Is Your School Late to Market?

Originally Posted on June 30, 2008

Several years ago, when I served as part of the administrative team of a large day school on the east coast, our entire middle school team was called to meet with the head of school. We received a list of fifth grade families, and the charge to make personal phone calls to each and every household before the end of November, in advance of our middle school open house. Our task was to begin selling elementary school families on the merits of our middle school, so that we could retain as many of these children as possible. We hit the phones, initiating lovely conversations…and perhaps even leaving a few well placed voice messages. Open house came. Open house went. In the end, it seemed as if the hours of “personal touch” we had invested had not done much good. It hadn’t. We were late to market.

I now know that we weren’t alone. In fact, many schools seem to share this dynamic—they create wonderful programs and compelling admissions materials, but get their message out too late to fully capture the attention of the families they seek to attract.

Another story-
Earlier this year (and now working as a sitting head of school), I got a call from a dedicated board member and the parent of a child in my school’s third grade. He was an avid supporter of our middle school program. And he was concerned. “Allen, my son’s friends are already making their decisions about middle school. Some of them are picking soccer and little league teams so that their kids will have friends when they leave Schechter at the end of fifth grade. What are we doing about this?”

My board member’s question is one that should provoke serious thinking among day school professionals. There is a growing and welcome knowledge base of expertise within the day school community on how we might reach out to prospective parents and what strategies can help control attrition. (See the PEJE website’s knowledge base, in general and Rheua Stakely’s articles on preventing attrition, in particular.) Still, I find that the question of timing is sometimes overlooked. I have seen many schools begin recruiting prospective middle school students at the start of their fifth grade years, or Kindergarten applicants from the “fours” classes of the local preschools. In each of these cases, the recruiting effort is too late.

Even if families have not made a decision about where their children will attend school, it seems that by the Fall of the year prior to Kindergarten, most households have dramatically limited their choices to a small number of options. Internal profiling at my school revealed that a significant proportion of parents who came to Schechter knew that they would do so even before they had kids. A larger number enrolled because friends, rabbis or pre-school cohort groups collectively encouraged them to look at our school. Our information (still highly anecdotal) suggests that two years prior to the start of Kindergarten is a critical time to reach parents who might consider our school. For middle school decision-making, the effective window of influence seems to begin closing at the start of fourth grade. (It is reasonable to extrapolate the same for high school, with the added complication that children’s input takes on even greater prominence in making high school decisions.)

At Schechter in St. Louis, we have recently begun to explore ways in which we can re-tool our admissions outreach process to better match the dynamic of our parent community’s decision making. We secured a generous donation from a supporter of Schechter, with the instructions that the funds must be used to “think out of the box in our marketing.” After some intense back and forth with both the donors’ representative and local institutions, we emerged with a pilot initiative.

As part of this initiative, Schechter is partnering with a local early childhood program to offer enrichment programming in Hebrew for their three year old children. Schechter will pay for materials, and will subsidize the compensation of a staff person from our faculty to work in this partner institution’s preschool several mornings a week. The curriculum we will use spirals from three to six years of age, and is also used in our Kindergarten. By sharing staff and curriculum, we hope to offer two years of experiences that can serve as a bridge to Schechter, where students may continue learning the same material, perhaps even with the same teacher that they have come to know through their early childhood experience.

(For other ideas about building bridges between schools and ECE programs, listen to Cheryl Finkel under this link:)

I don’t believe that our “out of the box” initiative is all that radical. We simply attempted to connect with potential families at the time that they are actually shopping for the services that we provide. To the extent that we had some data about parent decision making, we acted on it by creating a marketing vehicle that would reach families of three year olds—since that is when they appear to start making decisions about Kindergarten. If we waited until later, we surely would have missed the mark—and the market.

My questions for you are as follows:

My school’s strategy is based upon real but limited anecdotal evidence. Do you have more reliable data about how and when parents make enrollment decisions for their children’s education? If yes, kindly forward this to me, and I will gladly share the knowledge. If no, then we should ask ourselves—how valuable is this information, and can we make a compelling case for funding a vehicle that will allow us to gather it?

Shalom u’Veracha to all.
Rabbi Allen Selis
Head of School – SSDS of St. Louis