As Chief Evangelist at SchoolMint, I regularly speak with district leaders and communications teams across the country. Lately, many have told me they’re being asked (often for the first time) to lead student recruitment.
If that’s your situation, you’re not alone. Recruitment is different from traditional PR, storytelling, or brand marketing. It requires new skills, new tools, and a different mindset.
This guide shares where to start. The recommendations come from:
- Districts like Dallas ISD, St. Paul Public Schools, and Newark that have reversed years of enrollment decline.
- Charter and private schools that have honed recruitment strategies for decades.
- Our own SchoolMint experts, many of whom led enrollment work in schools and districts before joining our team.
My goal: give you proven strategies and practical insights to help your district launch student recruitment with confidence.
The Recruitment Mindset
The biggest difference between traditional district communications and student recruitment is that recruitment is closer to sales than public relations.
With recruitment, the goal isn’t just awareness or public image. It’s more about moving families through a clear enrollment funnel — from first inquiry to a school tour to enrollment.
Adopting a recruitment mindset means:
- Treating prospective parents as leads, just like businesses treat prospective customers
- Tracking conversion rates at each stage of the process
- Using clear calls to action (CTAs) that guide parents to the next step
- Measuring the return on investment (ROI), because every new enrollment brings additional funding
Some districts are already embracing this approach:
- Duval County Public Schools (FL) created a Chief Enrollment Officer role on the district cabinet to signal recruitment as a top priority.
- Los Angeles USD (CA) Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has made recruitment a regular talking point in the media and invested directly in schools to attract families.
Successful recruitment requires visible leadership commitment and a shift in mindset across the organization.
Investing in Student Recruitment Efforts
One of the biggest questions district communications leaders face is: how do we pay for this?
Historically, most districts haven’t had a student recruitment budget, so even modest amounts (e.g., $20,000 per school per year) can feel eye-popping to leadership. The key is showing the ROI.
The key to navigating this discussion is to communicate clearly the relationship between the investment and its potential return.
Let’s say I was helping you justify a $20,000 spend on student recruitment:
If your district receives $10,000 per student in funding, enrolling just two new students covers that initial $20,000 investment.
Keep in mind that’s just the first-year gain in funding.
If you recruited that student in kindergarten and kept them until high school graduation, that’s a $130,000 gain in funding over the course of the student’s time in your district.
Charter and private schools understand this well. Many invest heavily in recruitment (often hundreds of thousands of dollars) and justify the investment by proving the ROI. For example, one Florida charter network with 20 schools shared with me they spend nearly $1,000,000 per year on recruitment efforts.
The good news? You don’t need to match that level to see results. Even small, strategic investments can generate meaningful enrollment growth. But without a budget, outreach will fall short.
Build or Buy?
District communications already covers a lot: crisis response, PR, media relations, etc. But student recruitment is a different challenge, requiring a sales mindset, specialized strategy, and tools you may not use today.
Most districts find success with a blend of in-house work and outside expertise:
- Your superpower: local context. You know your schools and community better than anyone. That insight drives messaging, visuals, and strategy.
- What’s harder to tackle: digital advertising, lead nurturing, and funnel management, all of which are areas that require specific marketing skills.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t ask an English teacher to write a press release just because they’re “good at writing.” Likewise, even the most capable communications leaders shouldn’t be expected to become recruitment experts overnight.
That’s where SchoolMint comes in, bringing proven strategies, tools, and hands-on support so you don’t have to build it all from scratch.
Mistakes to Avoid
Here are several common pitfalls to avoid as you begin your work in student recruitment.
Mistake #1: Promoting Your District Instead of Individual Schools
Families don’t typically choose to enroll in a district. Rather, they are choosing specific schools.
Even if your district faces negative perceptions, individual schools can have strong positive reputations. Focusing on unique programs, successful outcomes, and safe learning environments helps families feel confident in their enrollment decisions.
Over time, the positive impression that parents have for your individual schools will build trust in the district.
