You want to be different than everyone else? Give people the information they want to know. It is that simple.
Besides my working life, I am a devoted volunteer director for a non-profit cultural association in Trieste called the Associazione Italo Americana del FVG. We are a cultural center, library, and English/Italian language school that was started by the American/English soldiers when they were running the Allied Military Government here after WWII.
Most of our activities are free and open to the public, but we also offer high-quality language courses that help us pay our rent and continue to offer our members more. Well, I have been doing some benchmarking recently of websites for language schools that (in theory) are our local competitors. Here is what I discovered that was truly surprising.
First off, we do not have a site, we have a blog, which is free and dynamic. It forces us to keep our members and the public updated with what we have to offer each week. We talk about EVERYTHING WE DO. And people actually read it. We get hits on it from all over the world.
Well, compared to our competition, we say everything up front: when our courses meeting, and, especially, HOW MUCH THEY COST. We put this info on our blog. We give the same information when people call and when they stop in. We echo this info on Facebook.
We treat the public as intelligent people who can have all of the information we have available and use it how they would like. Usually this means making the best decision and coming to us.
We have found that making things completely clear and publishing our information in detail makes it easier for our nearly 50 volunteers keep track and give the correct information, and it holds us to a higher standard than the competition. Nobody likes feeling tricked or sucked in.
Being up-front with your public means that the people who come to you are there because they want to be. It makes everything more pleasant, and people will let you know about it.
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