Charter School Enrollment: Four Ways to Get Your Faculty Involved

As a charter school leader, managing your charter school’s enrollment is a hard and, sometimes, lonely job—and there never seems to be enough time to get everything done.
Often, your colleagues at the school don’t understand the impact of your school’s enrollment numbers on the financial well-being of your school. If they do, they have few opportunities to collaborate or even understand how they can help make a positive difference.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be a solo job. Far from it. With the right approach, you can encourage your faculty to play a larger role in your charter school enrollment efforts.
Understandably, a teachers’ time can be hard to come by. But because your faculty represents the heart and soul of your school, they can be a huge asset as you are trying to attract (and retain) students.

Here are four easy things you can do to teach your faculty to become more engaged and help bolster your charter school enrollment numbers.

1. Talk – and brag – about your faculty

Parents love to know that the people teaching their children are qualified, smart teachers. They trust that they are going to help that child grow both academically and socially over the next year. But most parents know very little about the teachers at your school.
Therefore, your faculty should be the “stars” of your enrollment marketing efforts. How great would it be the next time you talk to a parent about why those chose your school and they respond by citing some specific and positive attributes of your excellent faculty?
Plus, showcasing your faculty and including them in your marketing efforts is almost a guaranteed way to engage them and have them feel some ownership of attracting students to your school.
Your first step is to make sure that you have compiled bios on all your teachers. These should be a mix of things that establish the quality of your teachers; level of education, where they went to school, types of degrees, years teaching, etc., as well as fun facts, hobbies, favorite experience as a teacher, what inspired them to work in a school, etc.
Your next step is to make sure you have a faculty section on the website where you can publish all of your staff biographies. You’d be surprised how few schools do this. Providing this “inside” information can increase interest in your school because it enables parents who are considering your school to see your strong and varied instructional staff, and it can even provide a competitive edge.
Once you have your staff’s information compiled and, on your website, it’s very easy to use this content to create a series of social media postings. Keeping up with the constant need to post material on social media is challenging for every school. But laying a solid foundation with those bios buys you a lot of content that you can use year after year.
Consider doing a “Teacher Tuesday” or a “Faculty Friday” series of posts where you post the bios on your social media channels. If you have a monthly or weekly newsletter, this would be fantastic content to feature there as well. Celebrating your staff can also create a powerful community feel for your school – your faculty might find common bonds with parents, prospective parents, or even students, over attending the same university or sharing the same hobby.
You will probably find that parents will engage more with these posts and make comments like: “She was an awesome teacher.”, or “We loved Mrs. Smith.”.
Going through this process will also allow you to gather some fun facts about your staff that you can use in your marketing. Things like “50% of the teachers at Inspire Charter School have master’s degrees”, “10 of the teachers at Northside STEM Academy are alumni of our school”, or “We have over 600 years of teaching experience at Science Prep.” These can be little blurbs on twitter or they make a great infographic for your admissions material.

2. Use your instructional staff as subject matter experts

Parents often read or research suggestions on parenting, particularly for specific phases of their kids’ lives. You only need to do a quick search on parenting blogs to realize that parents are constantly seeking information. Your instructional staff are your internal subject matter experts in childhood development and education and can be excellent resources.
Set up a simple editorial calendar by asking each of your staff members to write one to two articles a year that you can use across all of your marketing channels. (These should be roughly 600-1200 words—but let the content determine the appropriate length.)
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
• Should students specialize in one sport or play multiple sports? – Athletic Director / Gym Teacher
• Best educational toys for a third grader – Third Grade Teacher
• The books that every 6th grader should read – Sixth Grade Teacher or Librarian
• How much screen time is too much? – Guidance Counselor
• Signs that your child is ready for kindergarten – Kindergarten Teacher
The options go on and on. Don’t dictate to your staff what they write but give them creative freedom based upon questions that parents are asking about. I’m sure many of your staff would love to offer suggestions and advice based on their expertise. Let them!
Once you have compiled several articles (blog posts), you now have a ton of content that you can use for your charter school marketing efforts. These can be items like lead magnets (articles on your website that are used to identify prospects), social media content or can be used in a weekly/monthly newsletter, just to support parents by providing a valuable resource.

