Speaker 1: Here we are back here at the Charter Institute at Erskine podcast. We don't really have a title for this podcast. We have a working title. Working title. So today we have Ashley Epperson in the house talking about branding and consistency. And let me tell you something. This is like her favorite thing to talk about 100 percent. It really is.

Speaker 2: And this might, I don't know, I feel like this could be a two-parter, but we'll just take it, we'll take it one part at a time.

Speaker 1: We'll start today. Yeah, sure. So tell me a little bit about what a brand is and your best definition.

Speaker 2: So a brand, I'll start with what it's not. How about that? A brand, contrary to popular belief, is not just your logo or like a color. A brand is kind of the whole definition of the experience someone has when they come into contact with your product, your business, or in this case, your school. So it's made up of many different things, like your visuals are important, like your logos and your social media graphics and your website and your print material. But it's also made up of your customer service, your reputation within your community, and the expectations that your community has when they come and interact with your brand or your school.

Speaker 1: Cool, cool. So, yeah, I see you have this great meme of like, not the logo, but it is all of these other things. So there's a lot more to the brand than obviously just a logo.

Speaker 2: Correct, correct.

Speaker 1: So what are kind of some things that would define the Erskine brand outside of just the logo that we have then?

Speaker 2: So I think things that make up our brand are our visuals, like I was saying, our logo, the way that we present ourselves on social media, but I think it's also kind of the quality of our work. I think that's kind of something that we pride ourselves on, and that comprises our brand. So I think the quality of our video content, which you are responsible for, the quality of the work that we do for our schools, but also the way that we interact with our schools. We kind of, we have a very customer service-driven mindset here at the Institute, and so we try to kind of propagate that throughout our entire staff. And whenever we're communicating with schools, we just want to make sure that we're treating them well and working with them and just kind of keeping that customer service idea going.

Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So it seems that like the biggest buzzwords that we have that come up with that is innovation, we're resolute, we're very culture-driven, and we're very scholarly. So all of those kind of just contribute to the Erskine brand, and that kind of trickles down into everything we do at the Institute.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and when we're designing communications like the coordinators at our schools are doing, I think it's important that we keep those things in mind. So it can be helpful to kind of brainstorm a couple of buzzwords for your brand, and just keep those things in mind as you're communicating, whether that's through written communications, visual communications, print, digital, all those things, because everything needs to speak with one unified voice.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And we've worked really hard to get to that point, and I think a lot of other schools should work just as hard to figure out what their brand is and what their message is to everyone else.

Speaker 2: It's important. Yeah, it's important because charter schools have to be competitive, because there might be multiple school choice options within your area or that appeal to your same markets, and so you have to make yourself stand out amongst those competitors.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, if we were to go back to the baseline of just the visual elements, what are some things or some advice that you can give to people about branding visuals and how important that is?

Speaker 2: This is my favorite thing to do. So when Jacob says this is my favorite thing, this is really what I love. So I think some really important elements, I guess two important elements that I always like to think about are color and font choices, and those things to me are just fun. But I think they're really important in communicating. If I'm scrolling down our feed, we have 26 schools, we follow news organizations, we follow governmental organizations, but for example, I always know without even reading if I'm looking at a post from Odyssey. I just know, because there's colors, the colors are consistent, the fonts are usually pretty consistent, and they just have a vibe to their posts that I just immediately recognize. So that is something that I think is really admirable about the work that they do and something that I would like to see echoed throughout all of our schools. ClearDot also has that really going strong for them.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. They have some really great coordinators, and it really does, at least I feel from the Institute standpoint, whenever I'm looking at the text, I can just feel those words that we use to describe like scholarly, innovative. That's what I think when I look at it, and I think that's what everyone should be able to do when they look at their schools, is like everything they're posting, everything they're pushing out is just that same quality and same message visually.

Speaker 2: And it's recognizable. Like, you immediately know, like your parents probably have so many things that they're looking at on Facebook. Maybe they're a part of parent groups, or I don't know, like they like 10 million different pages, but they should always know when they look at their, or at the post from your school, that it's from your school, because that'll catch their attention and make them read and interact and take to heart what you're sharing, hopefully.

Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, is there anything you want to say, like maybe about colors, because it seems like you have a few slides here in your normal presentation about color and why that's important.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's important to kind of start, create a color scheme for your communications. A great place to start is your logo. So there's a million different ways that you can pull like the actual code from your logo of your school's colors, and then go from there.

