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Listening is a skill that’s vitally important for education leaders, helping us adjust our value proposition, story, tours, and plans based on strategically collected feedback from faculty, students, families, donors, and key partners. The beginning of the enrollment season is the ideal time to pause, renew the data, and identify growth opportunities.
Most of us are fairly decent at sending out surveys, but the key is listening to the right people, knowing how to read between the lines, and then creating a progressive innovation path. Actively and productively listening is a powerful skill that is only honed through preparation and practice, practice, practice.
Hearing from our most demanding people is easy, but we often ignore the more subtle clues being given by others. New families and new employees, for example, are a valuable source of fresh perspective and insights. Gathering their input a few weeks into the new year helps us understand:
- Why did they choose us over the other options available?
- What did they like/not like about our communication, tour, and process?
- How did they get connected within our culture? How would they rate their experience so far? What were the unwritten rules or expectations they encountered?
Keep in mind that our efforts in this regard are two-fold. The first is to understand their motivations, needs, and concerns. The second is to convey genuine interest in them, building trust and engagement through respectful dialogue.
In our webinar on "Enrollment Strategies: Listening to New Families," we explore six sources of data to listen and grow:
1. Historical Enrollment: Retention by grade/teacher, financial aid, transcript requests
2. Funnel Tracking: % yield by grade, inquiries & sources, feeder schools
3. Surveys: Exit interviews, new family survey, new employee survey
4. Competition: Enrollment messages, key strengths, tuition & aid
5. Demographic Trends: Community facts, projections
6. Student Performance: Academic results, cultural impact, growth factors
Join us on Wednesday, September 13 at 2:00 PM ET for a free webinar: "Enrollment Strategies: Listening to New Families"
