3.2 million views and an award nomination for Nord Anglia Education

A sea of sameness

International school marketing has a sameness problem. Across Southeast Asia and India, schools often rely on the same polished ingredients. Think beautiful campuses, smiling students, academic results, facilities, performances, sports days and leadership quotes.

None of that is wrong. But when every school is saying similar things in a similar way, it becomes harder for parents to see what really makes a school different and worth the additional investment.

To win parents' trust, content needed to feel more authentic, emotionally resonant and genuinely useful in helping families choose the right school for their children.

Finding the untold stories

School teams are busy, with events happening throughout the year. While teachers and marketing teams often document these activities, the stories that make them meaningful can be harder to capture. That means the preparation, the emotions, the student and parent views, and the small moments of growth.

Our challenge was to develop repeatable content formats that would help schools capture these stories and turn them into engaging content they could produce themselves.

Developed the storytelling formats

Using findings from a body of work in research, landscape audits and cross-sector mapping, WCC developed a set of repeatable social and video formats designed to help schools capture authentic and differentiated stories at scale.

The formats were built around a few simple but differentiating principles.

Make students the storytellers

Instead of speaking about students, create formats where students can speak for themselves.

Keep production realistic

The formats had to be achievable for school teams, not dependent on large crews, complex shoots or heavy-lift production. Nord Anglia wanted it nimble.

Capture emotion, not just information

Parents choose schools on feeling as much as fact. They respond to confidence, care, belonging, pride and personal growth.

Show the process, not just the outcome

The most interesting story is often not the final performance, match, exhibition or result. It is the effort, nerves, practice, mistakes and growth that happen before, during or after.

Built a playbook for scale

To make the work practical and scalable across Nord Anglia schools in Southeast Asia and India, we turned the formats into a playbook. It includes storytelling levers, format explanations, example episodes, production guidance, interview prompts, shot lists, adaptation notes and channel considerations.

The goal was to give Nord Anglia creative ideas and provide a repeatable editorial system.

Howie Phung, Regional Communications Manager at Nord Anglia, adds, "WCC helped us build formats that school teams across 19 schools can produce themselves and repeat throughout the year, across different markets and calendar moments, while still looking and feeling like Nord Anglia."

For international schools, the strongest proof is not always a claim, a statistic or a campaign message. Sometimes it is a student explaining what they love, a parent seeing how much their child has grown, a small conversation that says more than a prospectus ever could.

This project gave Nord Anglia a clearer way to turn these everyday moments into distinctive, emotionally engaging content.

Our playbook led to 300+ social videos across 19 schools in 9 countries. Families could finally see what the education feels like.

Howie Phung, Regional Communications Manager at Nord Anglia, highlighted the impact of the formats we developed. Compared with their usual content, these formats "engaged at a higher rate and were shared more often, proof that families notice the difference when a story feels real."

The Are You Proud of Me? series was also nominated for Best Video Series at the International Content Marketing Awards.