4 New Year’s Resolutions to Jumpstart Your Charter School Marketing Efforts

2019 is here, prompting us to think about resolutions and goals for this year—if we haven’t already! This is the year that I will finally get into shape, or I will lose 10 pounds. But what about setting those 2019 goals for your school? Setting new year’s resolutions for increased success with your charter school marketing efforts might be high on your list of things to do.
But, whether personal or work-related, inevitably by the end of March we all look back and wonder…what happened? Don’t feel bad, according to US News, approximately 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail by the second week of February.
But why do they fail? Often the reason is that we set lofty goals and then when we don’t see progress, it is easy to get disheartened and give up. I have found that breaking my resolutions into smaller, more attainable steps is the best way to make progress. Even if I don’t achieve the full resolution, I have at least taken some steps to achieve my goals.
At the outset, thinking about improving your charter school’s enrollment marketing program can seem like a huge undertaking with multiple considerations. However, simply by taking some small steps, you can start seeing the results you’re after.
Here are some resolutions that you can actually keep – so you can start getting some quick wins towards achieving your charter school marketing goals this year!

1. Resolve to get some professional development on how to market your school.

Hopefully, this article can help you achieve this goal, but there are a lot of other resources out there for you to improve your skills in marketing your school. One of the biggest challenges that I hear from my charter school clients is that they never received training on how to market their school.
You don’t need to go back to school to get your degree in marketing. There are a lot of great, free resources that you can tap into to improve your marketing acumen, and ultimately, drive more enrollment for your school.

HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM company that I recommend to a lot of my clients. In addition to offering a robust software application that many schools use, they offer a ton of great online marketing training classes to help you develop your marketing knowledge. And the best part about it? It is totally free! From the basics of “inbound marketing”, to developing your email strategy or how to use Facebook in your marketing, HubSpot has you covered. These courses are very well done and generally, you can finish a course in under two hours. For more school-specific marketing and recruitment training, there are several blogs and newsletters that are more specific towards driving higher school enrollment.
InspirEd Rob and Liza Norman send out a daily email that covers a lot of ground on effective school marketing. Though they approach this from the perspective of an independent school, and are more about graphic design and communications, a lot of the lessons and case studies that they discuss are applicable for a charter school.
SchneiderB Media Brendan Schneider is the director of admissions at Sewickley Academy in Sewickley, PA. His company, SchneiderB Media, has a great blog, podcast and Facebook group that covers a lot of the topics in creating an effective school marketing program.
Bright Minds Marketing I admit that I am biased here since this is mine, but our semi-monthly newsletters cover different topics for how schools can improve their enrollment process from the ttraction of prospective students to how to better retain your student body. I am also working on a web-based class that I hope to introduce early in 2019.
Image7 is a group out of Australia that has a monthly newsletter, blog and a podcast. I admit that I love listening to the Australian accent, but there is a lot of good information these guys put out. Some doesn’t really apply to US based charter schools, but you can still gather a few ideas from these guys.
Charter School Capital provides lots of resources free to charter schools to help them grow and sustain enrollment. Their new Digital Marketing for Charter Schools manual is a really helpful guide for those who are just starting their marketing efforts and want a step-by-step guide, and for those who just want to bolster the efforts, they’re already making.

Resolve to get your in-bound certification from HubSpot, download some helpful content, and sign up for two to three school marketing related newsletters. With a small investment of around four hours, you’ll be taking a great first step into becoming a more effective school marketer.

2. Make this the year that you launch a school satisfaction survey

Regardless if you are school with a long waiting list or one that is struggling to fill all your seats, your school will benefit from understanding how your current parents and staff view the operations of your school.
Related: The What, Why, and How-to for Designing a School Satisfaction Survey for your Charter School
If the prospect of writing a comprehensive survey fills you with dread, do a very short, five-question survey. Ask the following questions:

How did you hear about our school)?
On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend our school to a friend or family member?
What would you consider the strengths of our school?
What would you consider the weaknesses of our school?
What is the one thing you wished we would change about our school?