Mistake #2: Not Making Principals the Stars of Your Recruitment Efforts
Principals are the face of your schools. Parents want to know they’re engaged, accessible, and personally invested in students’ success.
That’s why principals should be front and center in recruitment, featured in ads and videos, trained to engage prospective families, and ready to deliver great school tours.
At schools where enrollment is growing, principals embrace this role. Families make decisions based on trust and personal connection, and that can’t be managed from the district office. Each principal must take the lead in “selling” their school.
Dr. Fatima Lawson at Highwood Hills Elementary School in Saint Paul Public Schools is the perfect example of a highly engaged principal who’s helped her school go from being on the closure list in 2021 to growing enrollment by 45+ students in the 2024–2025 school year. Click here to read the story of how Dr. Lawson and her team did it.
Mistake #3: Relying on Traditional Media
When districts first consider advertising, the default is often traditional media (e.g., billboards, print ads, and radio). While these channels can raise general awareness, these tactics alone rarely drive meaningful enrollment growth.
Take San Leandro USD, a smaller district overshadowed by Oakland USD. Billboards helped them get noticed locally, but even there, leaders knew they needed more than visibility. To truly compete, they had to reach families where decisions were actually being made: online.
Today’s parents research schools on the web and compare options. That’s why digital advertising is far more effective. It allows you to:
- Target specific audiences in multiple languages
- Reach families when they’re actively searching
- Capture contact information so you can follow up
- Measure results
Traditional media can spark awareness. Digital media turns interest into enrollment.
Mistake #4: Focusing on Vanity Metrics
I often hear district communications leaders describe the success of their marketing efforts based solely on metrics like impressions. While these numbers can look impressive, they don’t necessarily mean your campaign is working.
These are called vanity metrics: numbers that make things look good but don’t actually translate into results.
For example:
If 10,000 people see your school’s Instagram ad but no one clicks on it, that’s not a success.
But if only 100 people see it, and 10 of them click and fill out an interest form, that’s a real win.
Why? Because those 10 families are actively engaging with your school and considering enrollment.
The goal of ads should be engagement, not just exposure. Instead of counting views, focus on capturing contact information for prospective families.
This allows you to build relationships with parents well before they’re ready to enroll, ensuring that when they do make a decision, your school is top of mind.
Keep in mind that parents who complete inquiry forms will expect timely communication, often in the evening or on weekends, which can be challenging for your internal team.
Partner with an external marketing expert (like SchoolMint) to manage this outreach for you and free your team from extra hours.
A Step-by-Step Plan to Get You Started
Here’s how I recommend districts begin their student recruitment work:
Step 1: Conduct Diagnostics
Start by conducting a comprehensive diagnostic assessment for each school you plan to support.
It’s critical to know exactly what needs to be fixed before you start investing time and money. The worst thing you can do is throw resources at a problem only to discover it wasn’t the problem that needed solving.
This assessment should include an evaluation of the targeted school’s:
- Current marketing efforts
- Online reputation
- Customer service
- School tour quality
- Overall ease of the enrollment process
These diagnostics are essential to ensure your recruitment dollars and time are spent effectively.
Step 2: Select a Pilot Group
Rather than attempting to roll this out districtwide at once, start small. Select a subset of schools that have specialized or differentiated offerings. You want schools that have something unique to showcase.
Most importantly, choose schools with engaged principals who are excited about the opportunity to improve recruitment, because their active participation will be critical to success.
This is exactly what San Antonio ISD did in 2018, and it paid off. By focusing on a few key schools with specialized programs, they successfully attracted families from neighboring districts that didn’t offer the same types of opportunities.
Starting small has two key benefits:
- It allows you to test strategies to see what works best in your community.
- It creates internal champions in your principals, and school leaders who have seen success can build buy-in across the district.
If you want district-wide adoption, nothing is more persuasive than showing hesitant principals that one of their peers with the same resources made it work.
