Creating a RACI Chart for School Recruitment and Enrollment

If you’re new to your role in student recruitment or school marketing, you might be wondering what should I be doing every day?

• Should I be the one leading tours, or should it be the responsibility of the school principal?
• Who should be responsible for posting to social media? And how often should it be done?
• Who actually is accountable for hitting our enrollment projections?
• And speaking of that, who is responsible for— 

It can be overwhelming. So what do you do?

Well, first of all, don’t worry — pretty much every student marketer or recruiter I’ve talked with has told me the same thing, so you aren’t alone, and things can (and will) get easier! 

Second, get started with a RACI Chart. Keep reading to learn what a school RACI chart is and how it can benefit enrollment, school marketing, and communications teams!

What is a RACI Chart?

A RACI chart is a simple yet powerful organizational management tool that outlines who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each task or decision.

While it’s often used in business, schools can greatly benefit from this structured approach to managing tasks and responsibilities, especially when it comes to the more non-traditional school roles like student recruitment and K-12 school marketing. 

The Overwhelm of Undefined Roles

When I first stepped into a school marketing and recruitment role at a school, I felt excited to get started. But I was also completely overwhelmed. It was the first time I was starting a job from scratch — because it was a new role to the organization, and I had never done it before.

The first day, I spent about two hours staring at my laptop, not quite sure where to get started, so I just started doing anything I could think of that could possibly move the needle on student enrollment.

Marketing and recruitment roles within schools are non-traditional, requiring creativity, strategic thinking, and lots of multitasking. The biggest challenge? No one, including me, really knew what my role entailed.

Without clear guidelines, recruitment felt like a shared responsibility, leading to confusion and inefficiency.

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Why Everyone’s Job Often Means No One’s Job

In many schools, recruitment and enrollment are considered collective responsibilities. While teamwork is essential, this can often lead to confusion and a lack of accountability. When it’s everyone’s job, it can easily become no one’s job.

Important tasks might get overlooked, deadlines get missed, and efforts are often duplicated, affecting both enrollment numbers and staff morale.

That’s why you need a strategy to keep everyone on the same page. 

How to Use a School RACI Chart

First, you’ll need to understand what the RACI acronym stands for:

• R: Responsible 
• A: Accountable
• C: Consulted
• I: Informed

1. Responsible

Responsible means the person who actually does the work on a regular basis.

So if the task is answering prospective parent inquiries, your student recruiter would be responsible for this task on a daily basis.

2. Accountable

Accountable is a little different than Responsible because this represents the person who makes sure the job actually gets done.

So you might have your recruiter responsible for calling families to tell them enrollment deadlines are approaching, but your school principal might be accountable for checking in and making sure that task is done on time and to a high standard.

3. Consulted

Consulted (also called Collaborated) is the people who need to be involved in the task in some way, either by giving advice, supporting, or doing a piece of the overall task.

The easiest way to think of this as the people who have a supporting role in the task.

So if you’re redoing your website, your IT Director is probably the one accountable for the work, but your Communications or Marketing manager might be consulting/collaborating with them to make sure the website’s messaging is in line with your school’s standards.

4. Informed

Finally, that brings us to Informed. These are the people who aren’t actually necessary in the doing of the task but should know it’s happening.

To use another example, if you’re implementing a new website, your teachers probably don’t need to actually do anything about it, but they might want to be informed so that they know to expect some changes the next time they visit it!

How to Structure Your School’s RACI Chart

A RACI chart can be done a few ways, but the way I think works best is having your employees written along the top line and the specific tasks that pertain to student recruitment and school marketing in a column down the left-hand side.

Your school RACI chart will look something like this: 

You can download the above template for FREE and watch a training video on creating school RACI charts in SchoolMint Enrollment Academy!

Once you have your school’s RACI chart template, it’s as simple as filling it in and getting to work.

Check in with your team every so often (I recommend quarterly for the first year) to make sure the chart is still working, and add any new tasks or team members to the lineup!

Real-World Application

In my experience as a new student recruiter, once we introduced a RACI chart, the transformation was remarkable. Everyone knew their roles and what was expected of them. Recruitment activities became more organized, deadlines were met, and enrollment numbers improved.

It wasn’t just about assigning tasks. It was about creating a culture of accountability and efficiency where we were all pushing for the same goal: stronger enrollment for a stronger school. 

Conclusion

A RACI chart is more than just a management tool; it’s a game-changer for schools looking to enhance their recruitment and enrollment efforts.

By defining roles, enhancing accountability, and improving communication, a school RACI chart ensures that every task is managed, no one is overburdened, and important tasks don’t fall through the cracks.

Take control of your school’s recruitment and enrollment today and get started with a school RACI chart!