How to Protect your School’s Intellectual Property When Working with Third Parties.
Too often I start work with a new school and hear how the school’s former agency or Marketing [insert job title here] left several months ago, and no one has been able to access the Facebook / Google / MailChimp / Website accounts ever since. Maybe they set up the accounts originally, or engaged the agency and let them set things up how they saw fit. Then, for one reason or another, they didn’t leave the access details behind. They took the access to your school’s intellectual property when they walked out of the door.
You can imagine what havoc that wreaks on marketing, recruitment and parent communications. Imagine if you couldn’t update the term dates, or this year’s fees were still showing those from 2 years ago? And because those accounts already exist somewhere, everyone is a little reticent to start a brand new account and waste all the work and learnings gained in the originals. That’s if the account type or platform will even allow a new account to be set up for the same school or organisation. It’s a pain!
Often, there are ways around this, but it is frequently long-winded (requesting access to your own school’s page directly from Facebook - you can imagine how many enquiries they have to sift through before they get to yours), time-consuming (think un-picking all the account details to insert them anew), or simply a waste of your previous hand work which had built up over months or even years of audience and ad insights in the original accounts, and now has to be started from scratch.
This has several knock-on effects. Principally, you would have lost any insights you’d gained on your core audience (your most-likely-prospective-parents-and-students), perhaps even your active enquirers list, current students/parents contact lists, and even… your agents’ contact details. As a result, your agent relationships could suffer, you’d lose out on converting all those leads you work hard and spent budget on to find, and you could see much higher ad costs when you come to advertise to this same audience in your new account. Not ideal at all.
BUT. There are several ways in which you can protect your school and your team from coming up against this in future. Or indeed, again.
1) Use email addresses with shared (trusted) access
This is the holy grail of setting up any new accounts. When using any new accounts, ensure someone within the school sets up the account (or the agency uses a trusted, shared school email address, rather than one other own as the account username). Usually, several members of staff will have access to a mailbox such as admissions@yourschoolhere.com. THIS is the email address to use when setting up your accounts, for example as the highest Admin level on your Facebook page. Or, the email address of the person who is least likely to leave anytime soon (this will cause difficulties with transferring ownership of Facebook Business Manager accounts and pages). Many staff having access to this address means there is less likelihood that access will be lost when one of those members of staff leave for pastures new. If you can’t use shared addresses, then make sure you…
2) Keep a ‘Master Log-ins’ document
This should detail all your school’s social, web and other marketing accounts, along with the usernames and passwords for all. It’s a good (and time-saving) idea to share this document with any new starters - staff and agencies. Encourage them to bookmark the pages too, to save everyone time. This way, if a personal work email has been used, you can simply ask the IT department to not shut down access to the account, or indeed update the username/email when the email address ‘owner’ has left. Of course, ensure it is saved somewhere secure such as on OneDrive, to avoid unauthorised access.
3) Keep your Facebook Business Accounts separate from those of third parties
This is another big one. When engaging a third party such as an agency to run your ads (like us!), it is admittedly much simpler to ask them to set-up your Facebook Business Manager from scratch. (Facebook Business Manager enables you to more efficiently run, target and report on your ad activity).
DO NOT DO THIS.
You’re short on time and aren’t really familiar with Business Manager - which is understandable. That’s why you hired an agency, right? Here’s why the investment of time to set up your own Business Account is a good use of your time. If a third party were to set up your FB Business Account, they would own it and everything in it - including all the intellectual property and insights gained spending YOUR budget. If you were to part ways, they could simply take this access with them, and you would lose all your insights from the last however long. Instead, ask your agency for a step-by-step set-up guide for how they’d like to work with YOUR school account. I send my clients a document which teaches them how to set up their own account, and then to add my business account (not my personal profile) to the account as an admin. Depending on what your agency will be doing for you, you can choose to designate them as a lower level, such as an advertiser only, though this will inhibit them from carrying out certain functions for you. You may want to discuss the best approach with your third party or agency before you get started on any advertising.
I hope you found that helpful. Afterall, staff and agencies come and go, but the school is here to stay. These approaches can help ensure longevity of your hard work for the school, and set it in good stead for the future.
For advice on which marketing platforms would most benefit your school, and support setting them up, please do get in touch. We offer a 15 minute initial telephone consultation to see how we can help you fulfil your international student recruitment goals.
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