St Mary’s School, Waverley

Flow’s association with St Mary’s School dates back to 2005, when we took on the design, layout and editing of the school’s junior and senior newsletters. This led to the design, layout, editing and printing of the school’s annual magazine.

Since then, the scope of Flow’s work with St Mary’s has grown to include the school’s Distinctions magazine; design and printing for the St Mary’s Foundation; the design, layout, editing and printing of a recipe book in 2012 titled Our Generous Kitchen; and a number of social media campaigns.

In 2013 Flow took on a most prestigious St Mary’s project – the design, editing, co-authoring and printing of the school’s 125th anniversary coffee-table book. Flow spent hours interviewing past and present St Mary’s teachers, pupils and associates, uncovering stories and anecdotes from past pupils aged 18 to 81.

We are proud to continue our relationship with St Mary’s to this day, believing it is one of the very best schools not only in South Africa, but also the world.

The 2017 St Mary’s matric results campaign aimed to showcase the excellent results achieved by St Mary’s School, and also instil a feeling of pride as pupils moved on from school life.

The campaign went viral: the original campaign targeted only about 100 St Mary’s School matriculants in the matric class and their families; by the end of the campaign, we’d reached over 1.3-million people with the #SMS2017 hashtag; and a single Facebook post about the class on the day of the matric announcement reached 136 837 accounts.

There is always a lot of noise around the announcement of matric results, with each school trying to win a bit of the publicity pie. We needed to create something strategic and distinctive to ensure that St Mary’s really stood out from the rest.

We advised our client that it was no longer strategic to spend a lot of money on placing advertisements in newspapers around matric results, when many potential readers would be out of Johannesburg at the time the papers carrying results were published anyway.

We instead urged the school to invest only in a social media campaign.

The approach was to create a good mix of content – photographs, short write-ups about each matriculant and videos – to be published on social media throughout December 2017 in the build-up to the announcement of results on 3 January 2018.

Schools writing the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) matric examinations were informed of results just before 3 January, under embargo, leaving a small window period to prepare social media content for publishing on Facebook and Twitter at midnight on 2 January.

We suspected, from working on a similar campaign the year before, that the trending hashtag would be #MatricResults2017. We kept a careful eye out in the run-up to the announcement that this would be the one, so we could also tap into it quickly, as soon as the embargo was lifted and we were able to start talking about the results.

We also used the popular hashtag #Matric2017 on posts before the results, and created our own, #SMS2017, to define the conversation around the St Mary’s results in particular.

Strategically, the school wanted to ensure that the whole class was celebrated, not just the top achievers.

We had a limited budget for the campaign, so spent most of it on creating compelling organic content, spending only a few thousand rands in total on promoted Facebook and Twitter posts.

Content was carefully planned, created and published. A small Flow team of writers and photographers visited the school on several occasions towards the end of the year and interviewed almost every girl (two or three did not want to be interviewed) about what she had enjoyed about the school, what lessons she would be taking away with her, and what she intended doing.

We also made two short videos – a “vox pop” interview-style video of girls talking about what St Mary’s had given them personally, and a short one set to music showing the girls leaving on their last day.

We posted the photographs of the girls with their reflections every day on the school’s Facebook page from the end of November, right up to the day before the results.

As soon as the results were out, we posted several memes of the statistics from the class with the relevant hashtags. We had a small team working over midnight to ensure we seeded the content on Twitter and Facebook more quickly than any other school in the country.

The campaign was aided by the fact that 22 St Mary’s pupils achieved seven or more distinctions (two achieved nine), while eight out of every 10 girls averaged above 70%.

A mix of video content and memes gave the content a unique St Mary’s personality.

Reach

Regardless of where in the world pupils and parents were, they were able to see and engage with the social media content immediately, resulting in a rapid spread of information and mass engagement. The campaign hashtag, #SMS2017, reached 1.3-million people.

Parents, staff, pupils and past pupils contributed greatly in the sharing of information.

Innovation

The approach of using digital media to promote matric results is a big step forward after many years of following the traditional print media approach. There was a lot of pressure from (especially older) board members and others on the principal and head of marketing to buy space in newspapers. St Mary’s was one of the first schools in Johannesburg to pursue a fully digital matric results campaign.

Between 1 December 2017 and 5 January 2018, the St Mary’s School website was visited by nearly 10 000 different people. A dedicated matric results page was visited around 5 500 times, while other pages that received notable traffic were the fees (2 500 views) and admissions (2 200 views) pages.

Twitter follows grew from 2 493 followers (1 November) to 3 219 (5 January 2018) – an increase of approximately 726 followers, or 29%.

The campaign generated 672 700 Twitter impressions overall, with the top tweet on the day of the matric results announcement celebrating the whole class’s achievements, generating a total of 255 214 organic and 57 888 promoted impressions during the announcement of the results.

The top Facebook post reached 136 837 people and generated over 7 000 reactions, comments and shares.

On 3 January, the day of the results, the St Mary’s School Facebook following grew by 519, to a total of 6 335 (8% in one day).

The short video of the girls’ last school day was viewed 5 674 times on Facebook during the campaign, for a total of 3 897 minutes.

Facebook also directed around 1 800 people to the St Mary’s website between 1 December 2017 and 5 January 2018.

Instagram posts received a total of 2 665 likes – this off a brand-new Instagram account we had started as the campaign kicked off.

One video on Instagram had 244 views – five people saved it and there were 65 likes.

The school spent less than a quarter of its normal budget on the campaign, and was the most prominent IEB school on social media over the matric results period.