Is Your School Admissions Strategy Working? 4 Stats You Need to Know

Double down on data

We live in a world that revolves around data – it’s all about how you use it. Just as monitoring your school’s daily activity on Facebook can help you meet your social media strategy goals, monitoring admissions activities can help your team meet enrollment goals.

But what are the key metrics that every school admissions team needs to monitor regularly?


KPI #1: Inquiries-to-Connected

In other words: How well you’re doing to persuade those who get in touch to come for a school visit.

This is number one on the KPI priority list. Why?

It’s where it all starts. If you mess up at hello, what does it matter what you do next? The damage is already done. Besides, it puts to the test your entire follow up process, from the initial approach and ongoing communication to the nurturing mechanisms you have in place, like:

- How many touches do you do per lead

- How do you follow up (voicemail - email - text message - sharing content)

- What kind of scripts do you use to handle obstacles and stand out from your school next door

- How do you track “what” needs to happen “when.”

Extra tip!

Monitor each family’s status on a spreadsheet. This way you can track them individually as well as at a cumulative level.

KPI #2: Connected-To-Tours

What it tells you: How many of those who are in contact with you end up visiting your school.

Let me help you visualize what the entire flow would look like!

Enrollhand develops a targeted Facebook ad to run for three weeks, runs the ad, and receives 14 inquiries as a result. Of those 14 inquiries, we determine that 5 of the families are top priority contacts.

The admissions team works to prepare a lead nurturing stream (comprised of texts, phone calls, and school visit requests) to bring at least three of the  14 families on campus within a month. Once a family applies and enrolls, the team surveys to establish a data baseline to evaluate later for trends and planning.

This KPI not only informs you about what it is that parents are interested in your school when visiting. It also lets you know why they chose you over the competition. In other words, it tells you what matters the most to them. It could be one of your programs, your innovative learning approach, your beautiful campus, etc.

KPI #3: Tours-to-Applicants

It tells you how many families who visit your school apply.

Even with a fantastic inquiry-to-visit ratio, if your visit-to-applicants score is low,  it is an indication that your school tours or open house activities may need some tweaking. This KPI immediately alerts you that you need to improve your school prospect experience.

The School Tour is Over… Now What?  

- How would you rate the success of your school tours? Good? Great? None of the above?

- How many hours or days do you follow up after the tour?

- Have you provided prospective families with the next steps?

KPI #4: Applications-To-Enrollments

In a nutshell, it tells you: How many of your applicants finish the process and end up enrolling in your school.

This stat can help you identify potential barriers in your application process. Do you have a seamless application process in place? If not, you may find yourself with a ton of applications and few actual enrollments.

Want to know the sad truth?  

Through the years, we’ve worked with several schools that have invested quite a bit of time and money on marketing and then failed to capitalize on those efforts by making a few  simple changes in the way they track and monitor a few simple but fundamental stats. They have found themselves burdened with assumptions or extrapolations instead of data.

Don’t be like them. Empower your admissions team.

It’s easy. I recommend that the school team checks and reports on admissions statistics every week. This will help keep you accountable and keep the rest of your school administration team abreast of what your department is doing to help keep the school healthy and thriving.