Speaker 1: And if we like just interrupt you real quick, there's this really fun website that you like to go to that we can populate right behind us that is the most fun thing, right, where you can just put in one or two colors and then just find a bunch of different combinations of what you want to do.

Speaker 2: Yes, it's called, I actually don't even know how to pronounce it. What is it? Like Hoolors?

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like, I think, I think it's C-O-U-L-O-R-S.

Speaker 2: Something like that. It is really nifty. So we'll demo it back behind us here, but you can kind of lock certain colors. So once you find your hex code for your logo, like I always like to use our burgundy shade because I love it. I think it's really pretty. So that hex code is 9D1E21. And then our yellow shade and our logo with the banner is EBD05B. And so you can put those into Coolors, or however you say it, and lock them. And then just press the space bar, and it will generate like endless color schemes that you can use in your branding and in your communications. So that's a really great tool. Another great place to start from your logo would just be looking at different tints and shades of your colors that are already in your logo or your school colors. So a shade is just your color plus black, and a tint is your color plus white. Something that I do often is our yellow shade is kind of dark for backgrounds, and I need something a little lighter. So I just literally pull up my code and drag my little bar. What's that thing called? My little selector, my color picker, up so that it gets a little lighter so that I can read darker text against a lighter background. And then I have that in my color scheme in my head. I don't remember the hex code right off the top of my head, so that's my bad. But I have it there, and I make it consistent so that I know, okay, this lighter yellow shade is like our background.

Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, absolutely. And that just makes things really easy whenever you're just trying to communicate a message and to not have your text or your pictures get lost in the background.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it all comes back to recognizability. I like to think that our graphics are pretty recognizable because they have that light yellow background, and then elements with our gray, which is 545454, or our burgundy, which I already mentioned. But do you want to talk a little bit about color wheels?

Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, with color wheels, this is a big deal to me and my wife being a teacher for like seven or eight years and me teaching photography for two years. When it comes to wheels and how you want to select your colors, it's important to know the different types of colors in the color wheel. And for most people, they'll want to go on the analogous color spectrum. So colors that, if you're looking at a color wheel, which we'll have populated behind us, they're usually like three or four colors, two, three, or four colors that are like right next to each other on the color wheel. So you'll see over here that we have different shades next to yellow, next to yellow-orange, some down here around green. So having analogous color schemes is super duper helpful, and finding ways to have those colors on the color wheel complement each other is super, super helpful.

Speaker 2: Yes, very cool. More colors are like right in that red-orange-y, kind of yellow-y side of the color wheel, which is kind of interesting. But I know a lot of our schools have blues, a lot of our schools have greens. So that can be a great place to start if you're looking to pull colors and build out a color

Speaker 1: scheme. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, you mentioned fonts for a little bit earlier. Is there anything else you want to mention about fonts and the importance of choosing the different types of fonts?

Speaker 2: I think the biggest thing with fonts is readability and consistency, and also tying it back to kind of the way that your brand feels. So like we said, some of our words were like scholarly. So if I'm thinking my brand is scholarly, I'm probably not going to pick like a super loopy like cutesy little font, even though I might love them. And I might use that like on my personal stuff because I think it's cute. I don't know if I would use it for my school. And also talking about those kind of cutesy, scripty fonts, they can be kind of hard to read. And when you're communicating, especially on social media, you always want everything to be really clear and easy to read so that people don't have to like, you know, zoom in and move it around and try and turn up their phone brightness and do all that stuff just so they can read your post. And then coming back to consistency, I think just knowing what your fonts are, using them consistently, and then we'll talk about this a little bit later, but sharing them within your team so that whatever your team is putting together, whether it be a memo or a presentation, it's consistent across that and it's recognizable. So you can kind of get as detailed or as simple as you want with fonts. I typically recommend having like a heading font and then like a body font or a subheading. I'm kind of partial to like a serif, serif-y font and then a sans serif for your body. But that's just kind of my preference. So we've got a bunch of different examples here. You can go simple, middle ground, or detailed. I think just keeping your fonts consistent and making sure that they tie into your brand and what you're trying to communicate is important.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, generally, you can find most of the fonts, most of the fonts that we have are pretty easy to find those fonts on Office, on Canva, on places like that, or some that are just like pretty much pretty close to the same.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's pretty easy to find. Yeah. And something that I think too that's worth mentioning is our fonts are, our primary fonts, ones that I like to use the best, are Google fonts. So Cormorant SC and Cabin are our two big fonts. But those are Google fonts. And so either, for those to work in Office, you either have to download the Google font CTF file, which can be kind of a pain, or you have to have kind of a lead person who changes the fonts of things and exports them so that the fonts stay the same. So it's worth noting that when you're building out a font scheme, be mindful that some people are going to be using Google, some people are going to be using Office, Adobe is pretty good about switching between the two. But what we did was we really liked these Google fonts, we were like, okay, we want these to be our fonts, we want to use these fonts on everything. What are some fonts on Office that look similar, have a comparable feel? And then we can use those on Microsoft. So for example, our primary heading font that we really like and that we selected is Cormorant SC, which is a Google font. And so we wanted to find something that was comparable on Microsoft Word. So we chose Gaudi Old Style, just because it looks similar, has a similar feel. But it's more universal since it is a Microsoft font. And by the way, when I'm saying all this, choosing fonts, choosing colors, et cetera, it's important that you check all these things with your leadership before making them your standard practice. Just so they can put in their opinion on it, they can say, oh, I'm not too sure about this blue color, what if we did something like this? Just making sure that they're okay with it, maybe even presenting it to your whole team before really implementing like a branding guide, practices, policy structure, whatever.

Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So with that and being able to go through multiple formats and having to keep up with the just the fonts, the colors, all the branding, whenever you're doing everything, it would be really great if you had just one system to do all of it and be able to keep reusing the colors, the fonts, and everything all in one place while keeping it consistent. And thankfully, there is a thing such as that called Canva. So we use Canva all the time, and not just for photos, but also for like little short videos and stuff for social media, and for even like big presentations like our annual report. So what you want to, I mean, you're kind of more of the Canva guru, or you've been doing it for longer than I have. So tell us a little bit more about what makes Canva so great.

Speaker 2: So I love Canva so much because it's so intuitive to me, it just seems like it's just so easy to use. I've worked in Illustrator and InDesign and all that stuff. And sometimes I still use it for certain things. But sometimes you just need something quick, you need something to get the job done, like right there in that second. And I think that's Canva. And what I really, really like about Canva is they have preset like sizes for things. So like a Facebook post, an Instagram story, they do a pretty good job of keeping up with the changes in those things and adjusting. So say like Twitter makes their accepted image size smaller than it used to be, Canva will typically keep up with that and modify their templates. If you pay for Canva Pro, which I believe schools can get it for free as a nonprofit, it will actually, you can create within Canva a branding guide. So you can keep all your colors together, you can keep all your fonts together, and it will just kind of like present it to you when you go to edit your graphic and you have everything right there. You don't have to remember it. You don't have to memorize your hex codes like I did. It's all just right there for you. And I think it's really, really great. You can share on Canvas, like say, oh, I'm working on this post, but I need my CTE teacher to drop some text in because I don't know exactly what they're talking about. You can share it with them. They make a free account, edit the text, and it comes back to you kind of just like Google Docs would. You can live edit, you can export for printing or for digital use. I mean, it's really like the options with Canva are really limitless.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And the most important thing I think that's really great about Canva from my view whenever we have to make some posts or just some new formats for like something like a CTE month or a virtual learning month, they're coming up with new designs very regularly.

Speaker 2: How did I forget to mention that?

Speaker 1: So it's not that you're using the same designs and they're only updating them like every once in a while. They're updating it on a weekly basis. They're putting new things that are specific to holidays with different themes. And you can populate each individual element of the geography and the font and everything with your branding, your colors, your fonts. So it's all super duper helpful and malleable for whatever your needs are.

Speaker 2: And a lot of it is free, but like I said, I think schools can get it as a nonprofit. The Canva Pro.

Speaker 1: So, yeah. That's really awesome. Canva's a great tool. Now, like let's say that we're trying just to make this really consistent. Let's say we got approval from the leadership. What's kind of the best way to keep all that information in one place for anybody in your entire organization or school to put out any communication if it's not running through the communications department?

