Recruiting and retaining mission-appropriate students is critical to your school’s success. Therefore, an effective enrollment management program that attracts prospective families, encourages enrollment, and continues to educate your constituents about your school’s value is a necessity.
Recruiting new mission-appropriate families has long been the responsibility of the Admission Office. However, a formalized re-recruitment strategy—a dedicated focus on encouraging current families to re-enroll—is typically less common.
It may be the thinking that “everyone in the school is responsible for promoting re-recruitment.” But to ensure a re-recruitment strategy is developed and executed, the Admission Office must be primarily responsible for both of these functions.
Admission Directors typically create relationships with incoming families and maintain these relationships as students and their parents become settled within the school. This office is the best fit for ensuring efforts are carried out and measured properly.
With input from the School Head, create an Enrollment Management Team that oversees both recruitment and re-recruitment strategies. This team should be comprised of leaders from your Admission, Development, and Marketing/Communications offices—your advancement professionals.
However, it should also include academic and operations leaders, as well as key faculty members who have interest in future leadership roles. This guarantees a 360-degree view of your school, with people from every area focused on the enrollment management strategy.
This team should create goals that align with the school’s overall mission. Its primary responsibilities are to:
- Discuss new developments, such as new survey data or enrollment numbers, and make decisions accordingly.
- Use last year’s enrollment, student performance, and constituent survey data to measure the impact of the current strategy and make adjustments as needed.
- Work together to identify which families, if any, are “at risk” of leaving the school. Reach out to them to help enhance their experience and inspire their renewed commitment.
ISM Consultant Amy Riley further discusses empowering an Enrollment Management Team to drive your school’s recruitment and retention strategies in this Quick-Tip Podcast.
An Enrollment Management Team with a mission-based, student-centered approach can help create successful recruitment and re-recruitment strategies to attract and retain the right students for your school.
Is declining enrollment keeping you up at night? Not sure what’s causing it? Get the “big picture” view of the factors most impacting your hard-income bottom line in our Mastering Enrollment Management workshop, November 1-4, 2017, in Wilmington, DE. Learn to perform a root-cause analysis designed specifically for private-independent schools and walk away with proven strategies to help take your enrollment program to the next level.
Additional ISM Resources:
The Source for School Heads Vol. 14 No. 6 The One Question School Heads Must Answer to Guarantee Re-enrollment
The Source for Advancement Vol. 12 No. 9 Perpetual Enrollment: Is It Right for Your School?
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 36 No. 5 The Enrollment Management Cycle
I&P Vol. 38 No. 2 Who Is Responsible for Enrollment Management?
