CHARTER SCHOOL MARKETING Utilizing Data to Shape and Inform your - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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INDIANA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CHARTER SCHOOL MARKETING

Utilizing Data to Shape and Inform your Enrollment Marketing November 13, 2018

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OUR SERIES

Date Topic 10/16/18 @ 12:00 Introduction: Understanding the foundations of enrollment marketing 11/13/18 @12:00 Operations: Utilizing Data to Shape and Inform your Enrollment Marketing 12/11/18 @ 12:00 Operations: Your environment and your customer 1/8/19 @ 12:00 Marketing: Inbound marketing and building your culture of marketing 2/12/19 @ 12:00 Marketing: Lead nurturing and social media 3/12/19 @ 12:00 Recruitment: The school tour 4/9/19 @ 12:00 Retention: From first to last day 5/14/19 @ 12:00 Retention: Surveys and communication at your school

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ABOUT BRIGHT MINDS MARKETING

Boutique school enrollment and marketing firm

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REVIEW OF OUR LAST LESSON

Macro Issues

• The importance of enrollment to your school
• Largest source of funding
• Your key for sustainability
• Changing student landscape
• Lower birthrates
• Shrinking K-12 population in the state except for the Marion county area
• Indiana charter school dynamics
• Good charter school environment
• Lower state funding
• Continued growth of vouchers providing a competitive alternative to charter schools

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REVIEW OF OUR LAST SESSION

The different frameworks that we will use

• Using our enrollment funnel
• The power of the “5 whys” to diagnose

your opportunities

• The 4 pillars of successful enrollment

management

• Operations
• Marketing
• Recruitment
• Retention

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THE 4 COMPONENTS TO A STRONG ENROLLMENT SYSTEM

Operations: Know your self, your environment, your competition, and your customer. Create messages that resonate with her and have ways to deliver those messages

• 1. Attracting

prospects

• 2. Identifying

those prospects

• 3. Nurturing those

prospects Come to a recruiting event Marketing

1. Positive experience at every recruitment event 2. Closing the deal / enroll 3. Create a positive

• nboarding

experience

Enrolling students Recruitment

• 1. Listening to your

constituents

• 2. Measuring your

constituent’s satisfaction

• 3. Improving based

upon their feedback Retaining students Retention

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USING DATA TO SHAPE OUR ENROLLMENT PLANNING

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WHY IS UNDERSTANDING YOUR DATA IMPORTANT?

• 1. Data allows you to base decision on fact not intuition or

hunches

• 2. If you can measure it, you can manage it
• 3. Data will answer most of your questions if you ask it the right

way.

• 4. Having strong data eventually becomes a business asset

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WHAT BENEFITS DOES GOOD DATA PROVIDE TO YOUR SCHOOL

• 1. It makes your enrollment marketing more effective
• More efficient spend of your marketing dollars
• The ability to say no to certain opportunities
• More effective time spent
• Focus on what is important and what will generate more new students
• 2. It provides clarity and an ability to prioritize retention activities
• Improving areas that most parents have identified rather than just the
• nes from the loudest voices

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• Garbage in = garbage out
• Clean, updated, constant focus on it
• Registrar / school secretary must

understand the importance

• Don’t just gather data / analyze it
• What do you want the data to do?
• Are you gathering the right data?
• Use a system
• CRM, SIS, Google sheets

PRINCIPALS OF GOOD DATA MANAGEMENT

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EXAMPLE OF USING DATA TO IMPROVE YOUR ENROLLMENT

• Charter school X had poor engagement on their website
• Average session was under 1 minute and poor click through rates on

scheduling their open house

• Analyzed their Google analytics
• Discovered that 72% of traffic was via a mobile device but their site was

not optimized for mobile

• Redesigned their website to be mobile optimized
• Improved time on the site, click rates and customer experience

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TWO TYPES OF DATA

• Trend data
• How does the data evolve over time?
• Enrollment over 5 years
• Retention rates across the school over the past 5 years
• Customer satisfaction rates
• Snapshot data
• How did a single event do
• A specific email open rate
• Clicks to a certain video

