InspirED loves sharing brilliant ideas and brain food with school marketers. It’s our mission and our passion. Sometimes, though, analytics aren’t enough when we’re curious to know if anyone is listening and benefitting, and we get really charged up when one of you lets us know we have made an impact on your school. Such is the story of Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School in Waltham, MA.

“We love getting the Daily Jolt emails,” Matt Soule, CH-CH’s Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications wrote Rob recently. “About twice a week our Marketing Department and Head of School forward the emails around to each other, saying ‘check this out!’” One of the ideas Matt got excited about from the Jolt was in an episode of the InspirED Sparkcast podcast.

Just before the 2016 holidays, Matt listened to Private School Faculty as Marketers, hosted by Rob with guest Mike Connor of Connor Associates. In it, Mike referenced a viral video that InspirED posted in October on our Facebook page where teachers at a Missouri high school told students why they inspired them to come to work each day.

“We were looking for a unique way to share a holiday message with our community, and when you discussed this idea on the Sparkcast, it was the right idea at the perfect time,” says Matt.

Matt asked the CH-CH faculty to think about who inspired them, then grabbed his camera and filmed the teachers telling the students they chose. “After the initial shock of being asked to step out of class (the students thought they were in trouble),” Matt says. “There were lots of tears and hugs as the teachers explained the powerful impact the student has had on their life.” 

“The video did many things including demonstrate how invested our teachers are in their students,” Matt says. “We posted it on social media and sent it out as a holiday greeting to our entire community, and it had an amazing response.”

About a week later, the CH-CH got a call from WBZ-TV in Boston asking to send a crew to campus to record a news story about the project and the positive impact it had on the school. The piece aired January 9, 2017.

“Our teachers and students loved being a part of this project, it communicated who we are as a school, and it made an impact that we can still feel on campus,” says Matt.

It also had an impact on us at InspirED, and we were thrilled to have been able to spark an idea that resulted in television news coverage for CH-CH that's so hard to obtain for all independent schools.

Thanks for sharing this great story with us, Matt. We hope we made your job easier.

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