This week I received a delightful email message from a School Growth client:
"How did you calculate the 'Best Guess' projected enrollment for our school back in March? You were EXACTLY right!"
Early this year we Optimized the Enrollment Office for this school that had recently hired a new enrollment director and experienced other changes. Communication and productivity weren't going as well as they wanted, and they were trying to learn from their enrollment data in order to find ways to improve the quality of services.
Through this training and coaching we worked through our process to:
* Accurately assess enrollment trends and data quality
* Understand how to apply best practices for enrollment management
* Produce more useful forecasts and reports for the administration and board
* Determine strategies to build engagement with faculty and families
When you Optimize Enrollment, one of the reports we collaboratively produced is an enrollment forecast that uses the school's funnel and trend data to more accurately predict future results. This is important for budgeting and resource planning in advance of the upcoming school year.
Enrollment is complicated, with a wide range of contributing factors (as illustrated by our Healthy Schools Infographic). When you know how to use the data correctly and how to implement the best combination of people and processes, you will expand your abilities as a learning organization and increase your capacity to respond to new opportunities.
Delivering this kind of precise enrollment intelligence to the administration and school board is invaluable because they are able to make better decisions and will have much greater confidence in your leadership. That's a win-win!
How accurate is your enrollment forecast? Are you learning from your data?
