PR Education

About PR Education

Schools, training providers and universities tend to write for the person who has not enrolled yet. Almost everyone reading is somebody else.

Look at what an education institution publishes in a year and a pattern appears quickly. The homepage speaks to a prospective student. The brochure speaks to a prospective student. The social posts, the photography, the open day copy, the sign at the front gate, all of it addresses somebody who has not yet decided to come. That work matters. It is also, in volume terms, a tiny fraction of the communication the institution actually performs, and it is aimed at the smallest and least loyal group in the building. Meanwhile the people who are already inside receive timetable notices, fee reminders and the occasional apology, written by whoever happened to be free.

The imbalance is easy to explain. Recruitment communication has an owner, a budget and a number attached to it. Everything else is treated as administration. Nobody is promoted for the clarity of an enrolment confirmation email. Nobody is thanked for a maintenance notice that told people what they needed to know on the first reading. So the craft flows to the front door and the rest of the house is left to improvise, which is precisely backwards, because the people already inside are the ones whose experience becomes the reputation that the recruitment material is trying to describe.

Recruitment writing is the only communication most institutions resource properly, and it is not the communication most people receive.

Nobody decides to overstate. The drift happens one comparative adjective at a time.

The instinct to wait until everything is known is the most expensive instinct in institutional communication.

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