Attracting a new family to your parochial school is hard to do. There are many educational choices and they all have one or more unique advantages.
Sometimes you can have the same advantage or feature as someone else but yours can seem unique because you promote a feature others overlook. Here is one example:
Class Size – In the past few years there have been several studies performed on the impact that class size can have on student performance. Some of those studies focus narrowly on the academic side of student performance. Other studies look broadly at the long-term impact. One study discovered that at age 27 students who were in smaller classes in elementary school had an economic advantage over their peers. Another study found that different student groups enjoyed other long-term benefits from smaller classes.
Anything beyond academic performance is helpful when trying to justify tuition. Some of the results studies make a compelling case for a family to pay for their student’s education rather than rely on the free education from the public school.
The studies are great. Do they reflect the reality at your Christian school? Do the long-term effects (not academic performance) of your small classroom sizes echo the study results?
Before you quote one of the studies to a prospective family or make the claim in your advertising, it would be good to objectively assess the results of your alumni compared to the researcher’s results. If you were the prospective family, you would certainly want to know how well the study reflects the school’s assertions.
Next Step:
Ask your marketing committee to determine which studies have uncovered unheralded benefits at your school
Develop a marketing plan that will promote your previously unheralded benefits
Use the unheralded benefits as talking points when meeting with parents, prospective parents, donors, and supporters of all types
Add the benefits from the studies to the list of items you track among your alumni
Develop a plan to enhance the benefits beyond their current level
If these are unheralded benefits, as soon as you begin to promote them your competitors will react. Your competitors may begin talking about their similar benefits or find other benefits to promote. In any case, your marketing plan must anticipate their potential responses so that you can sustain your advantage.
The sustainability of your mission depends on staying at least one step ahead of your competition with your talking points, benefits, and quality. Supporting alumni data puts an exclamation point at the end of what you say.
When your benefits and the promises of your mission align, it demonstrates your high level of commitment to changing lives.
Caution – When the marketing effort works and enrollment increases, it is important to keep the class size small. It would be unfortunate to have marketing success destroy the marketing advantage.
