SchoolAdvancement (TM) Helping Schools Advance Toward Their Vision

MARKETING

Click here for this week's free marketing tip, Marketing Matters ^(SM)!

ENROLLMENT

Click here to find out more about BASICS - a FREE TOOL to help bring more students into your school! Enrollment Estimators (TM) are now available for the 12-13 school year!!

DEVELOPMENT

Development Development

A monthly article to help you form a development mindset from a fundraising one. Click here for this month's artilcle!. If you're already developed in Development, and want to advance toward an Advancement mindset, check out Advancementality:. Every week, a new post is made to advance your ability to attain an attitude necessary for Advancement.

PRESENTATIONS

Access to presentations given throughout the year can be found here!

* "Miracle Marketing" - For those in the Diocese of Harrisburg, click here to view or download the presentation. For those in the Diocese of Buffalo, click here to view or download the presentation.

* "Retention: The First Step To Growing Your Enrollment"

For those in the Diocese of Harrisburg, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

For those that attendend the NYSCIRS Conference in Albany, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

For those that attended the Alliance of Catholic Schools of Lancaster County, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

For those that attended the West Virginia Christian Education Association Conference, click here to download handouts from the presentation.

Put the System in Place

One of the recent presentations I've given to schools and groups of school administrators is titled "Row, Row, Row Your Boat: [Your School's] Life is But a DREAM." For those of you that have been visitors to this site, you know that DREAM is the acronym I use for the systems thinking required with advancement. Each of the 5 elements (Development, Retention, Enrollment, Asset Management and Marketing) all work together.

For those of you wondering about the "boat" reference, think of the slave ship in the movie, "Ben Hur." Or, for you younger folks, imagine a college rowing team - oars on the left side of the craft, oars on the right side. In order for the craft to go straight, those doing the rowing must be synchronized with one another.

Now imagine that the coxswain is the principal, giving directions to the team. The oars on the right side of the boat are those five DREAM elements, while the oars on the left side of the boat are those things that are usually associated with your schools, which spell out the word, FACTS - Faith identity or Founder's heritage, Activities, Curriculum, Technology and Surroundings. Interestingly, these can also be thought of as "left-brain" and "right-brain" functions. Each of the five elements balance the other side of the boat.

Of course, every good school is working on some attribute of the left side - Faith identity or Founder's heritage permeates all aspects of what happens in the school; activities provide a source of community pride for some schools while developing teamwork, physical fitness, and the importance of celebration (or the lessons of learning to be gracious losers); curriculum is always striving for academic excellence; technology is a must in today's schools - especially if students are going to be able to function in the marketplace they'll enter when they graduate; and the surroundings of the school make for a learning environment that is conducive to excellence.

Now, consider the other side of the boat - do you have an effective development program? Do you have an enrollment planning, follow-up and tracking system? Is your marketing goal clearly defined (and if you say that the goal of your marketing is to increase enrollment, just put the lock on the door now)? Are you in charge of your asset management strategies - or does that person report to someone else, and you just have to "deal with it?" And, do you have effective retention strategies in place to keep your parents positively involved and a part of your school's community?

If your answers aren't as positive as you'd like them to be, or as strong as your left side of the boat, that means that you don't have all your oars in the water. If you try to row, all you're going to do is go around in circles.

Does that sound like what you're doing now?

If so, you need to realize that it takes time to be able to change course. A boat can't screech to a halt like a car can. There are other factors - the wind, the waves, the current - that will affect how much time you need to right your navigation toward your vision. The first thing you need to do, however, is put the SYSTEM in place...not just development, not just enrollment, not just marketing...ALL of it!! Then, tweak it a little bit at a time. Changing the system requires systemic change...not linear change.

For another visual example, check out this week's entry in "Advancementality: The Blog" at http://schooladvancement.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html.

BONUS TIP:

You'll notice that the above link just doesn't say "click here" as a hyperlink. While today's browsers are more savvy than past programs, email programs today recognize words like "click here" as spam language, and may not deliver your important communication - or, it may be caught be a spam filter and automatically deleted. It's a best practice today to include the whole hyperlink text.

The other reason is that mobile devices do not readily recognize words set up as hyperlinks, but DO recognize the URL as a hyperlink. With mobile communications becoming more and more prevalent today (even Google says they're a mobile company - not a computer company), it will be the way you need to communicate with the parents that will be coming to check out your school for their iGeneration child.