Thank you Tania for sharing this piece – it raises multiple relevant points!

I recently presented at the Advancement Practitioner Training in Adelaide on Advanced Social Media and I believe that the essential social media needs for a school are LinkedIn (so students can list their Education at the school on a LinkedIn Profile and you can track alumni after they leave) and Facebook (for Facebook reviews so that these can be found in Microsoft Bing Searches) and that everything else is optional (although I am a big fan of YouTube as it is owned by Google and can help with Google Search results).

One school I worked with only took photos of students from behind (so no faces were seen). Other schools and early learning centres will not take photos of students in various positions (like a mouth open). It is unfortunate that these things need to be considered in our modern world.

All of that said, I am a big fan of traditional ways to market a school. One school spent $15,000 on advertising on an online platform but I have said that if they spent that money supporting three feeder schools with an afternoon tea/special award/interesting event, they would have been far more likely to attract enrolments.

I also agree with Nick Lawrence that our faces are being picked up in supermarkets, at major event venues and even in city streets and that data is matched to our driver’s license image (obviously not for under 16’s).

But I also agree that we need to constantly question what we share online, especially if it involves another person (under or over 18) and a recognisable location and the unintended consequences of that content.

Essentially, we need to adopt a ‘from now on’ approach where we acknowledge what we have learnt and how we can remain authentically congruent in the future.

There are many stories that we can share without including people’s personal data and we need to be respectful of how people may feel in the future as well.

I guess this means that we all need to be even more creative going forward…