Strategic Tactical

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EACH PILLAR OF ENROLLMENT HAS DIFFERENT DATA NEEDS

• Operations
• Baseline information
• Total enrollment
• Marketing
• Website traffic
• Identified prospects
• Nurturing activities
• Recruitment
• # of inquiries / tours / shadow days
• Yield or closure rate
• Retention
• Retention for the school
• Retention for specific grades

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YOUR IWIKS

• List out all the things that “I Wish I Knew”
• How do you gather this information?
• Would knowing the answer improve your efforts?
• Living document
• Helps to shape your whole data strategy

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IWIKS (I WISH I KNEW)

Topic Question Source

General Enrollment

• What is our 5-year average of new students?
• Is there a difference based for grade level?
• What is the 5-year average of our class sizes
• What is our true replacement number?
• Analysis of enrollment trends

New Student Information

• What channel was successful in recruiting students?
• Why did they choose our schools?
• What school did they previously attend?
• Who referred them / what channel closed the deal?
• Admissions questionnaire

Overall Satisfaction

• How do parents feel about the schools?
• What are areas that the school needs to improve to keep students?
• How do they feel about our teachers and administrators?
• How satisfied is our staff?
• Annual parent satisfaction survey
• Annual staff satisfaction survey

Retention

• What is our average retention rate?
• Are there specific grade levels at risk?
• Why are they leaving our school?
• What school are they going to?
• Why are they leaving
• Core enrollment data
• Exit interview

Academic Effectiveness

• How are our graduates perceived at their colleges?
• How valuable was the experience of our schools in the minds of

graduates

• Follow up with admissions directors at

colleges

• Alumni follow up interviews / survey

Channel Effectiveness

• What is our acquisition cost per channel?
• What is our closure rate by channel?
• What is our open house closure rate / shadow day closure rate?
• Comparison of newly enrolled students with

marketing channel against channel cost

• Closure rate at open houses

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CORE DATA: ENROLLMENT & RETENTION

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YOUR CORE DATA (QUANTITATIVE)

• Enrollment
• 1. Total enrollment for the school over time.
• 2. How many new students joined our school each year?
• 3. What is the grade level distribution for new students?
• Retention
• 1. Retention percentages for the school.
• 2. Do certain grade levels lose more students than others?

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TOTAL ENROLLMENT TRENDS

379 375 354 340 328 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 Total

Total Enrollment Trends

2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018

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NEW STUDENTS PER YEAR

61 52 41 44 49 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018

5 Year New Enrollment

Total

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NEW ENROLLMENT BY GRADE LEVEL

Focus on your entry grade 61 52 41 44 49 45 35 25 29 31 16 17 16 15 18 20 40 60 80 2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018

New Enrollment by grade level

New Enrollment New Enrollment K New Enrollment Other

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RETENTION DATA

• This can vary depending upon how you want to look at

retention:

• Number of students enrolled in year 1 that re-enroll in year 2
• Number of students enrolled in year 1 (first day) that are still enrolled in

year 1 (last day)

• Key Metrics
• 1. Total school retention rates
• 2. Retention rates by grade level

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TOTAL RETENTION TRENDS 80% 82% 84% 87% 89% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018

Average Retention Trends (All Grades)

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CHARTING OUT YOUR RETENTION RATES

Retention 2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018 Retention full school 80% 82% 84% 87% 89% Kindergarten 55% 62% 60% 58% 65% 1st Grade 78% 85% 82% 93% 100% 2nd Grade 90% 85% 95% 100% 96% 3rd Grade 85% 90% 84% 90% 92% 4th Grade 84% 82% 90% 91% 96% 5th Grade 92% 85% 91% 88% 78% 6th Grade 62% 55% 64% 68% 71% 7th Grade 78% 90% 89% 96% 100% 8th Grade 95% 100% 100% 96% 100%

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HIGH ISSUE GRADES VERSUS SCHOOL AVERAGE

80% 82% 84% 87% 89% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018

High issue grades against the school average

School average K 6

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WHAT DID WE LEARN – WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS

• The school is facing declining enrollment
• Non-K grades are attracting around 17 students and is stable
• Kindergarten enrollment is down 30% over 5 years
• Focus on kindergarten enrollment!
• The school is improving its’ retention rate
• Kindergarten and 6th grades are significantly below all school average
• Understand why those grades are at risk.
• Start creating retention programs for the kindergarten to 1st grade

transition and 6th to 7th grade transition years.

