Tips and tricks for hiring out your school facilities

Tips for hiring out school facilities 

If you’re currently managing your school lettings programme in-house and struggling to find ways to promote your spaces, this blog is for you! Here, we’ll go through tips and tricks for hiring out your school facilities. 

Tips and tricks for hiring out your school facilities

Provide clear policies & procedures: hirers need to know what’s expected of them, and what they should expect from you, during the hiring process. Therefore, making terms & conditions and policies & procedures easily and readily available will make the process of hiring your facilities much easier for everyone involved, and should provide potential hirers with all the information they need to make a confident and informed decision to make a booking enquiry.

Put prices front and centre: when searching for facilities for hire, hirers are likely to already know their budget or at least how much, roughly, they’re willing to spend on their chosen facilities. As such it’s important to ensure that prices are available, clear and easily accessed – making the decision making process much easier for potential customers. However, if you don’t feel comfortable putting a definitive price on a specific facility, don’t worry, you can always provide a ‘ballpark’ figure or ‘from £xx’ price to provide potential hirers with an informed idea of price. 

Maintain your facilities: well-presented and well-maintained facilities, offered in a good state of repair, will attract new hirers and repeat customers – hirers, understandably, wanting facilities that look good, and feel modern, spacious and well-equipped. 

Update photos semi-regularly: when browsing, hirers like to see up-to-date images of the facilities you offer for hire and, ideally, more than one; showcasing different angles of each space in order to get a really good understanding of the size, capacity and state of repair of the space in question. 

Make booking & payment as easy as possible: making booking and payments as quick, easy and friction-free as possible will contribute to a possible customer experience and make booking your facilities both easy and enjoyable for hirers – leading to increased bookings over time; repeat custom and word of mouth recommendations. We all know how off putting it can be when an online shop makes it difficult or lengthy to pay for an item! The same principle can be applied to booking facilities. 

Utilise social media: especially today, social media is crucial to any kind of marketing and promotion and openly promoting your facilities for hire on whatever social platforms you’re on – whether Facebook, Instagram or Twitter – will help you reach a wider audience and get people talking about the facilities you have available for hire. 

Work with an external lettings company

Of course, managing your lettings programme in-house is a huge undertaking for an already busy team and – should you want more from your school lettings without further stretching your existing resources or you simply don’t have the time to devote to your school lettings, you may wish you outsource your current lettings programme to an external company. 

An external lettings company such as Schoolhire Solutions Ltd. has the resources, knowledge and experience to seamlessly take over the management of your current lettings, as well as find new opportunities and hirers. 

Having worked with nearly 600 hirers to successfully hire out facilities in over 25 schools across London, Greater London and Berkshire, our helpful team are on hand to help you get more out of your school lettings. 

To find out more about how we could help you, please click here or contact us for more information. 

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