It’s re-enrollment season, and as a savvy data-driven admission directors, marketing directors, and advancement directors, you know that studies say enrollments are down 10% in 10 years and hard inquiries are down 20%. This excellent article by Mike Connor so eloquently addressed how to tackle this issue intelligently that we just had to reprint it. Read the original here.
Latest headlines: NAIS enrollments down 10% in 10 years. Hard
inquiries down 20%, mirroring private colleges. Listservs buzzing about
how to increase full-pay families. Even successful schools with
waitlists in upper grades are concerned about lower school enrollment,
where the value proposition is often more difficult to make.
Sound familiar? When I was an admission officer for a boarding and
day school a couple of decades back, I was seeing similar issues even
then. But the threats have since multiplied many times over. See
SSATB’s excellent report, Sizing Up the Competition.
I remember interviewing for my first admission job and
asking the admission director I was to replace to acquaint me with her
marketing strategy. “I just wait for the phone to ring,” was her reply, as she calmly crocheted, relaxing behind her paper-free, exquisite walnut desk.
But as the competition has ramped up, so have the tools that are at our disposal to confront it head-on.
The past seven years I have been building a model geared to the needs
of independent schools to help increase the number of full pay leads
you can generate -- and the strategy to turn those prospects into hard
inquiries and visits. Imagine being able to pinpoint them at rooftop
level and seeing where your current parents, faculty, trustees, alumni,
and brand ambassadors live in relation to your prospects in order to
mount a word-of-mouth campaign?
Imagine knowing not only their home value, but how much equity they
have. For schools that are struggling to increase diversity, imagine
knowing their religious preferences and ethnicity. For schools trying
to balance their enrollment with more athletes or more artists, imagine
knowing who they are and where to recruit them. For development
officers, imagine knowing what charities they support. For the CFO,
imagine being able to visualize the numbers of potential children in
incoming classes by age, beginning with newborns. For all these,
imagine knowing what messages motivate them to action, and how they want you to approach them.
And finally, imagine projecting where your mission-appropriate
families who share your values will live five years out, so you can
proactively "skate to where the puck is heading."
It’s called Enrollment Feasibility and Forecasting.
When I was in admission, I would have killed to have had the
intelligence these tools provide to help me deploy my ambassadors and my
marketing budget in the most cost-effective way.
Now, Heads, Boards, and CFOs are demanding it. And if you
are a savvy data-driven admission director, marketing director, or
development director, you should be demanding it, too.
Even though demographics are shifting and the competition is
breathing down our necks, there is always a way to deal with
it--intelligently. Granted—nothing will ever replace great teachers,
great teaching, and a curriculum that will help our students adapt to
the world they will inherit. That’s our product. Great teaching and learning is our strongest marketing asset.
You may have the greatest educational "product" in the world. But it
won’t matter unless the right people know about you, and you can prove to them that you deliver it better than anyone else.
About Mike Connor
President, Connor Associates
Mike Connor is co-author of the National Association of Independent Schools’ (NAIS) book, Marketing Independent Schools in the 21st Century. His white paper, It’s What’s Inside That Counts: Maximizing Internal Marketing, has been digitally published by NAIS and many state, regional, provincial, and international independent school associations. Connor Associates Strategic Services, LLC has worked with over 450 independent, charter, and faith-based schools in the United States, Europe, Africa, and China since 1998.