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KEY TAKE AWAYS FROM ENROLLMENT AND RETENTION CHARTING

• Charting your enrollment and retention are critical to allow you to

understand your core trends rather than what happened last year

• Cutting the data allows you to isolate and focus your efforts
• You can use first day of school, count day, or other day, just be consistent

and use the same one every time

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RECRUITMENT: RECRUITMENT EFFECTIVENESS

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YOUR RECRUITMENT EFFECTIVENESS (QUANTITATIVE DATA)

• How many students toured your school / attended a shadow

day?

• How many students enrolled?
• What is your closure rate?

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RECRUITMENT EFFECTIVENESS

100 110 94 65 98 61 52 41 34 49

61% 47% 44% 52% 50%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 20 40 60 80 100 120 2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018

Recruitment effectiveness

Tour / Open House Shadow Enrollment Closure %

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WHAT DID WE LEARN – WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS

• Closure rate is averaging around 50%
• To enroll more students;

1.

Increase the number of families who tour the school / engage in a shadow day

2.

Improve the closure rates of families who enroll after they take a tour

• Follow on question for the data or the school:
• Why is our closure rate so low?
• Why don’t parents enroll after engaging with our school?
• Is there a difference in rates from open house only, open house→shadow, shadow
• nly?

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KEY TAKE AWAYS FROM RECRUITMENT EFFECTIVENESS CHARTING

• Improving your closure rate is low hanging fruit for a school
• You should be striving for at least a 75% rate
• Optimizing your closure rate generally doesn’t cost money
• It is just creating a better experience while a family “tries” the school
• This exercise helps you to know the “what”, it might take more effort to

know the “why”

• Possible reasons: Poor tour, less than engaging collateral material, lack of a follow up

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YOUR CURRENT STUDENT BODY

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YOUR CURRENT STUDENT BODY

• Understanding information about your current student body

informs other marketing efforts

• Two simple sets of data to track:
• 1. Where do your students live
• 2. What was their previous school
• These give you insights into what your “typical” customer looks

like and what schools are your best feeders

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YOUR STUDENTS

• Pull from your student database all the addresses of your students
• Include what school they previously attended (preschool or 8th grade)
• Feed this into a mapping program like Google maps, www.batchgeo.com, or

www.mapline.com

• Questions this will answer:
• Are you a neighborhood school or a destination school
• What do the zip codes of households tell us demographically about the families?

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• Though this school pulls from 28 zip codes, most

students reside close to the Binford corridor

• 5 zip codes make up 87.7% of all students:
• 46220:

31.7%

• 46256:

25.4%

• 46250:

10.4%

• 46236:

10.4%

• 46226:

9.8%

• Three public school districts make up 89% of

the school’s student population

• Lawrence Township: 56%
• Washington Township: 22%
• IPS: 11%

STUDENT LOCATIONS

Example map

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• Knowing where your students

are coming from allows you to analyze the effectiveness

• f your feeder school

programs

• It also allows you to spot

potential opportunities

PREVIOUS SCHOOL

43% 21% 13% 12% 5%4% 3%

Students in the network

Public Schools Charter - Non Virtual

Private - Non Catholic

Private - Catholic Home School Charter - Virtual Out of state

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PREVIOUS SCHOOL (2)

Target Preschool 2016-2017 Students 2017-2018 Students Happy Child PreSchool 6 7 ABC Preschool 3 4 Goodard Preschool

• St. Mary Preschool

5 6 Early Learning Preschool 2 4 HeadStart 3

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KEY TAKE AWAYS FROM STUDENT MAPPING

• Though this is a retrospective look, it provides you an understanding of

what your effectiveness has been to date.

