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Communications Strategy & Recruitment

St. Martin’s Episcopal School
Viewbook cover

An Episcopal school for pre-K–12, St. Martin’s Episcopal School came to Zehno to help develop marketing communications strategy, with a particular focus on general recruitment. As part of an initial communications audit, we carried out market research to determine core values, address issues of retention, and explore reasons that the coeducational school had a disproportionate enrollment of boys.

Driven by the results of the research, we focused on several key messages

  • the value of the investment in a private school where graduates tend to be admitted to their first-choice college and often earn scholarships
  • the advantages of a school that is rooted in religion, community service, and ethics but that stands apart from the parochial system
  • the importance of individual attention in a supportive family atmosphere (St. Martin’s had the best student-teacher ratio of its competition)
  • the fact that you can get to the school’s location within 15 minutes from almost any site in New Orleans (to counter perceptions of inconvenience and isolation).

Then we applied the messages in a viewbook, a search piece, and an advertising campaign. The material supported both recruitment and retention efforts and was cost-effective. For example, we printed a three-year supply of the glossy front section of the viewbook which was rebound each year with an updated “courses-and-costs” back.