The SchoolAdmin Blog
Word of Mouth Marketing for Schools: Lesson 1
Last week I attended Word of Mouth Crash Course, the “How to be great at Word of Mouth Marketing” conference. My main takeaway from the event is that the Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing is all about ‘sharing’ and enabling that sharing. Since we focus on school admissions here at SchoolAdmin, I wanted to share this lesson as it relates to you (the admissions office). How can schools use Word of Mouth marketing to attract prospective students and parents?
Here is “Lesson 1” on Word of Mouth Marketing for schools, based on the talk by Andy Sernovitz (@sernovitz)
- Word of Mouth (WOM) can be defined as “Giving people a reason to talk about YOUR stuff. And making it easier for that conversation to take a place (by providing the tools).”
- Word of Mouth topics should be: Portable, Repeatable and Emotional.
- “Nobody talks about chocolate” because everybody already knows it’s great. Use your blog, social media and videos to share information that’s new and worth talking about.
- Think about your school this way: Would your teachers, current parents or alumni talk about your school to other prospective students and parents? Would they recommend you? Are they excited?
- LOVE is the key to Word of Mouth Marketing. If parents, students and faculty love your school, they will talk about it. LOUDLY.
- Advertising is the cost of being boring. If your school is not interesting enough for others to talk about, you’ll be forced to pay to talk about yourself.
If you make Word of Mouth Marketing your focus, you will create an “army of fans.” And an army of fans will undoubtedly make school admissions easier!
Look forward to some more interesting lessons from this conference which would help your schools.
Posted by Sharanya Srinivasan
The Conflicted Admissions Officer: Relationships or Statistics?
What is the single most important factor that Headmasters, Superintendents, and Boards of schools and universities think about when they think of admissions?
If you answered “numbers”, you got it right. These numbers can refer to inquiry to application ratios, yield, selectivity, etc.
Admissions teams across the country are always trying to improve the numbers. One of the tools that is great for breaking a complex admissions process into digestible pieces is the admissions funnel. This tool, though very helpful in identifying where to focus, is missing an important piece of information: PEOPLE. Every one of those numbers represents a real and ongoing conversation and relationship with a candidate or prospective family.
There’s an inherent conflict: you are tasked with improving the numbers, but your job is first and foremost about people. Your job is about connecting with candidates, building relationships, telling the story of your school and helping them find their place in that story.
So you can either focus on finding more candidates, or spending more time with the ones that you have. Numbers vs. People.
Its quantity or quality, right? Common sense says that unless you expand your team, you can’t grow the numbers and improve personal connections at the same time.
I challenge that. I think you can do both.
The keys to success:
- Use technology to save time on routine admissions tasks. There are so many tools out there that can make a difference.
- “Mass Personalize.” Build targeted communication plans to connect with candidates (specifically about the things they care about) in a more efficient way.
- Broaden your audience. Connect with more candidates through your website and social media.
In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss each of these steps in detail. Stay tuned.
Posted by Elyn Roberts
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Twitter for schools: 10 tips to use it as a marketing tool
I love twitter. I think it is a great tool to convey your thoughts in a brief concise manner and be to-the-point. So when I recently came across this wonderful article on 100 ways to use twitter in education, I got really excited. The piece focuses on how schools can integrate Twitter into the classroom, but it also provides great advice on how schools can use Twitter in marketing campaigns to effectively reach parents and students. Now, 100 things is a lot to remember, so I decided to select the 10 most important things to take away that can help schools take advantage of twitter’s potential as a marketing tool.
1. Learn how to use hashtags and choose relevant ones – Hashtags are the words which follow the # sign in twitter. It is a great yet simple way to organize relevant tweets.
2. Learn from others and share (Retweet) that information
3. Ask (and answer) questions
4. Always credit your sources and say thanks
5. Take part in “Follow Fridays” – #followfriday is a neat way to make suggestions to people on who to follow.
6. Create your own chat to connect with parents and get their inputs
7. Pass on information about events and updates
8. Share across platforms – It is important to integrate your twitter with your other social media accounts such as Facebook, YouTube, etc.