• It gives you data points that will also allow you to judge effectiveness of future

marketing programs as well as inform and make better your future marketing programs.

• By identifying what schools our students come from, we can better shape
• ur partner (feeder) school strategy
• This also allows us the ability to “target” certain groups if we are looking for more racial

diversity, higher academics, etc.

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YOUR MARKETING PROGRAMS

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YOUR MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS

• Improving your marketing (attraction and identification of leads) is often

the hardest and most expensive part of your enrollment plan

• Parents may see your advertisements in multiple places and often they

can not identify the single piece that drove action

• Knowing what caused them to engage with you is tough to figure out and

is often more of an art than a science

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ADOPT A MARKETING NOT A COMMUNICATIONS MINDSET

• Establish strong platforms that

make prospective parents aware of you

• Write engaging copy that

makes them consider you.

• Move them down the buying

journey to engage with you.

Communications Marketing

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YOUR MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS

• Key metric: # of identified leads in your prospect database
• # of identified leads that turn into an enrolled student
• Make sure you ask people how they heard about you or provide a source for how you

got that name!

• Key questions to ask:
• What tactic generated the highest number of identifiable leads?
• Is this tactic an awareness and consideration tool or one that leads to engagement?
• What can we do to make this channel an engagement channel?
• Be very deliberate with tactic that you can not source identified leads
• Radio, TV
• Your website and your social media ads should be designed to identify

leads

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YOUR FOUNDATIONAL TOOL: A CRM SYSTEM

• You need to gather the contact information for any prospective parent that engages

with you

• You want to have the ability to follow up and nurture them
• Don’t hope they engage with you – engage with them
• Feed this information into a prospect database.
• This can be robust or simple
• Salesforce.com (free to non-profits)
• Hubpot (starter pack is free)
• Sharpspring
• Google Sheets

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BEGIN TO POPULATE YOUR DATABASE WITH DATA ABOUT THAT CUSTOMER

Parent name Parent email address Child’s name Child’s age / entering grade Marketing source Activity 1 Activity 2 Susan sample susan@gmail .com Steven 5 / Kindergarten Preschool feeder – Polly Panda Attended kindergarten round up 10/18 Attended

• pen house

12/1

• Once you have this data – you move into the nurturing phase to get them to come to a recruiting

event

• As this begins to get fleshed out, you can track the lifecycle of a prospect

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PROSPECT SOURCES

Websites

Community events

Social media ads

Door to door canvasing CRM Data base

Enrollment form for siblings

Summer programs / tournaments

Nurturing

Open House

Shadow

Tour Enroll Student name, parent name, student age, parent email, parent phone Enroll Indy

Feeder Schools School visits

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SUMMARY

• Data is important
• Must be clean, must be updated
• Foundational
• Enrollment
• 5-year enrollment trends, new enrollment, new enrollment broken out by grade level
• Retention
• School retention rates, grade level retention rates
• Student data
• Addresses, previous school
• Marketing
• How did they hear about your school
• Get your CRM for prospective families set up

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OUR SERIES

Date Topic 10/16/18 @ 12:00 Introduction: Understanding the foundations of enrollment marketing 11/13/18 @12:00 Operations: Utilizing Data to Shape and Inform your Enrollment Marketing 12/11/18 @ 12:00 Operations: Your environment and your customer 1/8/19 @ 12:00 Marketing: Inbound marketing and building your culture of marketing 2/12/19 @ 12:00 Marketing: Lead nurturing and social media 3/12/19 @ 12:00 Recruitment: The school tour 4/9/19 @ 12:00 Retention: From first to last day 5/14/19 @ 12:00 Retention: Surveys and communication at your school

https://www.doe.in.gov/grants/marketing-and-communications-webinars

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THANK YOU!!!

Facebook.com/brightmindsmarketing @brightmindsmktg 531 W. 83rd Place, Indy, IN 46260 317-361-5255 nick@brightmindsmarketing.com