I recently had a conversation with the director of admissions at a private Catholic school that is thinking about working with Bright
Minds Marketing.
She said that even though the school had a record enrollment last year, that they still feel that their student recruitment process is
fragile and within a few students of not meeting their goal. She told me that she felt like they were living “paycheck to paycheck” when it
came to student recruiting and wanted some way to feel more confident about the number of potential students that they were attracting.
Does this sound familiar? Are you constantly wondering where the next class of students is going to come from? You are not alone. Most of
the people I talk to about recruiting for their school have a hefty fear about how successful they will be every year. Though a little fear
is good, there are ways that you can take control of the situation and become more confident in your recruiting. Marketing takes time, but
by following these four easy steps, you can begin to own your process.
There are a few important data points that you should analyze to get started. Pull your enrollment numbers from the past 5 years:
By doing this exercise, you will probably find that there are a lot of gaps in what you know and don’t know. Write those down so you can
begin to develop a plan to address them in the future.
For many schools, just going through this audit uncovers a lot of learnings. Do you have a full suite of marketing tools? How good are those tools? Do you need to improve or develop them? It is OK if you don’t have these in place now, but make sure as part of your marketing plan, you are identifying a way to create them in the future. Here are a few types of marketing assets and things to consider:
It is ok if you are answering no to a lot of these. The important thing is to know where you stand and develop a plan to address them. The
list may seem daunting, but start small and start checking them off.
The physical act of writing out your marketing plan is important. It can be a very basic template but force yourself to go through the process. What you put down on paper is not going to be your final work. This should be a living document that you constantly change as you learn more about your environment or what works and what doesn’t work in your marketing.
A few bits of advice on your plan:
This may sound self-serving coming from somebody who helps schools in recruitment, but you can’t do everything well. There are experts at different things when it comes to student recruiting and it might not hurt to bring in specialists to shore up areas where you are not as strong. A few things you might want to consider hiring for:
You can probably perform some of these things yourself, but sometimes you’ll need to hire for a specialty. One of my clients was a chain of
20 very successful schools that just needed expertise in customer
persona development.
And even though I am a marketing consultant, I still hire out for collateral design because that’s not my specialty.
As I told my client that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the best way to remove this feeling of fragility is to understand where
you are (point 1 & 2), understand where you want to be (point 3) and know the best tools to get there (point 4).
Once you have that in place, you will feel more confident in your recruitment and ultimately more successful.
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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