With the constant challenges of how to increase enrollment in your private or charter school, good “intel” is key. The more you understand about the marketplace and where your school sits within it, the more you’ll be able to create effective strategies to enroll more students.
In the business world, one of the most effective tools organizations use to assess where they stand is called a “SWOT” analysis. The
term might sound goofy, but a SWOT analysis of a school and its environment can reveal incredibly useful information to help inform
everything from marketing plans to future enrollment campaigns.
SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—the four critical components of self-awareness for any business or organization. Strengths and weaknesses deal with the internal aspects of your organization—those elements that you can control and improve upon. Opportunities and threats have to do with the external factors in your environment—those things over which you have no real control, but which you can and should respond to.
Conducting an honest assessment of all four of these elements gives you a clearer understanding of your school as an entity and its
position in a competitive marketplace, letting you know where to best target your energies as far as marketing.
Before you pull out your whiteboard and jump into your self evaluation, take a moment to step back and consider all points of view you’ll need to get a true picture of your school and your environment. There’s no one-size-fits all formula for which perspectives you need. It all depends on your particular school.
Faculty members, both tenured and new, athletic directors, parents as well as administrators would all be somewhat "standard" participants in this exercise. For some schools, they may add additional perspectives. For example, a SWOT analysis for a private school will need to also include the perspective of the school’s fundraisers, while a SWOT analysis of a primary school would need to depend on parents more since they might have trouble getting specific feedback from younger students. Figure out the right participants for your school swot analysis.
Once you’ve identified the key stakeholders in your school community to help you perform the analysis, find a time when you can meet free from interruptions.
A good time is often over the summer break or an extended holiday vacation when the team won’t be distracted by the day-to-day (or
really minute-to-minute) distractions that are a part of running a school.
Once you’ve picked a time for the key members of your leadership team for an unhurried meeting, possibly with a third-party business consultant present to help guide the conversation, collect and review any current research about your school. For instance:
The more data you have, the easier it will be to paint an accurate picture.
When your ”SWOT team” is finally assembled with all the relevant data in hand, the brainstorming can begin.
During this phase, ask key questions about each of the four elements and write down people’s responses somewhere everyone can see them. Many schools are already equipped with smart boards that make it easy to save and share the information, but if you only have an old school whiteboard, that works fine, too. I do recommend, however, that you tackle each topic one at a time in order to remain focused
Some examples of what these questions might look like:
Once you have successfully identified the primary strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, compile it into an organized four
section grid that lists everything for easy future reference. The end results should look something like this:
Now comes the most important part. Whenever you have a big decision to make about future marketing plans, campaigns, or anything to do with
future enrollment refer to your school SWOT analysis and ask yourself these questions:
You should have a good answer to one or more of those questions for every consequential decision you make.
By performing a SWOT analysis for you school and creating an action plan based on the results, you’ll have a clearer understanding of where
your target market is and how to reach them more effectively. You’ll also know how to play to your strengths and “lean in” to what attracts
students to your school, and how to communicate those strengths to enroll more students like them.
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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