Business school Deans play a complex role, crucial to the success of a school.
First and foremost, they are the face of the brand. For any business school, the Dean acts as an extension of the institution, physically representing it at events as well as engaging with the media on a school’s behalf. It’s because of the centrality of the role, that Deans are tasked with the responsibility of cultivating strong and fruitful relationships with key stakeholders, both within and out of your institution. It’s up to them to ensure the protection and advancement of a school’s assets, achievements and goals.
That’s a lot of responsibility for one individual, so it’s vital that there’s an effective team and a wider support mechanism to help down the path of success.
We can help.
What if the success of any Dean hinged on positioning? As seasoned experts in business education and media relations, BlueSky Education has both the experience and the skillset to position an institution’s leader in the right way to external stakeholders and other target audiences.
How can BlueSky Education help to position a Dean?
At BlueSky, we take a holistic approach to communications, and so when positioning a school’s Dean, we take a fully comprehensive approach.
Through regular engagement with the communications and leadership staff at an institution, as well as the Dean themselves, we’re able to take your school’s strategic ambitions and targets, and translate them into an effective media campaign around the Dean, often complementing this with communications support to promote faculty expertise and individual programmes.
Having identified what’s important to your institution and your Dean, we’re then able to set about positioning the head of school, setting them (and therefore your business school) apart from the rest.
Creating engaging thought-leadership is key to this. As an organisation made up of gifted storytellers, we’re able to identify the interesting angles and meaningful topics that your dean will be able to provide comment on. We remain at the forefront of media trends and communicate daily with relevant journalists, so we know exactly what editorial lines are really worth pursuing.
We understand that, as the leader of a business school, the prospect of putting together a thought-leadership piece, while appealing, may not be always feasible with such a large workload, and so as expert communicators BlueSky comes equipped with the skills and experience to create engaging content on a Dean’s behalf, capturing their tone and style, as well as ensuring that their contributions and comment reflect the school’s outlook.
Through effective thought-leadership and an effective media strategy, we can distinguish a Dean as being at the cutting edge in their field.
And, our media support goes beyond traditional media platforms. As a forward-thinking consultancy, we’ve long-since come to embrace the value of social media. Through platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn, we’ve been supporting our clients in sharing their content and boosting their Deans’ profiles.
Supplementing column inches in publications such as the Financial Times and Forbes, through social media platforms, and with the help of BlueSky Education, your Dean can regularly engage with your school’s key stakeholders.
As an international communications consultancy that works with business schools across the globe, we’re acutely aware of the fact that higher education is a global marketplace. It’s because of this that we ensure that our clients achieve media coverage for their Deans in both domestic and international press, particularly in key target geographies. When working with international publications, we’re also able to tailor content to ensure that it is as engaging and relevant as possible to the specific readership of that region.
Through this approach, we’re able to build the profiles of the Deans we work with in new regions and markets across the globe. We’re also able to coordinate media campaigns with a Dean’s travel plans – if they are travelling at this time – arranging interviews with leading publications in that region. In doing this, we can help your school to make the most of the Dean’s time abroad, which is likely to be more common post-Covid.
In a market that is becoming ever more competitive and crowded, it’s vital that your institution does what it can to position your Dean in a way that maximises their footprint in the media – both traditional and social media – increasing your school’s reach. At BlueSky, we have the know-how and experience to guide your institution, creating a media and communications strategy that works for your school.
If you’d like to support positioning your school’s Dean, contact BlueSky Education today, via email or call +44 (0) 1582 790700.
Alternatively, if you’re interested in our workshops designed to help academics write for the media, please see here.
If you’d also like to raise communications support to promote academic expertise and research, discover more about our services here, or if you’d like a PR agency’s expertise specifically on programme promotion then read more here.
