Kettering Fairmont High School boasts a wide range of extracurricular opportunities for its 2400+ student body, including 29 varsity programs and a unique Career Tech center. So when principal Tyler Alexander noticed AD Chris Weaver and SID Jonathan Hauge using Gipper to promote and brand their athletic department, he knew he had to do the same to showcase the incredible activities his school provides.
Since taking on the Athletic Director position 10 years ago, Chris Weaver had a primary goal in mind: unify all of the schools' extracurricular offerings under one brand.
"We're a big D1 feeder program with 29 different varsity programs. We have a lot of facilities. So you can imagine we just have a lot of activity going on, not just athletically, but academically with clubs and organizations. One of my goals from day one was really to try to unify a lot of our branding."
On the school side, Tyler's goals are simple: inform and celebrate.
"We need to get information out and we need to celebrate good things that are happening within our building," Tyler said. "We have 2,400 students, grades 9-12; it's a big building. And there are lots of things happening that people in this building have no clue about, so we're always trying to find ways that we can celebrate."
Chris and Tyler started to notice two key issues with their online presence before Gipper: a lack of consistency and a shift from the website.
“We were at a point years ago where we had every team using different logos and fonts,” said Tyler. “We had different logos being used in our building between the arena and the academic facility. They just were everywhere.”
“Our website was really where we encouraged our coaches to post articles, pictures, and up-to-date information,” said Chris. “Well, things evolved and we started to realize that people were not digesting the content anymore by going to the website. Kids were digesting that information through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And it just honestly got to be overwhelming trying to be one person managing all of these different components.”
Gipper has helped the Fairmont HS team create a consistent brand, no matter who is creating and sharing content. Plus, the template library helps Tyler brainstorm new content to share.
“Gipper gave us a platform to be able to utilize all of those colors, fonts, and logos all in one place very easily,” Tyler said. “So if I send a tweet out through Gipper, it’s going to look like a Fairmont High School tweet. If Chris or Jonathan sends something out, the content is going to be totally different, but it’s going to be obvious that it is from our school.”
“I go through and look at the templates just to see what’s out there, that’s how I started using templates for Teacher of the Week. The thing I also like about the templates is that you can adjust them to fit what you’re trying to do. We’ve got all the natural communication — snow days, delays, graduation, and awards — but now we’re trying to celebrate staff and students too.”
Since getting Gipper, Tyler, Chris, and Jonathan have all witnessed extremely positive responses from their communities — whether that’s from students in the hallways, family members, or social media fans.
“My own daughter, who’s in a different school district, said, ’Dad, my whole soccer team follows your account because the type of stuff that you put out is really, really good,’” Chris said. “We hear a lot of that, but that’s because of the quality of the content and templates that we’re provided with.”
Jonathan added, “Recently, we put a tweet out at the end of our girls' basketball semi-final game congratulating the team and sharing the final score. Our girl’s team has 1,600 followers on their account, but that tweet got a total of 16,562 impressions. And that’s all a content thing — if the content looks really good and looks really professional, people want to keep looking at it and they want to share it.”