These simple questions give you a lot of information: you know which channel is most effective in your marketing; you have a quantifiable number for your satisfaction levels that you can track over time; and you have identified areas that families like and areas where they feel you need improvement.
This gives you a lot of visibility and helps to form your improvement plans for the upcoming year.
There are a lot of survey platforms out there like SurveyMonkey, QuestionPro or you can even just make this survey in Google Forms.
A brief survey like this won’t cover everything, but if you aren’t doing one right now, it is a huge step forward.

3. Learn the key metric in your enrollment marketing

Sometimes gathering all your enrollment data together into an easy-to-analyze format can seem like a daunting challenge. The data might reside within multiple different spreadsheets and across different groups and people within your school.
But keeping with the theme of quick wins, there are two valuable steps you can take that will provide the valuable data needed to help inform your recruitment efforts:

Gather the names of all the families who attended tours at your school
Match these up with the names of families who newly enrolled at your school and divide

This small exercise is going to give you the most important metric in enrollment marketing: your “yield rate”.
Related: How to Use Data to Improve Your Charter School’s Enrollment
Knowing what percentage of students convert after a tour is one of the most actionable pieces of data that you can have. It allows you to understand if your challenge is in the attraction stage (getting families to come to the tour) or in the conversion stage (getting families to enroll). Once you have this information, you can focus on improving that particular part of your enrollment marketing program.

4. Get an outside perspective on the effectiveness of your school tour

When was the last time you evaluated the effectiveness of your school tour? If you are like most schools, this is not something that you spend a lot of time analyzing. It can be easy to fall into the trap of just doing the same thing again and again. But what if your tour is not effective? If you looked at your conversion rate, you probably know the answer, but how do you fix it?
Ask a friendly parent or a faculty member to pretend to be a prospective parent and run them through your typical school tour. Kind of like a “secret shopper”. I’m sure that they’ll point out things that you might have missed that are the best attributes of your school and perhaps some areas that need attention. Sometimes we are too close to a task to realize that there are ways that we could get better. And they might have some great ideas about a certain program or feature of your school that would resonate more with prospective parents in your community.
Achieving these four goals can make a big difference in your school recruitment efforts. Though they might seem small, if you do them this year, you will start to become a better charter school enrollment marketer and bring more students into your school. Best of luck for the New Year!

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How To Use Data To Improve Your Charter School’s Enrollment

Data is impacting all facets of education, including charter school enrollment efforts. The use of data-driven instruction is on the rise in schools across America. According to a recent survey of over 1,500 educators conducted by Kahoot! in 2018, almost 75 percent of teachers identified data-driven instruction as the top trend in how ed-tech is being used at their school.
Effectively utilizing data is important in delivering tailored and targeted educational approaches, and it is extremely important in developing a robust and effective enrollment management system. But many charter schools still struggle with using data to shape, inform and improve their enrollment.
If you are new to enrollment marketing for your charter school, or just looking to improve the effectiveness of your use of data, here are five ways that you can successfully use data to improve your charter school’s enrollment.

1.) Develop your overall data strategy

The first step in building a strong data strategy is to identify all the things that you want your data to tell you. When I was in brand marketing, we called this a list of IWIKS or (I Wish I Knew). In this planning stage write down all the things that, if you knew them, would allow you to be a stronger enrollment marketer. Some of these would be:

Enrollment trends over the past five years
Retention trends over the past five years
Marketing tactics that bring in the most prospective parents
Customer satisfaction rates
What school is your biggest “feeder”, or source, of students

This list will be long, and since you are in the brainstorming phase, don’t be alarmed if it takes a page or two.
Next, figure out where to get this information.

Is it currently in your student information database?
Is this additional data you need to figure out a way to gather?
How hard would it be to gather that data?
Assign a source for that data.

