Where do your new students come from? Unless you are running a preschool, chances are that they are coming to your school from another school.
Identifying what schools are sending families into your school and improving those pipelines is a fundamental enrollment strategy for any
private or charter school. But as with any relationship, they must be cultivated and managed to be effective.
Most private and charter schools operate as stand-alone schools. They aren’t part of a natural transition like what occurs in the traditional public school district.
However, every admissions office knows that a small cluster of schools often “feed” a disproportionate number of families to their
school every year.
Nevertheless, even though many schools have anecdotally identified these “feeder schools,” they don’t take the next step to partner and
deepen these relationships. This is a mistake. These schools must constantly be cultivated to create and deepen relationships in order to
bring in more students.
So how do you develop these feeder school relationships? Going about this is rather easy.
There are two sources that you can use to identify feeder schools. The first one is your existing student base. As part of your standard enrollment process, you should always ask what school the student previously attended. In taking this small step, you can identify who are your existing feeder schools.
In my opinion, the new student enrollment form is really a wasted opportunity for schools to gather critical marketing
information. I cover this and other small changes you should make to your enrollment form to drive higher enrollment here.
Understanding who came from what school allows you to begin to make a qualitative judgment on the quality of the schools that feed into
yours.
If you know that students from feeder school X are particularly strong academically, you can then focus on that school to try to recruit
higher achieving students. If you know that students from feeder school Y are particularly well behaved and you are looking to attract
more serious and attentive students, then spend more time with school Y.
This is a bit of a change in culture. Targeting the attributes of a student rather than just hoping good students come to you is not
how K-12 schools normally work. But if you think about how colleges (who have a targeted feeder school list) do it, it is a similar
concept. Go to the source for the best students.
Knowing your existing feeder schools is just the first step. Your next step is to identify all of the potential feeder schools that you could tap into. A great resource for this is the website www.greatschools.org.
Using this website, enter your school’s address and the site will identify every school within a five-mile radius. It is very easy to
set the search for preschools if you a K-8 seeking to grow your base or to set it for elementary schools if you are a high school trying to
make sure you are covering all of your potential opportunities.
A lot of times you may think you know all of the schools around you, but you can be surprised. Once you have this wider list,
review it with your staff to identify which schools should be a target for your relationship building efforts.
Now that you have your shortlist of potential feeder schools it is a matter of creating relationships with those schools. Contact either the principal or guidance counselor or in the case of a preschool, the center director.
Offer to provide them a school tour or to meet with them to help them understand the specific benefits of your school for their
students. You should always be able to articulate who your target student is when you are discussing your
school with a potential feeder school.
This is very critical for elementary schools. Being able to recruit a strong kindergarten class is often a key area of strength for an
elementary school. But yet, many schools don’t actively reach out to the preschools operating in their area.
Now that you have identified your feeder schools and made initial contact, it is important to continue to deepen that relationship.
Here are some ideas for how you can partner with feeder schools:
There are many different approaches you can take, so try them all to deepen the relationship and figure out what works best.
Establishing school feeder relationships is an easy and free marketing program that will pay huge dividends as you attempt to recruit and
enroll more students and should form the base of your enrollment marketing efforts.
Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email to nick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call us at 317-361-5255.
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