3. Get them involved in your student enrollment

The personal touches in your student enrollment are often going to make big impressions with prospective parents. When a student tours your school (and you’ve collected their contact information), as part of your follow-up process, have one of the teachers – who will be working with that child in the upcoming year – write a short personal note thanking them for coming and describing a little bit about what the next year will look like. This doesn’t have to be a long letter, but it is much more about the thought and the fact that the teacher personally reached out to the prospective parent.
Even better, if the student expressed interest in your language program, art curriculum or STEM offerings, have the teacher from that discipline write the note. This personalized approach based upon what the student is interested in will pay huge dividends in your recruitment efforts.
Many schools have the teacher write a note for the new students entering their classroom over the summer, this idea just take this one step further and expands it to your prospective students.

4. Increase the amount of positive communication from the teacher to the parent

Though this recommendation is primarily designed for your existing students, a strong charter school enrollment program focuses on the retention of students as well as attracting new students.
Parents love to get visibility into how their child is doing in school. Most parents will check grades, but it is the softer and more emotional development milestones that they don’t hear about as often.
Parents will greatly appreciate a short email or better yet a handwritten note from your teachers to parents just saying something like, “I wanted to let you know what a pleasure it is to have Alex in my class. He is such a good helper and is always being a friend to the other kids.” You better believe that note is going to go on the refrigerator at home and maybe even spur positive conversations around the dinner table.
As every parent can attest, as kids get older, it gets harder and harder to draw out what happened at school that day. Having these as conversation starters can have the added bonus of helping to improve the communication between the parent and their child.
Plus, these small notes, help to show to the student that there are adults in his/her life that care about him/her. Establishing that feeling in a child is one of the greatest ways to encourage engagement in school.
Of course, your teachers’ time is understandably limited, so this doesn’t need to be for every student, every week, but try to encourage your staff write these at least quarterly for each student.

In Conclusion

Your faculty can be a “secret weapon” in your charter school enrollment activities. Utilizing their influence and their knowledge can provide an impactful lift to your marketing and recruiting efforts.
It can be difficult to get your staff engaged because they are all busy doing their own job. But helping them understand that sustaining and boosting enrollment provides job security and helps to ensure the financial health of your school, may inspire action in even the most reluctant of staff members.
In addition, these four steps are all fairly small things that shouldn’t take a huge time commitment from any single staff member. Collectively, though, they can have a very positive impact on how both prospective and current parents perceive your school and your school community, ideally resulting in a boost to your charter school enrollment numbers.

Digital Marketing for Charter Schools: An Actionable Workbook to Help You Achieve Your School’s Goals!
Still scratching your head as to how to go about implementing marketing efforts to support your charter school enrollment efforts? You’re not alone! This free manual will be your go-to guide for all of your school’s digital marketing needs! Download this actionable workbook to help build get your marketing plans started, guide you as you define your audience and key differentiators, choose your tactics, and start to build your campaigns.

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The What, Why, and How-to for Designing a School Satisfaction Survey for your Charter School

Your charter school’s success depends on many things, but key among them is how satisfied your key stakeholders are with your school. The easiest way to understand this is to ask them! For example, here are a few vital questions a school satisfaction survey can answer: How satisfied are your parents? How satisfied is your staff?

What is their risk of defection? What parts of the school are they satisfied with and what parts do they find lacking?

Your students (and their families) are your ‘customers’ so keeping them satisfied with the quality of your school’s offerings is vital to maintaining – and ideally increasing – enrollment, and therefore important to your school’s financial wellbeing.

There are two ways to increase enrollment at your school: attracting new families or retaining more of your existing families. Schools spend a lot of time, money and effort in attracting new families, but retention is often somewhat considered an afterthought.

But, it is a lot easier to keep families than it is to attract new ones—and there is a significant cost benefit. Different sources will cite different costs, but the standard rule of thumb that I have found is that it generally costs five times more to attract a new customer than it is to retain one. This is one very good reason that understanding the true satisfaction levels of your ‘customers’ can be imperative to your school’s health and retention rates.

Many school leaders shape their perception of parental satisfaction by the interactions that they have with parents. But this is generally not representative of how your entire parental base feels, and often, it is skewed towards the very engaged, the often so-named “high maintenance” parents – or simply the loudest voices in the room.

But, parents are just one of your key stakeholders. Your staff forms the backbone of your school, so understanding how to keep them satisfied and motivated in their job also needs to be a critical part of any principal’s (or leadership team’s) goals for the year.

A simple school satisfaction survey, administered yearly to both your parents and staff, will give you a wealth of information and allow you to understand how the majority of your parents and staff feel about your school.