For all the pieces of data that you want to know, ask this question: “Is knowing the answer to this question relevant to my job and is it actionable”? If the answer is no and it is just an interesting tidbit of data, don’t waste your limited time figuring out a way to gather it.
Now that you know what you are trying to gather, it is important that your data gathering process allows for good analysis. You have heard the phrase, “Garbage in, Garbage out”? Make sure that the ways in which you gather the data (input from the office administrators, online forms, transfer information, etc.) is clean and follows a standard and consistent data structure.
For example – let’s say that you are trying to analyze what schools are your best sources for students. Knowing this allows you to focus your recruitment efforts to create deeper relationships with those schools. Having clean data makes sure that you are spending your time engaging in relationship building efforts rather than cleaning the data. If your registrar or school admin doesn’t use a standard name for each school, you may not clearly understand your “feeder patterns. Or at the very least, you will have to spend time cleaning up the data rather than engaging with prospective new families.
Hopefully, you will be spending more of your time analyzing data rather than collecting the data. Ensuring that the data you gather is clean and usable will go a long way towards making your analysis – and your job – easier.

2.) Establish your foundational metric #1: Enrollment trends

Many schools that I have worked with have a good understanding of how last year’s enrollment performed. However, enrollment should not be viewed as a snapshot, but rather as a trend. Go back and chart your enrollment over the past five years to see how your total enrollment has fluctuated over time.

Now add to this, your total new students per year and break out which grade level they enrolled in with an emphasis on your entry grade (K if you are a K-8 school and 9 if you are a high school.) You should end up with a series of graphs like these:
By going through this exercise, you have identified where your school’s enrollment challenge is. In this example, almost 100 percent of this school’s declining enrollment can be attributed to lower kindergarten numbers. Analyzing the data allows this school to focus their enrollment marketing efforts on boosting the enrollment numbers for kindergarteners and not be as concerned about the other grades—which are consistently bringing in approximately the same number of students.

3.) Establish your foundational metric #2: Retention trends

For retention, there is a similar process. Track the five-year retention rate for your school and then repeat the process by grade. Understanding retention data can be tricky. Do you analyze if a student came back after the summer, or if they left in the middle of the year? When you are starting out, I suggest that you look at students who started on day 1 in year 1 and were they enrolled on day 1, year 2?

Now, break out each individual grade’s retention rate.
In this example, even though the school’s overall retention grade is increasing, there are still two problem grades: Kindergarten to 1st grade and 6th to 7th grade.
This analysis tells you what, but it doesn’t tell you why. Is it a teacher issue, or maybe competition for 7th graders coming from a strong public middle school? This might be call for further analysis, but even this small exercise allows the school to identify the need to drive retention programs for those two grades since they represent the biggest opportunity.

4.) Know your school’s closure rate

The next most critical metric to track is your school’s “closure” or “yield rate”. This is the number of families who engaged with your school via a school tour or shadow day, divided by the ones that ultimately enrolled in your school.
This is one of the most critical metrics to track and one of the most critical to do right. Here is how it should look if we are only looking at open house attendance:
You can see in the example above that this school is averaging around a 50 percent closure rate. For every 100 families that come in and tour the school, only 50 will enroll. If you know this, and are trying to increase your enrollment to 100 students a year, there are two choices:

Increase the number of families that tour your school to 200. You can do this, but you will probably have to spend a fair amount of money to double your attraction. Or . . .
Improve your closure rate by “closing the deal” with more of the families (parents) that come to tour.

This chart throws into sharp relief where you need to focus your attention: increasing the quality of the experience a family has when they tour your school. Cutting the data this way allows you to identify your biggest opportunity to drive your charter school enrollment.
Unfortunately, this yield-rate tracking doesn’t tell you why. This might be when you want to consider engaging a “secret shopper” to identify why your tour is not getting parents to convert by enrolling their children.

