Do you spend too much time creating graphics?

We know how busy teachers are—managing your school’s media, creating content, and keeping everything consistent can feel overwhelming.

But what if you had a simple system in place?

That’s where social media graphic templates come in! Graphic templates are pre-made designs that you can customize for any post. They are graphic shells that provide the design structure that then you can later edit for specific games, opponents, players, photos, and more.

When you want to publish high-quality, cut-through-the-noise graphics—templates are the only way to do it efficiently and timely. In our latest webinar, Danielle Schaf—Striv Education’s Director of Marketing & Digital Media Education, provides 5 reasons why schools should be using graphic templates, 3 ways for creating templates, and 8 deliverable graphic templates for schools to fit into their own content. 

Here’s a quick recap of the webinar, explaining how social media graphic templates can be transformative for your school’s content, marketing, and designs.

5 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media Graphic Templates

1. Saves You TIME

Whether you’re trying to put out a final score, announce you won the conference championship, or want to spotlight a player of the game—social media graphic templates save you time. You don’t have to whip something up on the spot. Your students can create a high-quality design well before a game tips off. It saves you time from reviewing and approving your students’ work before publishing. 

2. Organizes Your Content

There’s over 20 games in a regular season of basketball, and now double that to include both your boys and girls teams. Not to mention wrestling meets. Plus music performances, concerts, and much more. Creating graphic templates gives you and your students a game plan for tackling all of those events. Having pre-made templates makes it easy to organize your content and takes away the stress of each season by providing a solid plan for publishing your designs.

3. Strategizes Your Storytelling

When creating content to market your team, program, or school the BEST success comes when content has been purposefully thought through. This happens when creating graphic templates. When you and your students work together to design templates to encapsulate a season, a sport, a tournament, an event—whether you know it or not—you are asking yourself, “What story am I going to tell?” You’re thinking strategically about how to best showcase and promote your school. 

4. Streamlines Your Workflows

Graphic templates not only streamline your photography on what to capture in a game for your graphics, like I mentioned earlier. They also offer an efficient way to create, schedule, and post content throughout a season. Pre-made designs allow for proactive marketing, instilling forward thinking and social media preparedness. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from creating content these last three years, posting presently is posting late. Creating future content through graphic templates affords you and your students the freedom to stay ahead of the game and allows you to adapt content for better outcomes.

5. Enhance Your Marketing

Designing a 5-10 different graphic templates before a season enhances your marketing because it lends to a clear, consistent brand across creations. Your brand voice doesn’t get drowned out by varying fonts and clashing elements between a Tuesday and Friday night game. By creating a framework of templates, you are providing your students a structure to work within, allowing for congruent messaging and design. Having a set handful of templates helps students align with branding, providing a consistent look and voice across platforms. A clear and consistent brand gives your audience an unambiguous school identity that can be easily bought into, followed by, and supported by your community.

How to Make Social Media Graphic Templates

Those are five reasons why you should be making and using graphic templates for your social media. But now comes the tough part. How do you make them and where do you find inspiration?

Before the start of a new season or maybe finding a natural break during season, challenge your students to each create their own three templates to use on social media to promote a game day, matchup, and bracket. Your class can then vote and choose the top 10 graphics to use for that season. BUT, at least one of their designs, they have to research and find a college or professional team graphic and use it to inspire their own creation. This is key!

Steal like an artist! All of the great creatives do it—art inspires art. Our company’s best creations have come from Danielle asking herself, “Could I make something like this?” And trying it! 

This means:

1) Finding where to look for inspiration

2) Having a keen eye to dissect what makes up a graphic

3) Learning the tools to create it in your design software

Watch the full webinar recording below and join our Future Ready Educators community to access the 8 FREE social media graphic templates that Danielle shared!

Start Simplifying Your Social Media Content Today

Don’t let your social media content become another burden. 

With Striv Education, you can empower your students, elevate your content, and tie your content creation with curriculum.

Take the first step toward transforming your school’s social media today.

Schedule a call!