Building an Enrollment Culture at Your School

Creating an enrollment culture in your school begins with instilling a strategic, focused effort on boosting student enrollment.

Creating an enrollment culture in your school begins with instilling a strategic, focused effort on boosting student enrollment.

There is a famous line by management guru Peter Druker: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

Drucker rightly observed that if your organization does not embrace a culture that is oriented toward achieving its goals, it doesn’t matter how strong your business strategy is. You will still fail.

With student enrollment continuing to get more competitive, it is important that your school or district has the right enrollment culture to engage in a strong enrollment strategy.

Is Your Student Enrollment Down?

In my work helping schools and districts enroll more students, I often start off the meeting by asking one simple question: “Why is enrollment down at your school or district?”

How they answer this question tells me a lot about the cultural challenges or mindsets that need to be shifted for them to become more successful in enrollment.  

Here are four dangerous mindsets to have about enrollment — and how you can reframe your thinking to build a culture of enrollment in your school.

1. “The competition is stealing our kids.”

You often hear this complaint in public districts that have a significant charter population. They feel the grand bargain in public schools was broken and that students who should go to their school are instead being swiped away by other schools.

This is a very dangerous mindset.

What it does is absolves the person saying it from responsibility: Those schools are doing something nefarious (stealing), which is why our students aren’t attending our school anymore.

By adopting this mindset, it is easy to paint yourself as a victim and not take any action to address your enrollment challenges.

The more appropriate question or statement to make here is, “I may not like it, but we are in an environment of school choice. And for some reason, families are choosing another school over ours. We need to figure out why and address it.”

By moving to a more positive mindset, you can take action to improve your situation. Understanding what those other schools are offering and comparing them against your own offerings will give you insight into how you stack up against the competition.

If you are a district school in this competitive choice environment, you can learn more in my recent two articles:

• Why Parents Choose Public Schools
• Why Parents Don’t Choose Public Schools

2. “We don’t know why students are leaving.”

Retention is the foundation of developing a strong enrollment system. So if your enrollment funnel has a big leak at the bottom, you need to plug it fast!  

It can be hard when families leave your school because they are not happy.  Administrators work very hard to ensure that they are delivering a positive experience every day. Sometimes, it can be seen almost as a personal criticism when families decide to leave.

Modifying this statement into a more action-oriented one will help you to address this issue: “Families have a choice in where to send their child to school. We should constantly ensure they think we are the best choice for them by listening to complaints and concerns.”

One of the simple things that a school can do is to conduct an annual school climate survey.

Using an instrument like this will help you understand how parents perceive your school. And if you use a mix of both quantitative and qualitative questions, you can often get at some of the things frustrating them and making them consider leaving.

Oftentimes this might be something that is easily remedied but nobody on staff realized was a source of frustration.

However, don’t do a school climate survey unless you are prepared to release the data along with an action plan to address their feedback. Asking their opinions and then sitting on the data will not build the trusting relationship that you are trying to accomplish here.

For more information on these surveys and additional enrollment marketing tips, check out our enrollment guide:

3. “Nobody is in charge of enrollment.”

Imagine a scenario like this: if you lost your Spanish teacher for a year, you wouldn’t say, “Hey, everybody. You all support this Spanish class,” or “Mrs. Principal, in addition to your current responsibilities, can you teach sixth-grade Spanish as well?”

No. You would hire a dedicated Spanish teacher.  

Every university has a Chief Enrollment Officer whose responsibility is to ensure they are attracting enough students to that school.

They know there needs to be somebody responsible and accountable for ensuring they enroll their target number of students. And they all have a specific number target!

Increasing enrollment is simply too important to be run by a committee or by people with competing responsibilities.

4. “We have never done that before.”

How many times have you heard this at your school? Heck, how many times have you heard it today?

Schools, by their nature, do not adapt to change easily. And it’s understandable why: providing an education to students is not a responsibility to take lightly.

However, schools are much more flexible than many of them give themselves credit for.

Adopting some of the techniques and strategies of strategic enrollment marketing may at first pass feel weird and outside of what you “normally do,” but soon, it will become second nature.

Instead of being afraid to try, tell yourself, “I am going to make mistakes, but doing something is better than doing nothing.”

Henry Ford had a great saying: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.”

Building a strong enrollment function at your school or district might first require you to jettison some old ways of thinking that might be holding you back from improving your marketing and recruiting.