5.) Try to track the effectiveness of your outbound marketing efforts

Tracking your specific enrollment marketing efforts is the hardest metric to get right. There is an old line in consumer marketing, “I waste 50 percent of my advertising dollars, but I don’t know which 50 percent”. It is often hard to know what specific thing drove enrollment. For example, most schools use yard signs to raise awareness for their upcoming open houses. Does a yard sign make a parent engage with you? It is hard to say, but this is a good example of a cost-effective way to raise awareness.
For a small-budget item like a yard sign, it is ok if you don’t know the direct effects. But if you are planning on spending more money on radio, TV or billboards, having a way to track the effectiveness of those campaigns is critical.
Because it is so important to track your marketing program’s effectiveness, I tend to recommend to clients that they shift more of their marketing dollars to digital, or online advertising. Digital advertising allows you to track engagement and, most importantly, if the customer acted as a result of your marketing efforts. You know if somebody clicked on a Facebook Ad. If you are running a digital campaign and all your “calls-to-action” lead the parent back to a custom landing page to sign up for your open house, you are easily able to track which one worked and led to the highest engagement. You don’t get that same proof of engagement with a billboard. Digital ads can also be very targeted. You can ensure that only parents within your designated age range and zip codes see your ads. This is not really something you can do with broader consumer-based ads like magazines, radio, or billboards.
It can be hard to start the process of using data-driven practices for your charter school enrollment strategy. However, understanding your data allows you to make better decisions, and ultimately, it pays off by improving your school’s numbers.

Digital Marketing for Charter Schools: An Actionable Workbook to Help You Achieve Your School’s Goals!
Want to improve your charter school’s enrollment but are scratching your head as to how to go about implementing digital marketing for your charter school? You’re not alone! This free manual will be your go-to guide for all of your school’s digital marketing needs! Download this actionable workbook to help get your marketing plans started, guide you as you define your audience and key differentiators, choose your tactics, and start to build your campaigns.

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Charter School Enrollment: Four Ways to Get Your Faculty Involved

As a charter school leader, managing your charter school’s enrollment is a hard and, sometimes, lonely job—and there never seems to be enough time to get everything done.
Often, your colleagues at the school don’t understand the impact of your school’s enrollment numbers on the financial well-being of your school. If they do, they have few opportunities to collaborate or even understand how they can help make a positive difference.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be a solo job. Far from it. With the right approach, you can encourage your faculty to play a larger role in your charter school enrollment efforts.
Understandably, a teachers’ time can be hard to come by. But because your faculty represents the heart and soul of your school, they can be a huge asset as you are trying to attract (and retain) students.

Here are four easy things you can do to teach your faculty to become more engaged and help bolster your charter school enrollment numbers.

1. Talk – and brag – about your faculty

Parents love to know that the people teaching their children are qualified, smart teachers. They trust that they are going to help that child grow both academically and socially over the next year. But most parents know very little about the teachers at your school.
Therefore, your faculty should be the “stars” of your enrollment marketing efforts. How great would it be the next time you talk to a parent about why those chose your school and they respond by citing some specific and positive attributes of your excellent faculty?
Plus, showcasing your faculty and including them in your marketing efforts is almost a guaranteed way to engage them and have them feel some ownership of attracting students to your school.
Your first step is to make sure that you have compiled bios on all your teachers. These should be a mix of things that establish the quality of your teachers; level of education, where they went to school, types of degrees, years teaching, etc., as well as fun facts, hobbies, favorite experience as a teacher, what inspired them to work in a school, etc.
Your next step is to make sure you have a faculty section on the website where you can publish all of your staff biographies. You’d be surprised how few schools do this. Providing this “inside” information can increase interest in your school because it enables parents who are considering your school to see your strong and varied instructional staff, and it can even provide a competitive edge.
Once you have your staff’s information compiled and, on your website, it’s very easy to use this content to create a series of social media postings. Keeping up with the constant need to post material on social media is challenging for every school. But laying a solid foundation with those bios buys you a lot of content that you can use year after year.
Consider doing a “Teacher Tuesday” or a “Faculty Friday” series of posts where you post the bios on your social media channels. If you have a monthly or weekly newsletter, this would be fantastic content to feature there as well. Celebrating your staff can also create a powerful community feel for your school – your faculty might find common bonds with parents, prospective parents, or even students, over attending the same university or sharing the same hobby.
You will probably find that parents will engage more with these posts and make comments like: “She was an awesome teacher.”, or “We loved Mrs. Smith.”.
Going through this process will also allow you to gather some fun facts about your staff that you can use in your marketing. Things like “50% of the teachers at Inspire Charter School have master’s degrees”, “10 of the teachers at Northside STEM Academy are alumni of our school”, or “We have over 600 years of teaching experience at Science Prep.” These can be little blurbs on twitter or they make a great infographic for your admissions material.

