What teaching has taught us

Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Working with education clients has certainly changed our world, so we wanted to reflect on what teaching has taught us.

First, it’s inspiring to work with people committed to spreading knowledge and giving others fresh opportunities through learning. And working with brands like these helps us keep our own learning journeys on track too.

Helping launch the brand Manuvo was a fascinating example of this. Manuvo is committed to working with ‘cultural changemakers’. This means that they’re dedicated to creating resources to ‘awaken, inspire and empower people to affect societal change through the transformative power of change’.

Wow

It took us a while to get our heads around what this meant in practice. But after asking a shedload of questions and doing plenty of reading, we came back with a brand platform idea – Make better. The line has a dual meaning: to make things better, as in make the world better. And to become a better creative/dance teacher/filmmaker. Manuvo ran with our idea and the brand has gone on to be a great success. We’re proud to have helped them get off the ground.

Of course

Manuvo came to Craft because Manuvo’s founder Maurits had taken our founder Paul’s course on Domestika. Domestika is an online educational platform, where Paul has created a bestselling course called Copywriting for Social Media. 

The course shows students how to write effective copy to attract and engage a brand audience through social media. It’s been so successful, with 60,000 students and 98% positive reviews to date, that Paul was asked to make a sequel. He now also has a course called Tone of Voice in Copywriting for Brands. This one teaches writers how to uncover a unique brand voice by exploring copywriting principles, and creating a style guide to keep tone consistent across different media. It seems very popular already, with 3,534 students and 98% positive reviews

Top prof

Paul was originally asked to join Domestika because of his work teaching the Digital Copywriting module of the Masters in Visual and Digital Media at IE University (voted sixth best Business School in the world by Forbes, 2019). Every year he teaches about 55 Masters’ Students the basics of Digital Copywriting. He’s obviously doing a good job, since he’s received Teaching Excellence Awards in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024 and Best Professor 2023. 

As you can see, the people at Craft, led by Paul, have an affinity with learning and learning brands. 

Playtime

This was borne out even more recently when we completed a project for an exciting toy start-up who have developed a fun way to teach the basics of coding to children aged 3-12. (We’d love to show you, but we’re sworn to secrecy). Suffice to say, it’s quite brilliant. We worked closely with the team to develop their messaging framework and lay the foundations for the brand’s tone of voice. 

One specific task was to separate and define the different messaging for two separate markets: education and consumer. Our work covered everything from taglines, and an elevator pitch, to brand values, and personality traits.

The rewards of learning

So what have we learnt from education brands? A hell of a lot. We’ve learnt about culture, and we’ve learnt about toys. But most importantly, we’ve learnt how to get under the skin of educational brands. To ask the right questions and to understand their individual audiences and how to speak to them. We’ve also realised that the many of the same principles that apply to other sectors we work in (such as Tech and Automotive) apply here too. Our job is to uncover what’s brilliant about an education brand and communicate it through great writing. It’s very similar, but in some ways, more rewarding.