PR & Communications

Hong Kong International School (HKIS)

Introduction

As a top international school with an excellent global reputation, Hong Kong International School (HKIS) needs to know what's happening in education around the world so it can stay ahead of its peers. At the same time, they want to understand and deliver on the educational needs of students and their families. It's important to HKIS to meet student expectations no matter where they are from. To achieve its goals, HKIS needed an exceptional tool that allows it to track sentiment worldwide.

"We didn't feel like our brand or our school name was necessarily being mentioned that much outside of the main media vehicles that we used regularly, which we monitored ourselves. But we wanted to increase our visibility in different markets, so if we're investing in increasing our visibility, then it made sense to invest in a tool to track that."

Carrie Chen, Director of Marketing, HKIS

Challenge

As a school with a global presence, HKIS faced a number of communication challenges, including monitoring public sentiment about the school and educational issues from around the world. The school was handling its media and public relations in a very direct and manual way, which was time consuming and inefficient, and it had no way to detect and deal with possible reputational threats. The team also struggled with visibility of their brand and offering in the rest of China, a potentially important market.

Carrie said one big challenge faced by HKIS was knowing how to monitor and track the social media channels that operate uniquely in the China market.

Solution

To help HKIS achieve its objectives, Meltwater provides a range of solutions. The school uses the social listening tool to monitor mentions on social media, be they positive or negative, including how the school is viewed among parents, students and competitors.

It also uses the analytics tool to monitor the media and receives a daily alert giving a snapshot of what's happening in the media, any mentions of the school, and any education-related topics that the team has flagged as being of interest. The analytics tool allows the school to see trends graphically by using the data collected to generate reports.

HKIS also uses Meltwater's solutions for crisis monitoring in case a situation arises that the school needs to respond to, or at least needs to continue to monitor. An unexpected benefit to using the Meltwater tools is connecting with alumni. Being able to monitor media mentions all over the world, even in small community newspapers in Australia or the USA, has helped them reestablish connections with former students.

Download Success Story