what would it be?
[00:27:43] Chelsea: I don’t know if I can pick one book. I’m also really bad at remembering book names. So, um, but I can look up a few, but I would say one of my favorite kind of sets of books that I ever read was really about the Disney customer experience and where Disney came from and understanding hospitality and how it embodies everything you do.
[00:28:06] And there are some really books out about that experience. And it’s thinking about How you showcase yourself, but how you make people feel from the first time they enter your doors from the first call. It’s that front end experience that it can transcend every facet of your school, your district, your organization.
[00:28:30] And so thinking about every single person. impacts that experience from the custodians to transportation to leadership to the front desk staff to principals to the calms departments technology. It’s how you make people feel that truly make your brand or break your brand. And so I just absolutely have loved the Disney experience, how they have thought about it.
[00:28:58] And then you can jump off to a lot of different like experiential learning, customer service related books. Um, and that’s something kind of near and dear to my heart, especially as a lot of project managers, it’s really how you, um, approach people and make them feel and feel a part of something. And so those are kind of my favorite.
[00:29:16] I don’t think I can pick just one.
[00:29:18] Tara: Yeah, that’s great. And there are a couple of books about, um, about, well, there are many books about Disney and, and how they run their company and their customer service. I know, I think one of our guests has even mentioned one. I know there’s one called Creating Magic, but I think the other one that’s popular is called Be Our Guest.
[00:29:33] I don’t know if either of those ring a bell to you, but yeah, but they
[00:29:36] Chelsea: are, they have great stories. Mm hmm. Yeah. Great. Thanks. Yay.
[00:29:42] Aubrey: That’s so exciting. It’s a good one. Um, what is one app you couldn’t live
[00:29:46] Chelsea: without? Unfortunately, it’s TikTok. I love it from a creative, just searching for a keyword and opening your brain or thinking about things or laughing or if you just need a break.
[00:29:59] Um, it helps me make dinner every night because I am horrible at figuring out what to have for dinner and, um, just different facets of life. So TikTok would definitely be one both professionally and personally.
[00:30:13] Aubrey: Okay, maybe I need Tic Tac because I’m horrible at preparing my dinners for my kids at night.
[00:30:18] So maybe Tic Tac is the solution for
[00:30:20] Chelsea: everything. If you’re a little bit of a geek, um, which I am, definitely look into how Tic Tac runs their algorithms. So you can kind of play the game and get what you want back and not get stuck in a different center. So we joke about it a lot at our team about like, I’m stuck in this endless cycle of whatever I was.
[00:30:40] And then just search like puppies or kittens or something and get out of it and then start playing the algorithm game so you can get some more creative stuff. So something to look into if you like to geek out like I do.
[00:30:50] Tara: Wow. That’s really interesting. I never thought about that before. Um, and I never thought about using it for recipes.
[00:30:56] You know, we’ve had someone on the show about, uh, Um, talking about AI and that’s another thing I’ve heard people do with AI is they type in, um, you know, what they have in their refrigerator to get some ideas
[00:31:10] Chelsea: for dinner. So, yeah. Or it might be less. Yes. A great one to throw in to just spark some ideas or if you’re writing meta descriptions for your web pages, like you could get started there and then just make sure you’re checking them, adding keywords in.
[00:31:23] It can help you if you’re in a slump to trying to think of like topics or things you need to do or just. Make sure that you’re actually fully writing it yourself in the end, but it’s a great like creative outlet to get you brainstorming if you don’t have someone else to bounce ideas around or if you’re just in a slump.
[00:31:40] Tara: Yeah, excellent. Thanks. Um, okay. Next question. What are you reading right now?
[00:31:47] Chelsea: It is called Remember how I told you I’m really bad with names of books. I’m more of a face person. I can tell you what the front page of it looks like. Um, leadership two words at a time. So our leadership team is actually reading that book and chapter by chapter and talking through it.
[00:32:05] Um, right now we’re at, uh, Area within the book that talks about calm confidence and I think it really showcase to all of us something we really like about our leadership team and something we hear about all of our staff is bringing that calm confidence of calming down the anxiety, bringing stability and being a partner and a team when we work with the districts that we work with.
[00:32:31] And so I’ve really liked that one. I love that you have like a little
[00:32:35] Aubrey: book cup going there. That’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s great. Really awesome. Um,
[00:32:42] Chelsea: last question. What is one great piece of advice you’d like to leave us with? This is one that we bring to a lot of our presentations, but good branding is good storytelling.
[00:32:52] Good storytelling is good marketing and good marketing positively impacts the lives of your community. Wow, that
[00:32:58] Tara: was great. Very succinct. I like that you have that already set up and then memorized.
[00:33:04] Aubrey: We can put it on t shirts.
[00:33:07] Chelsea: It’s one of my favorite things and something that we developed to just talk about like the why of branding because it really also connects to our mission which is passionately committed to the betterment of business, family, and community.
[00:33:19] Tara: Well, thank you so much. Thanks for all that you shared today. It was great to meet you, Chelsea. Where can people find you
[00:33:24] Chelsea: online? Thanks. Well, I’m on almost all social media, so feel free to look there. But, um, Instagram, um, I’m, I have my personal accounts on there. Um, Facebook, I do a lot of connecting on as well.
[00:33:37] And then we have LinkedIn and Twitter. If you, I’m on Twitter quite a bit when I’m at conferences and out speaking and then watch it as well and do a lot of just communication back and forth. So, Um, All the social media is on our website too for our company and we put out ideas um blog posts things about what you can learn more about especially about branding and websites.
[00:33:57] So if you go on to any of our social media um we connected out to our resources to try to give more education to the um school market. Excellent
[00:34:08] Tara: well thanks again Chelsea. It was great to meet you. Have a great day.
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[00:34:51] Tara: Thanks for joining us on the Mindful School Marketing
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