Step 3: Provide Training for Staff and Principals
Begin with an introductory training session for your entire team covering the basics of student recruitment. Follow this up with specialized training sessions tailored to each role.
For example, principals should receive specific training on giving great school tours, while office staff would receive customer service training focused on communication with prospective families.
This approach ensures everyone has the core knowledge and specific skills required by their role.
For example:
- In Baltimore Public Schools, 101-level training was rolled out to all principals during their start-of-school professional development process to ensure baseline competencies around student recruitment.
- In Albuquerque, a group of school leaders went through an intensive two-day bootcamp to enable them with recruitment skills.
- In Tucson, magnet school leaders got regular virtual recruitment training to maintain their skills.
Step 4: Develop a Recruitment Plan
Each school needs a simple, written plan to guide its recruitment work. This keeps efforts focused, makes responsibilities clear, and ensures everyone is aligned on goals and next steps.
Create a clearly defined recruitment plan for each school, including:
- A clear enrollment goal (for example, “Enroll 20 new students”)
- A simple description of what makes each school special
- Who you want to reach with your marketing
- A clear plan for marketing your school to families
- How you’ll offer tours and engage with prospective families
- Who will be responsible for following up with prospective families
Step 5: Make it Easy to Enroll in Your District
A complicated admissions process can be a substantial barrier to enrollment. Today’s parents expect mobile-friendly, online enrollment options.
If you require families to fill out a complex set of forms or come into a physical enrollment center, you risk losing prospective families right as they’re about to cross the finish line.
A simple way to evaluate your current process is to perform a self-audit from the lens of a first-time parent:
- Is it clear how to navigate the process?
- Are you using too much educational jargon?
- Is it easy for families to apply to a school outside of their neighborhood?
- Are you welcoming to families from outside of the district?
- If they get stuck, is there someone to call who can help?
Consider that the typical charter school application takes around two minutes to complete.
If your process is substantially longer or requires many more steps, a parent might assume this is how all interactions with your district will feel.
This is, after all, the first administrative interaction the parent is having with your organization. Ensuring an easy process creates a positive first impression.
Step 6: Measure, Adjust, Improve
Student recruitment isn’t a one-time activity. In fact, for organizations growing enrollment, recruitment is a year-round activity.
As such, you should be continuously measuring the success of your recruitment efforts. Specifically, track how many prospective families inquire, how many school tours are scheduled, and how many students enroll.
You’ll use this information to refine your process and become experts at student recruitment.
Closing Thoughts
As I reflect on the schools and districts I’ve worked with that successfully grew enrollment, one consistent factor stands out: their commitment to making things easy for families.
Often, the complexities inherent in districts unintentionally get passed on to families, leaving them frustrated or feeling ignored. Organizations that consistently grow enrollment do the opposite.
They place an extraordinary emphasis on the family experience — I would even call them obsessed with customer service — and it shows in their enrollment figures.
When you interact with staff in these districts, you immediately feel that families are genuinely valued. These organizations have successfully adopted a customer-focused mindset that flows throughout the entire district, and as a communications leader, you’re uniquely positioned to help foster this mindset.
The era of being guaranteed students because they live near your schools is gone. As school choice expands, improving our student recruitment practices is no longer optional.
If districts don’t master recruitment and fully adopt this customer-first mindset, I fear continued difficult decisions around closing schools and cutting staff while other educational options thrive.
Take the Next Step: Grow Enrollment with Digital Ads
Recruitment starts with awareness, but it works only if families know about your schools and feel compelled to enroll.
That’s where SchoolMint’s professional digital advertising service comes in.
We design and manage targeted social media campaigns exclusively for K-12 schools and districts, helping you:
- Reach families who are actively searching for schools
- Deliver ads in multiple languages to connect with your community
- Capture inquiries and follow up with families on your behalf
- Free your team from the heavy lift of campaign setup and management
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn how SchoolMint can help you increase your student enrollment!
