For years, Littleford & Associates has said that the best way to market a school and build enrollment demand and wait lists is to mobilize the parent body as an admissions/recruitment cohort.  This does not mean the active parents who help with open houses and tours but a large group of parents who become passionate advocates for the school where they live, work, pray and play.

Listening Comes First

Recruiting, motivating, and organizing parents for this purpose, regardless of the school, starts with a concerted effort to listen to them. The listening is not just about why they chose, or stay with the school, or what they like best about it. Their responses to other questions about what they most want to see improved and where they would have gone if the current school had not had an opening are very revealing. Listening always precedes positive emotional engagement.

Tapping into Parent Networks

Once parents feel heard about their big and small areas of concern, they tend to want to help their school. Many parents have had some marketing training or exposure to it in their professional lives even if they are not working in those fields now. Many others have wide networks of friends from church, athletic and social clubs, university affiliations, political groupings, business connections, etc.

Parent ambassadors can help by being engaged in internal marketing, i.e., reinforcing the important message or tag line internally within the school, and promoting that message everywhere. Internal marketing always precedes external marketing.

Parents can be very powerful in external marketing as well. Tour guides and admissions outreach volunteers should follow up with an inquiry and stick with that applicant through the visit, testing, acceptance, enrollment and as a mentor parent to a new family when that child starts school.

Parent admissions ambassadors can often be invited to serve as fund raising solicitors for the annual fund. The organizational concepts are the same.

Schools spend a fortune on social media advertising. Our client schools not only want higher admissions demand, higher visibility presence and yield rates but they also want parents who will act as the phalanx that protects the school from rumors, false information and gossip that are meant to undermine the school and its reputation. Parent ambassadors thus also become proactive, supportive messengers of the important, immediate information that the school leadership needs constituents to hear.

A Scalable, Low-Cost Model

This is not an expensive project. Generally, for a school of 500 students, we advocate recruiting about 50 to 75 ambassadors. We have worked with schools of 1200 or 1500 to recruit up to 100 parent ambassadors. The cost is often less than one tuition.

Often parents who are seen as complainers and negative voices can be encouraged to become more positively engaged through this process. I have always liked the Chinese word, Ji-huey, because it is formed from words meaning both challenge/crisis and opportunity. How do you turn a challenge into an opportunity?

Many heads may be wary of inviting parents to be so closely tied to marketing and the admissions office. Yet, all heads must engage the parents if they are to be successful leaders. So often parents engage in complaining and not about celebrating the school. A school’s student retention rate of 90% or higher means that almost all parents are happy enough to continue paying the tuition. Thus, they want your school to succeed. That prompts a core emotion we all have: the desire to be valued, needed and to make a difference.

Building Something Enduring

Another interesting aspect of this concept is that many parents serve in these roles for many years including for a few years after their last child graduates They become very powerful ambassadors driven by their children’s success. As one eloquent parent ambassador wrote:

“Harnessing the brain power, enthusiasm, and experience of our School’s parents to sell a product we all believe in is a simple idea. And brilliant. With your insightful questions and rapid analysis, you have quantified and confirmed what we know in our hearts. It is reassuring to learn that the qualities that brought us to this school when our daughter was in search of a kindergarten have held up rather nicely a dozen years later.

My husband and I are journalists for major national newspapers and broadcast stations for more than 60 years combined. We are by nature and training skeptical of hype, hoopla, and public relations. So it is, to say the least, uncharacteristic of me to leave the training session proudly wearing my School Ambassador pin and checking the on-line store for a school license plate frame.

Until your arrival on campus, I was content to think of our School as one of the best kept secrets in education. But I’m persuaded by your presentation. It is important for the future of the school that we do a better job telling our story.

When it comes to news organizations–there’s always the risk that the story they tell is not the one you expected. Not all school stories are as sweet as your army of dog-loving students packing sugar packets in case the school dog, Olive, might go into diabetic shock. That said, I think opening the door wider to reporters is a good idea. An interview with our Head on just about anything would be golden. And I don’t think the School should hire a publicist. I’m sure there are parents and administrators who would be more effective. If I can be helpful, great”

She became the Chair of the External Marketing Committee of the Ambassador program for this prominent K to 12 day School of 1500 students.