Here are the five key questions you should ask yourself when you are planning your school satisfaction surveys:

1. Should you conduct the survey on your own or should you pay to have this done?

The Do-it-Yourself Option:
There are several free online survey vehicles out there. You can use Survey Monkey, Survey Gizmo, or you can even create a survey using Google Forms. If you have the time and knowledge, you can pull together a decent survey.
But a DIY approach can have some noteworthy drawbacks:

Parents are often leery of being completely honest if they think that in some way their answers can be tied back to them or their child. Even though you tell them it is anonymous, they may not believe you. You run the risk of getting watered down feedback.
If you are doing this for staff – they will never be honest since they feel that this is not anonymous, and it will impact their job if they voice a negative opinion.
Writing good questions is an art as well as a science. There is a skill in crafting questions that can get at the underlying issues. You can probably get there eventually, but you might find that this is taking more time than you wanted to spend.
Analyzing survey results is another time-consuming task. Is this really where your time is best spent?

Professional Survey Service Options
Market research firms regularly conduct customer satisfaction surveys for their clients. The one caution I would make is to try to find a firm that does these for schools. There are often nuances in education that need to be considered when conducting these types of surveys.
Additionally, these organizations will be able to provide context and benchmarks from other schools similar to yours so you know if you are truly doing well or need to make some improvements.

Some options for survey firms:

2. How long should your survey be?

If this is your first time running a school satisfaction survey, there might be a tendency to ask too many questions. Schools often take the “kitchen-sink” approach in their surveys because, although some of those the answers may be interesting, they may not really be actionable or helpful for achieving your specific survey goals.

Survey Monkey recently published some interesting data about survey completion. They looked at surveys ranging from 1-30 questions from 100,000 users. This research uncovered some interesting data.
This chart shows that the higher the number of questions, the smaller amount of time people are thinking about the answer. Additionally, Survey Monkey found that the abandonment rate increased for longer surveys. Surveys that were longer than 7 – 8 minutes saw their completion rates drop by 5 – 20%.

3. What should you ask?

This will vary by school, but the most important question to ask is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a simple question and is widely used across businesses to measure satisfaction. It is a simple question and states, “On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend (your school) to a friend or colleague”.

To gain your NPS, you break your respondents into three groups. Parents who scored you a 9 or 10 are your “promoters”. 7-8 are passives and 0 – 6 are “detractors”. To get your score, take the percentage of promoters, subtract the percentage of detractors and throw out the passives. Voila! You have your NPS score.

Understanding how your NPS score compares against other schools is a bit tricky. (Another potential reason to use an outside consultant), but Temkin Group publishes yearly statistics on industry NPS scores. You really want to approach the level of Amazon at an NPS score of 47 versus that of the cable companies which average around -11!

This NPS is a good standard question that you can use every year to track your progress on improvement.
Here are other topical questions that you may want to ask:

Opinion on overall academic quality
Use of technology in the classroom
How safe is the school
The effectiveness of differentiated instructional programs
Enrichment / after school programs
Communication programs
The overall trend of the school (getting better, staying the same, getting worse)
Quality of the cafeteria and food offerings

The last one may seem to be of low importance, but in the surveys that I have run, this is an important criterion for the younger (millennial) parents.
If you are also surveying your staff – you will want to include questions related to their overall job satisfaction:

Do they feel valued by the administrative team?
Do they feel that the administrative team supports their efforts in the classroom?
Do they feel that they have enough professional development opportunities?

I also generally recommend to clients that we include a number of “open-ended questions”. These are questions such as:

What is the one thing you would like to see improved at our school?
Are there additional things you would like the administration to know that weren’t covered in this survey?

Since these questions are qualitative in nature, you can’t track them through a simple metric, but they will give you a lot of very interesting insights into what your parents (and staff) are thinking

4. When should you conduct a school satisfaction survey?

Generally, you have three windows to run your surveys:

October – November
January – February
March – April – May

These avoid a lot of the holidays and you always want to give new parents a couple of months to familiarize themselves with your school before you survey them.

You should also consider running your satisfaction survey every year. It can be easy to fall into the habit of just doing a satisfaction survey as part of your reaccreditation process. However, running a survey once every 5 – 7 years only gives you a snapshot, not a trend.

Considering that every year, 15% of your families are new to your school, you’ll definitely want to run this every year to capture each incoming class and be able to map their satisfaction trends over time.

