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Springfield-Clark Career Technology Center

Improved Digital Recruitment Strategy

For Megan Anthony, her school communications role is anything but typical. While being a one-person department isn’t uncommon for school communicators, Megan is a one-person team shared by three separate districts in Ohio. Having better tools at her disposal is not a want, but a need.

One of the schools that Megan oversees communications for is Springfield-Clark Career Technology Center (CTC) in Springfield, Ohio. CTCs are different from traditional high schools because students and families have a choice to attend school there or not. Recruiting, attracting and retaining students is a top priority. Springfield-Clark CTC knew they needed to make a website change in 2020 when the tried and true ways of reaching families through in-person assemblies and tours were no longer effective, or even possible.

Springfield-Clark Career Technology Center homepage screenshot displayed in a laptop
 

 

At a Glance

Springfield-Clark CTC is Ohio's first career technology center, founded in 1967. The CTC serves students in the Springfield and Clark County regions, offering a blend of academics and specialized career tech coursework.

Clark Shawnee Local School District is located in Clark County, Ohio, serving 2,300 students from Springfield Township, Bethel Township and the city of Springfield. The district has five schools — a high school, a middle school and three elementary schools.

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“One thing that became apparent really quickly was that our current website did a pretty good job with our existing students and families, but wasn’t doing anything to attract people to the CTC,” Megan said. “We made a pretty clear decision early on that we needed to do a better job representing ourselves to prospective families and students.”  

Understanding that the school’s website is often the first impression that families have with the school, Megan and the CTC team knew a change was needed. They started researching web providers and found out fast that many sites they admired were powered by Finalsite. 

“We started looking at our current website, what it could do, what it couldn’t do, what we needed it to do. We looked at some other CTC websites in Ohio and we came to a list of the four to five that we liked. We were asking ourselves, who made this site? Finalsite kept coming up, and was very much what everyone thought was the best choice.”

With a new site primed for prospects in today’s digital world, Springfield-Clark CTC’s website is a key component to its successful recruitment strategies.

Better Tools, Stronger Schools

Having worked with five different CMS providers, Megan says Finalsite is her favorite. Why? It’s software made by school communicators, for school communicators.

“At Finalsite, it feels like school communicators have been part of the development of the tools and the CMS behind it. It doesn’t feel like it’s just people who have experience with website design, who are driving that conversation, driving those decisions. I think that can be the case with some of the other options,” Megan said. “If you don’t have someone who’s in a communications role in your district, having Finalsite is like having that advice built into your website, so you can do a better job with the resources you have."

Balancing her days between multiple organizations means time-saving tools are a must. Megan relies on Finalsite’s Create Once, Publish Everywhere (C.O.P.E.) integrations, making updates a breeze.

“I love the shared content block features where I can update content once and it shows up everywhere. That is a problem I had so much with my previous provider. For example, I would update lunch prices but I would forget that someone put it on their building page too, so I’d have to update it twice,” she said.

Finalsite Forms are another frequently used tool used by Megan and the Springfield-Clark CTC team. These beautiful and user-friendly forms have become part of the school’s recruitment efforts.“One of the things we wanted to be able to do, if someone visits our site, we wanted to collect information from them so we could reach back out to them, and forms have really allowed us to do that,” Megan said.

Converting from SchoolPointe to Finalsite: An Easy Decision

Megan also manages communications for Clark Shawnee Local School District in Springfield, OH. A current SchoolPointe client, the school has made the (easy) decision to upgrade their website to Composer following Finalsite’s acquisition of SchoolPointe in July, 2021.

Having worked with both CMS platforms, Megan said the opportunity to upgrade to Finalsite at such an affordable price is a deal nobody should pass up.

“Having this opportunity to go from a Schoolpointe site to a Finalsite site at the investment that you have before you is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” she said. “The tools just make so much more sense. The Finalsite tools can do so much more for you. They can do everything you’re used to and they can do everything you’ve ever wanted to do. The support and the training and development that you’re going to get from Finalsite is unmatched from any other provider I’ve seen in any communications area. I’ve never seen a company that is so focused on helping clients in any way they can.”

The CMS of Choice

As a seasoned school communicator with experience using multiple CMS platforms, Megan Anthony whole-heartedly recommends Finalsite to friends and colleagues near and far. The robust, intuitive and time-saving tools have helped her school districts increase visibility, engagement and overall communications efforts.

“As someone who has used a lot of CMSs before, Finalsite is so much more user friendly, so much of it is intuitive to me. I love everything about it, I’m a big fan,” she said.

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