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.

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

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

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 6^th 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.

Posted by: Elyn Roberts