Three Enrollment Accelerators To Get The Most Out Of Your School's Growth Potential

All too often, massive growth opportunities may lie within your school's existing organization.

Your school's internal growth potential often gets overlooked because familiarity with the status quo can blindside you to the opportunities.

How can you unearth your untapped potential?

Three key internal growth factors can help you set the foundation for sustainable enrollment growth.

But each of these three components needs to be supported by the others for optimum performance. Investing in enrollment training alone, or hiring a good marketing manager without an enrollment management process, cannot work in isolation to improve performance and grow enrollment.

#1 Strategy Alignment—prioritize aligning your goals at all levels.

In order to deliver consistent enrollment results, your strategy must be relatable and understood at all levels among your school's leadership team, administration, as well as the teaching staff.

You have to align your board's strategy with your front-line action and understand how your leadership team can translate the overarching enrollment strategy into daily execution.

You've also got to understand how to set KPIs that motivate your team while avoiding stretch goals that rarely work in the world of education.

#2 Enrollment Agility—or how fast your team learns and adapts to changing situations.

Enrollment agility is the new currency for enrollment success as parents' needs are constantly changing, and there is more competition than ever before.

Your families don't need salespeople; they need experts who will partner with them in the enrollment process, help make sense of their choices and empower them to make the right decision.

At the same time, each touchpoint and conversation must have an intended goal or expected outcome. Conversations with parents that do not yield an outcome are not productive.  In the world of enrollment, productive conversations take planning. They require business acumen, strategic thinking, and most importantly, making connections and building upon other conversations.
Effective enrollment outreach requires stringing together multiple (online and in person) conversations with the goal of helping and ultimately converting the family.

#3 Enrollment Scorecard—focus on structuring, measuring and monitoring results.

As Peter Drucker wrote in his seminal book, 'The Practice of Management' (1954), "what gets measured, gets managed".
In the same light, without a dashboard, it's impossible to tell if you're improving.

Regular reporting is a crucial ingredient of successful enrollment performance because it keeps the focus on four fundamental questions:

- Where are we compared to our goals?
- Why are we winning or losing enrollments?
- What problems or trends do we need to address?
- What actions should this information lead to
- What should we do differently?