5. What should you do with the results?

Use the data for planning for improvements for next year, and to track how well you are hitting your satisfaction goals. Take them to your board of directors and share with your leadership team so that they have key insights into your school’s success—and an understanding of any areas that may need work.

Be very careful if you choose to not release the results of the school survey to your parent base. I always advocate to my clients that transparency on results is best, but only if you are also telling parents what your plan is to address their critical feedback.

If you choose not to release the results, don’t be surprised if parents don’t answer your next survey, or assume that the reason why you didn’t release the results is because they were bad.

I hope that this information helps you to understand the value of creating and implementing a school satisfaction survey and why it benefits your school to do one each and every year.

Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email tonick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call them at 317-361-5255.

Since the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.6 billion in support of 600 charter schools that educate 800,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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Charter School Enrollment: Unified Enrollment and Enroll Indy

Thirty years ago, the process for selecting and enrolling in a school was very easy. Parents would send their child to the neighborhood public school, or if they had the means and/or desire would choose to apply to a private and/or parochial school. With the introduction and growth of charter schools, choosing a school is now a more involved and often a complex decision. Though some would say that the free market approach to school choice – and the option for charter school enrollment – is good, others have suggested that it has created a challenging system that disproportionately skews towards parents who have the time and ability to ensure that their child gets into the best school.
In an attempt to address these concerns and simplify what had become a very complex process, cities are turning to unified enrollment systems which provide parents a single place to research schools, a common application and single process to “match” to the school of their choice.
Denver and New Orleans were the first to roll these out in 2011. Both systems were able to pull together both traditional public school enrollment and public charter school enrollment into a single, common system. New Orleans also included their private schools. Since then, other cities like Washington DC, Camden and Newark have instituted this unified enrollment system across both traditional public schools and public charter schools while others like Detroit, St. Louis and Kansas City have created these systems without traditional public school participation and only include the public charter schools.
Early research of the Denver system has shown that this program has brought more equity to the group of schools who participate with higher enrollment of minorities, lower-income students and English language learners to the charter sector.
However, the move to common enrollment has not been without controversy. In Boston and Oakland, the implementation of unified enrollment has been stifled by concerns about charter school expansion, believing that the implementation of a unified system will drive more students away from the local traditional public schools.
Recognizing some of the challenges that other cities had faced in rolling out unified enrollment, Indianapolis was very deliberate about garnering community support of a unified enrollment program. In the fall of 2017, Enroll Indy was launched with substantial support from the two key local players in education: The Mind Trust and the Mayor’s Office of Charter Schools. Caitlin Hanlon, the founder of Enroll Indy, was a Mind Trust fellow and had structured the system during her fellowship.
The organization conducted a well-designed community outreach program prior to launch. This outreach garnered support from many well-known neighborhood organizations, civic groups, and schools. In its first year, a total of 57 schools participated in Enroll Indy. This included all the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and most of the larger charter schools in the city. — few notable exceptions included the Christel House schools and the charter (non-innovation schools) of Phalen Leadership Academy.
Under the Enroll Indy system, any kindergarten or above student who is changing schools to a school that participates in the system is required to register with the Enroll Indy website and indicate their priority choice for a school. They are then matched to a school based upon their priority choices and the space available at the school.
Enroll Indy has changed the enrollment and recruitment dynamics within the city of Indianapolis. As a school enrollment consultant, I had the opportunity to work with several clients in Indianapolis during the roll-out. I wanted to share some of our experiences and ways that schools can maximize their recruitment efforts in a unified enrollment environment.

1. It is going to be harder to enroll students if you choose to operate outside of Enroll Indy.

As a charter school leader in Indianapolis, or really in any unified enrollment system, you need to ask the fundamental question: Should we participate in this system for our charter school’s enrollment? This is a judgment call based upon the success and quality of the existing enrollment strategy for your charter school. If you have a well-designed enrollment system, consistently have a waiting list, and can communicate to all prospects that they don’t need to use Enroll Indy to enroll in your school, you might be able to run independently. As I stated above, a couple of schools are going this route. However, generally, there are more positives (for the expansion of charter schools) than negatives to be gained from Enroll Indy, so I recommend to my clients that they participate. If you choose to operate independently, you are going to have to overcome the perception that all schools are part of this system. This can be done, but it will require more work. Enroll Indy participated in over 60 community events and did phone banking /canvasing of over 25,000 households in Center Township. That is tough to compete against.
If you choose to participate:

2. You need to be thoughtful and strategic about the information that you include on your school description

For a lot of parents, your page under the Enroll Indy school finder site may be the first time that they have heard about your school or have seen detailed information about what your school offers.