9. Establish your brand to create school spirit
And most important of all:
10. Tweet regularly!!!
Posted by Sharanya Srinivasan
The Heights School – Record Enrollment Spotlight
How SchoolAdmin Helped The Heights School Achieve Record Enrollment
2010-2011 was a record admissions and enrollment year for The Heights School in Potomac, MD, with the highest matriculation rate in the history of the school. They had 13% more applications by April then they had collected by June of the previous year.
According to Richard Moss, Director of Admissions for Heights, SchoolAdmin allowed them to facilitate a level of individualized focus on families that made all the difference. “If a school has a director who has a passion to connect with families, they will easily use the SchoolAdmin tools to increase matriculation.”
It Started With Online Inquiries
“Without a doubt, SchoolAdmin increases (web) inquiries,” said Mr. Moss. But it was the communication tools in SchoolAdmin that enabled his team to do a much better job of fielding those inquiries. In prior years, the inquiry process was left in the hands of the families – they were largely names in a file. But with SchoolAdmin, Heights took control of the conversation, efficiently and effectively moving families through to apply.
A Database Admissions Directors Can Use
Because of the complexity of databases, Admissions Directors typically don’t spend much time using them. However, because of the simplicity and power of SchoolAdmin, Mr. Moss used the database every day. “With the amount of information we can capture in the database, it would be silly not to use it. I don’t think I would be ½ as good without the tools that SchoolAdmin provides,” said Mr. Moss. His favorite SchoolAdmin features are:
- Notes: His team can quickly log notes from conversations with families
- Reminders: He easily directs teammates to respond to phone calls, and reminds himself to follow up with prospective families
- Quick Search: Pulling up all the notes on a family in the first few seconds of a phone call
Record Enrollment from 10,000 Feet
With admissions season approaching a close and enrollment time upon him, Mr. Moss shared a story about enrollment with SchoolAdmin. After acceptance decisions were made, his team had two weeks to complete enrollment. It had been an extremely busy and successful admissions season, so he retreated to South America for a much needed vacation, where he climbed mountains by day and accessed the internet at night. He signed into SchoolAmin to track everyone’s enrollment progress, and made calls on Skype. It was his “ultimate SchoolAdmin experience,” as he did it all from 10,000 feet.
Remember Your Prospects in 4 Easy Steps
If you’re anything like me, it’s hard to remember all the prospects you meet and all the discussions you’ve had. Luckily with the right tools and some discipline, you can completely fool everyone – or at least avoid looking like the complete fool. Here’s how:
1. Take copious notes. Write them down or – even better – type them while you are talking.
2. As soon as the conversation is over, put those notes in your CRM or database (if you weren’t already typing there directly). Add any appropriate details like what you observed about your contact’s mood, personality, or appearance (if you met them face to face and want to make sure you remember them). Just be careful not to write anything that you wouldn’t want someone else to see! (Read: They might have been a pain in the “you-know-what”, but you would never want that opinion getting back to them. Instead you might type, “Mr. Johnson prefers to be very involved with every decision related to his son. It is crucial to keep him in the loop.”) Be real, but be polite.
3. Know who they are when they call you back. Spend the first two minutes of your call engaging in a little bit of “strategic” small talk. During that time, what you’ll be doing is searching for their name in your database and reading the most recent notes. Ideally, you should have a database where it’s easy to do a quick and accurate name search and view those notes. Even better, you’ll be able to view the notes from others at your school as well.
4. Set Clear Follow-ups. You should have the ability in your database to schedule a task for yourself or someone else at your school to follow-up with a contact. It’s handy to copy the notes from your last conversation into the details for the task, because sometimes it’s hard to remember WHY you are touching base with them to begin with!