Speaker 2: Yeah. It can definitely create like a bottleneck if you're saying everything that we put out, every newsletter, every PowerPoint, whatever has to come through me so that I can format it. That's just not reasonable. We don't even do that within our own office and we have two people on our team. A lot of our schools don't have a dedicated communications coordinator anyway. So anything we can do to kind of take the load off of them, I think is really important. So what we did at the Institute was just make something called a branding cheat sheet, which we can put up here behind us. On that cheat sheet, it has a multitude of information for our staff in the most digestible format possible. So we have the location of our logo within our Dropbox in case people ever need to pull down our logo for something and a little screenshot of the actual image itself, a whole folder linked for templates. So we just redid our email signatures. So we'll have an email signature template in there. We have a memo template, a PowerPoint template that's already branded. All people have to do is copy it into their folder or Dropbox or whatever it is that they're working in and edit, and it'll be done for them. Also within that, we have our font schemes, again, from Microsoft, Google, and Canva because sometimes it'll be the same font, but it'll just have a slightly different name. So we just want to make sure that everything is consistent, as well as some sample text so people can see exactly what it's like. There is an informational item kind of where we keep our form stack template names so that those are consistent across the board, as well as our colors. So you can see I've thrown in our hex codes there, and I said, don't know what these are? Ask me, because a lot of people, they don't know what hex code is, and that's totally fine. And then we also dropped in where to find colors that are pretty close to our colors if they're not comfortable using the hex codes on both Microsoft and Google Suite. And so what we've done is we created this document, ran it past leadership, got it approved, and then we either emailed it to everyone or encouraged them to print it out, keep it on their desk, keep it on their bulletin board, just somewhere at hand so that they can quickly reference it as they're creating these materials.

Speaker 1: And whenever we, it's important to note, too, that in this structure, wherever you have it in Dropbox, you've already created a lot of templates in here for how they can just take a letterhead or take a document and populate it with, that's already formatted to have the correct text, whatever they're going to type in there or whatever. You've already made it easy for everyone else in the organization.

Speaker 2: That's the goal. That's the goal. Not everyone is a communications person, and I think we try to be very cognizant of that. And so we just try to make it as simple as possible for people to do their work, do it effectively, but also maintain the institute look and the institute brand.

Speaker 1: So it seems like the biggest thing, whenever you're creating a brand, is that you want to create good communication for your school. And the fact that you're working in a school, in an organization with a bunch of different team members, you want everything that comes out to seem like it all came from the same place. And having staff buy-in is really important with those branding principles, and just making sure that what you're doing is you're just creating consistency for your audience that you're appealing to, whether that's you're writing a memo, sending out a newsletter, or posting something on social media.

Speaker 2: So a few guidelines for implementing this within your team. You might want to sit with kind of key team members, maybe sort of the discussion leaders within your team or department heads, and go over this with them, just make sure they understand it, make sure how to implement it, and see if they have any questions. Like we said, just make it as easy as possible for them with a cheat sheet and templates, and make yourself available as a resource to them. Something that I kind of want to highlight, I mentioned earlier about how if the communications team is formatting everything and branding everything, it can create a bottleneck and it's just not productive. But for things that are really intense, like if we have a huge meeting, for example, and I want all of our slides to have the institute template and look the same and have the nice fonts and the colors and everything like that, what I'll usually do as the assistant director of communications is just say, hey, I know everyone is super busy getting their presentations together, don't worry about the formatting, just send them to me and I'll fix it for you. So for more intense formatting jobs, I think it can be helpful for someone who's kind of a designated brand lead to take those things in and kind of just brand it for the team so that it looks consistent and it stays consistent.

Speaker 1: Yeah, especially with something big like for us here, that would be the annual report. That's pretty big. That needs the content the whole team can contribute to, but branding is pretty important for having one lead for.

Speaker 2: And lastly, I would just say, lead by example. The more people who see you using the PowerPoint template and the memo template and the newsletter template and the email signature, the more people see you using that and implementing that, it'll just spread throughout your team and you'll see more and more buy-in. And it's always worth maybe a little refresher every now and then, hey, this is what we want to do. This is how this is going to look, et cetera, et cetera. But I think just kind of leading by example and offering yourself as a resource and a contact for these things is really important.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're really excited about our communications coordinators to be working on their brand. And it's like, for us, I feel like every social post we put out, every communication we have with the press, we're constantly working on our brand and making sure people know what our brand is. So it's not like a one-and-done thing. It is a consistent process because, and I mean, the first slide kind of said it the best, like it's more than just a logo that you design one time. It's like, it is a whole lot of stuff that you're constantly working on.

Speaker 2: I think of it kind of more like the experience that you want your stakeholders to have when they're interacting. And I think that's a good starting point. You can really go from there and make it into the best it can be.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is great. And I can't wait to see what our coordinators have to come up with and like, you know, what else we can do to help as the charge to Good Erskine.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So reach out to us anytime if you want a brand makeover, if you need help creating these templates, we're here for you as a resource or if you have any questions.

Speaker 1: Bye.