The “Who We Are” section is your opportunity to make a great first impression. This section needs to be exciting and resonate with your potential parents. DO NOT take the description in your charter application and copy and paste! You need to think about who your audience is and what they want in a school. Many of the descriptions that I read from schools were chock full of academic jargon like “…leading literacy socio-emotional and neuroscientific research..” or were not very exciting like “We incorporate the environment into our instruction, and our students have opportunities for outdoor education.” Give your prospective parents an easy to understand but also a compelling description of your school. You are describing your school, but also selling it. Global Preparatory Academy, a dual language immersion program on the Near Westside, provides a good example of a parent-friendly description:

Example description from Global Preparatory Academy

Next, in the school highlights section, you can select six pictures and categories that highlight the uniqueness of your school. There were a few schools who struggled with this part. I saw a few that displayed their school mascot, or just the exterior of the facility. Those are important, but in this key selling stage, you want to continue to describe your school, but use the visuals to create excitement and allow the parent to envision their child at your school.
Don’t use stock photography or leave this section blank. Take this part seriously because parents are taking this seriously.
Finally, make sure that you are filling out all the different programs, clubs, sports and community partnerships that your school provides. Though the filtering program allows parents to search on a specific type of activity that your school offers, right now that filter does not “knock” a school off the consideration list, so it doesn’t remove you from consideration. However, if you don’t fill this section out, you give a very incomplete picture of your school.

Example of a school that is not very enticing

3. Utilize the event feature and participate in all the events that Enroll Indy hosts

Enroll Indy hosted four of events in the six months of the matching period. Attending these events gives you an excellent opportunity to get in front of parents who are currently looking for a school.
In addition to hosting their own events, Enroll Indy also allowed schools to use their platform to advertise upcoming open houses or other recruitment events. Surprisingly, only about a quarter of the schools used Enroll Indy to publicize their events.

Enroll Indy’s website averages about 2,000 users a month. This is a great (and free) platform for you to advertise your events. Additionally, in the monthly newsletters that Enroll Indy sends out to their entire parental database, they highlight and promote these events. Because my clients had events listed on the site, they were profiled in the newsletter. If you don’t list your events, you don’t get that opportunity.

4. Utilize the “like” or favorite feature to understand who is interested in your school

One of the complaints that I heard from schools using Enroll Indy was not being able to see who is interested in their school until they were matched. However, on your school page in the upper right corner, there is a heart, or a favorite, button.

Note the “like” button (heart) on the top right-hand corner

When a parent “likes” your school, they go into a separate list that you can access prior to match day to follow up with that parent. This is the only time you are going to see contact information for a parent prior to the official matching time. Encourage all your parents that you are recruiting to “like you”. This can be done in the description of your school or through your promotional efforts outside of Enroll Indy. Once you have a parent’s contact information, you need to follow up with the parents who have signaled a preference towards your school. Email them, call them, send them more information, personally invite them to an event, etc. They are giving you a buying signal, go out and court them. A personal outreach at this stage is going to make a huge impact on how they view your school.

5. Enroll Indy will not be a silver bullet if you constantly struggle with enrollment. You must still do the work!

Enroll Indy’s goals are not to ensure full enrollment at every school, but rather to try to spread enrollment more equally and equitably across all the schools in Indianapolis. Enroll Indy can help communicate to new parents who might not have heard about your school, but it should not in any way encourage you to stop doing all the recruitment activities that you have done in the past to attract students. It is a great addition to your marketing toolkit, but it shouldn’t be your sole tactic.
It is too soon to confidently talk about the impact that Enroll Indy will have upon education and enrollment within Indianapolis. However, if you are a charter school in Indianapolis, maximizing Enroll Indy should be a factor in the planning of your enrollment strategy. Hopefully, these five tips can help you to maximize it for your school.

Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email to nick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call them at 317-361-5255.

Digital Marketing for Charter Schools: An Actionable Workbook to Help You Achieve Your School’s Goals!
Scratching your head as to how to go about building messaging for your charter school? You’re not alone! This free manual will be your go-to guide for all of your school’s digital marketing needs! Download this actionable workbook to help get your marketing plans outlined and started, guide you as you define your audience, key differentiators and messaging, choose your tactics, and start to build your campaigns.

DOWNLOAD NOW