Posted by Elyn Roberts
Three Simple Steps to Social Media
I recently wrote about how use technology to make a personal connection with today’s parents in my post, “The 3 Keys to Staying Connected with Younger Parents.” Aside from having a well-defined and consistent “personal” communication plan for parents, you must also use technology to include them – and even better – entice them to collaborate in your online community. Yup, I’m talking social media here and I know that with Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace and more, it can get pretty overwhelming.
In chatting with the communication folks at some Independent Schools across the country, I’ve learned a few best practices:
1. Pick three social media outlets – you don’t have to use them all – and create a “mash-up” page on your website.
2. Use them efficiently. You don’t have to recreate the wheel for each social media outlet. Instead use RSS feeds, so whenever you post news on your website, it will automatically be pushed to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. This is an easy way to get your news out there to a pretty broad audience, especially since newspapers no longer cover private schools.
3. Use them effectively. Saint Andrew’s School in Florida told me that they post local job opportunities on their LinkedIn group as a resource for their alumni. They know the chances of their Alumni logging into the Alum portal on their website is slim to none, so they’re reaching them in other places with information that is uniquely useful.
I’m curious, how are you using Social Media at your school?
Posted by Elyn Roberts
The 3 Keys to Staying Connected with Younger Parents
Posted by Elyn Roberts
Parents are getting younger. Each new generation of parents is more and more familiar with the bleeding edge technology. They’re constantly connected. They live and breathe online. It’s where they bank, where they shop, where they play, where they nurture friendships and where they post updates about their day. Without a single spoken word, they are constantly connected and up to date – not only with what is going on in the world, but with everyone they know. And it takes just a single glance at their smartphone.
So what does that have to so with Independent Schools? Well, it means that “personal contact” has to be redefined to meet the expectations of the prospective and current parents, and future alumni and donors. They expect from you the same level of service they already get from their banks, their doctors, their frequent flyer programs – knowledge of who they are and the details of their relationship with you. They expect you to know about the conversations they’ve had with other members of your staff. They expect you to know about their family structure. They expect you to know that they just clicked “submit” on a completed application three minutes ago. They expect to be able to log into their parent account and see all aspects of the business they do with you including grades, billing, enrollment status and donation history. They expect immediate access to any “paperwork” they need. And, this is important – when they actually do pick up the phone to call you, or vice-versa, they expect that you’ll know all of this about them as if you had been thinking about them all day.
A personal connection is no longer purely about a face-to-face meeting. It’s also about how well you can demonstrate that you know your families, over the phone, through email and through organized communication. The only way this is possible is to use technology as often and as effectively as they do. Some things to think about:
1. Current, accurate information is crucial and it must be easy for your staff to access extremely quickly. For example, if a donor happens to call your Development director, they expect him or her to know – immediately – that earlier that morning his son, Little Johnny, got accepted into 6th grade and will be trying out for soccer.
2. You’d better have online forms, a Parent Portal and Single Sign-on. Give parents the immediate access to information they demand. They DO NOT want to have to call you find out the status of their application, whether or not their payment was received, or what their child’s homework assignment was. They also don’t want to handwrite anything (it makes their fingers hurt) and they definitely don’t want to mail anything. In fact, they might not even know HOW to mail anything.
3. Your communication plan should be as well defined and consistent as your disaster plan. For every impersonal connection with a parent, you should consistently and quickly follow-up with at least two more personal contacts. For example, if you receive an inquiry and that inquiry specifies that a prospective student has a particular interest in drama, within a few hours of the inquiry receipt, you send an invitation for that student to watch a rehearsal for the upcoming play and have the drama teacher connect with the parent. Sounds pretty easy, right? But spread that across the different types of inquiries… and even further across the different departments of your school and it gets complicated quick. To be able to respond to a variety of different scenarios in a consistent and timely fashion, you need to plan for each one and the action you will take.
And, what about social media? There’s more to know. Stay tuned.