Since 1926, Cathedral High School has sat in Boston's historic South End performing a very worthy mission: provide a high-quality, Catholic, college preparatory education to inner-city Boston youth from underserved neighborhoods who otherwise would not have this type of educational opportunity. The school makes the education affordable through substantial philanthropy which brings down the tuition to about 12% of its actual cost.

 

Cathedral was languishing. They had been operating the red for several years, donations were static, admissions fell short of capacity leaving empty seats (many people also didn't know the school offered middle school grades), and the school's reputation was only that of a football and basketball powerhouse; Cathedral was widely seen as academically mediocre. The school hired a new headmaster in 2013 who, with a strong vision, worked tirelessly to substantially increase the rigor of the curriculum and improve academics across the board. Shortly after starting, the headmaster hired me as director of marketing & communications to fix this image issue. 

 

Cathedral had great strengths (besides just athletics): a long and proud history, a beautiful campus in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Boston, and a 100% graduation rate for about a decade. In fact, not only had every student graduated high school, 100% of them were accepted to and went to college. They were far outpacing national and Boston averages as well as averages for inner-city students below the poverty line.

My solution was a comprehensive rebranding: name, visual identity, message, and approach. We had to raise the image of the school in the eyes of the community and prospective students. We had to better convey the great work being done (and the impressive results) to donors and prospective donors to motivate giving. We had to engage the students and families already at Cathedral to ensure their experiences would turn them into brand ambassadors. We had to find a message that would resonate with older, mostly Irish and Italian-decent alumni making them feel a continued connection to their alma mater where now 90 percent are students of color. 

 

 

I hired Boston-area-based Jeff Groves, principal of ThinkTree Design, to spearhead the visual identity aspect. I wrote the copy for everything from scratch — we wanted to portray a new Cathedral, focusing on its academic rigor, offering of grades 7 through 12, and its desirability as a great school.

 

We started using "Cathedral 7-12 High School" in all our admissions materials and overall marketing to emphasize that we were not just a high school with grades 9 through 12. We revised our logo and created a logomark lockup to include text which included Boston to clarify that we were distinct from the Cathedral High School of Springfield, Massachusetts with which we were often confused. It also reinforced our urban and central location in the city of Boston, a desirable trait of the school since so many students use public transportation to access our South End campus.  We also chose a modern typeface to help update the image: Hoefler's Gotham family of typefaces, which would go on to be used across all materials, print and electronic, going forward.

 

We started referring to the school in materials as a "college preparatory" to reflect the academic focus on college readiness, and emphasized academics in all of our admissions materials. In order to portray a more sophisticated image as a school, we needed compelling photography. I hired Nate Fried-Lipski, of Nate Photography, to conduct a number of marketing shoots. These would develop a new library of photography we could draw on for the production of marketing and communications materials.

 

Every piece of admissions material was scrapped and rethought. The centerpiece of the admissions marketing campaign would be a new viewbook: a slick, multi-page booklet which would tout the school's most unique aspects to prospective students and their families featuring new copy, new photography, and the new visual design.

 

The school's materials were all revised. Stationery from letterhead and envelopes to fax sheets and shipping labels were all updated. I also reviewed everything we put out to the external world. No longer would a form ginned up in Micrsoft Word by an admissions officer or accountant be acceptable to send out representing our school. We revised dozens of forms to conform with our updated and clean visual identity but also for clarity and logical flow.

 

The rebranding and revision of the school's image continues. Recently I revised the student and family handbook, previously a mundane collection of legal policies and rote information, and the faculty/staff handbook. Instead of a policy book, I created guidebooks full of helpful, accessible, and well organized information in an attractively spirial-bound and durable book which people will want to keep as a convenient, continual reference throughout their time at the school.