Six Years at Himawari Preschool | What I did as a social media manager?

What the longest brief of my career taught me about doing marketing without a marketing department.

Vu Quynh Anh Social Media Manager (freelance), Himawari Preschool

It’s 6 years…

• 6 years on retainer
• ~2.500 parent conversations from social media ads
• ~500M VND media spend managed
• 1.05M video ThruPlays (just in 2025)

Channels I managed: 4 Facebook Pages · Messenger · himawari-preschool.com.vn · landing pages · print and on-site signage

Scope of work

I was the Social Media Manager in Himawari Prschool from 12/2019 to 2026. It was 1 campus at first, then 4, then 1 again. My team size was 3: 1 social media manager (me), content manager and a recruitment manager.

In December 2019 I took a small freelance job: run the social media for Himawari Preschool, a Japanese-method kindergarten in Hanoi. I thought it would last a few months.

Six years later I was still there, campuses, a website, a design queue, and an ad budget I reconciled line by line every month. This is the longest relationship of my career, and the one that taught me most about doing marketing as a freelancer.

It was not just “social media”…

The quote was specific: one content plan, eight Facebook posts, eight image sets, a landing page and a social ad management. A fixed retainer plus about four million VND a month in media.

Everything the school couldn’t produce in-house came to me, for example: Sport Day medals. The lunch menu and all monthly designs. Tet notices – one version for parents, five sets for teachers. Flyers, festival tickets, classroom stickers, the signboard above the gate.

Then the housekeeping nobody budgets for: hosting renewals, a domain transfer, a chat plugin so parents could message from the site, a full rebuild, and once a version of the site prepared for a Ministry of Education visit.

I designed most of it and briefed out the rest – a developer for the landing page, print and signage suppliers for anything physical. That was never in the quote. It was in the reality that a preschool needs a poster by Friday.

One spreadsheet held all together

Everything lived in a single workbook. Every month has the same shape: opening balance, planned budget, actual spend, what carried over. Then the content calendar, week by week. Then the task list, with an owner and a status on every line. Then the raw Facebook report.

That list is also how three people stayed in sync. In the later years I worked alongside a content manager and a recruitment manager — one selling places to parents, one selling jobs to teachers, both pulling from the same queue.

A school director does not want a dashboard login. They want one tab that says: here is what we planned, here is what we spent, here is what it produced, here is what’s left.

When the ads overspent in October, the negative balance sat at the top of November and cut the next month’s budget. Nothing needed explaining because nothing was hidden.

Selling a preschool deal means to sell trust

Parents don’t buy a curriculum. They buy the feeling that their child will be safe, happy, and slightly more themselves at the end of the day.

So the calendar was built around the day itself, not the sales pitch. Farm days STEAM lessons Tanabata wishes Sport Day Bat Trang pottery Rizumu movement

Illustrations of the six activity types that anchored the content calendar: Kogumakai thinking-maths and GrapeSeed English ran alongside them.

The school’s own note on the farm days said it better than any copy I could write: a child who has grown food does not waste food.

The best content I made was rarely something I invented. It was something the teachers were already doing that nobody outside the school had ever been shown.

Sales posts were rationed – one or two a month, short. Everything else was evidence. By the time a parent saw the offer, they had spent weeks watching the school being itself.

What six years of numbers show

Every year I ran the same core campaign: get a parent to start a conversation on Messenger. Two numbers tell the story – how many parents messaged, and what each conversation cost.

Parent conversations from Facebook Ads

• In 2020: 86 conversations, each costing 124,330 VND.
• In 2025: 822 conversations, each costing 97,085 VND.
• Almost ten times the volume – for less money per parent.

• Scale to the best year for volume (822, in 2025)
• Most expensive year (126,370 VND, in 2023)
• *2026 covers January to June only
• 2022 was a partial year.

Source: my own monthly tracker

By early 2026 a conversation cost about a fifth of what it cost in year one. In total the tracker holds more than 2,200 parent conversations against roughly 408 million VND of media – under US$17,000 over six years.

None of it came from a clever campaign. It came from small corrections: message ads tested against engagement ads, budget moved to video once video started winning, spend split by campus so Cầu Giấy, Long Biên and Mỹ Đình stopped competing for the same impressions.

Why I stopped

The school scaled down. Four campuses became one.

One campus doesn’t need a plan across four pages, a per-campus ad structure, or three people running marketing and recruitment. It needs a teacher with a phone, an actual in-house team.

I closed the sheet, handed over the accounts, and left on good terms – which, after six years, felt like the right way to finish.

What I’d tell myself in 2019

• Small budgets are a gift. With four million VND a month there is nowhere to hide. I had to learn quickly which post actually makes a parent open Messenger – and that transfers to every budget size afterwards.
• Speed beats polish more often than designers admit. The banner that goes up on the morning of Sport Day is worth more than the perfect one delivered on Monday.
• Longevity is a marketing skill. I didn’t keep this client by being cheapest or most creative. I kept it by being legible – same sheet, same rhythm, same honest reconciliation, month after month, through a pandemic that closed the campuses entirely.
• The client’s own operation is the content strategy.My job was never to make a preschool look interesting. It was to notice that it already was, and get out of the way.

Himawari is still the work I point to when someone asks what marketing looks like without a team, a stack, or a budget – just attention, consistency, and a spreadsheet that tells the truth.