2. Use your instructional staff as subject matter experts

Parents often read or research suggestions on parenting, particularly for specific phases of their kids’ lives. You only need to do a quick search on parenting blogs to realize that parents are constantly seeking information. Your instructional staff are your internal subject matter experts in childhood development and education and can be excellent resources.
Set up a simple editorial calendar by asking each of your staff members to write one to two articles a year that you can use across all of your marketing channels. (These should be roughly 600-1200 words—but let the content determine the appropriate length.)
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
• Should students specialize in one sport or play multiple sports? – Athletic Director / Gym Teacher
• Best educational toys for a third grader – Third Grade Teacher
• The books that every 6th grader should read – Sixth Grade Teacher or Librarian
• How much screen time is too much? – Guidance Counselor
• Signs that your child is ready for kindergarten – Kindergarten Teacher
The options go on and on. Don’t dictate to your staff what they write but give them creative freedom based upon questions that parents are asking about. I’m sure many of your staff would love to offer suggestions and advice based on their expertise. Let them!
Once you have compiled several articles (blog posts), you now have a ton of content that you can use for your charter school marketing efforts. These can be items like lead magnets (articles on your website that are used to identify prospects), social media content or can be used in a weekly/monthly newsletter, just to support parents by providing a valuable resource.

3. Get them involved in your student enrollment

The personal touches in your student enrollment are often going to make big impressions with prospective parents. When a student tours your school (and you’ve collected their contact information), as part of your follow-up process, have one of the teachers – who will be working with that child in the upcoming year – write a short personal note thanking them for coming and describing a little bit about what the next year will look like. This doesn’t have to be a long letter, but it is much more about the thought and the fact that the teacher personally reached out to the prospective parent.
Even better, if the student expressed interest in your language program, art curriculum or STEM offerings, have the teacher from that discipline write the note. This personalized approach based upon what the student is interested in will pay huge dividends in your recruitment efforts.
Many schools have the teacher write a note for the new students entering their classroom over the summer, this idea just take this one step further and expands it to your prospective students.

4. Increase the amount of positive communication from the teacher to the parent

Though this recommendation is primarily designed for your existing students, a strong charter school enrollment program focuses on the retention of students as well as attracting new students.
Parents love to get visibility into how their child is doing in school. Most parents will check grades, but it is the softer and more emotional development milestones that they don’t hear about as often.
Parents will greatly appreciate a short email or better yet a handwritten note from your teachers to parents just saying something like, “I wanted to let you know what a pleasure it is to have Alex in my class. He is such a good helper and is always being a friend to the other kids.” You better believe that note is going to go on the refrigerator at home and maybe even spur positive conversations around the dinner table.
As every parent can attest, as kids get older, it gets harder and harder to draw out what happened at school that day. Having these as conversation starters can have the added bonus of helping to improve the communication between the parent and their child.
Plus, these small notes, help to show to the student that there are adults in his/her life that care about him/her. Establishing that feeling in a child is one of the greatest ways to encourage engagement in school.
Of course, your teachers’ time is understandably limited, so this doesn’t need to be for every student, every week, but try to encourage your staff write these at least quarterly for each student.

In Conclusion

Your faculty can be a “secret weapon” in your charter school enrollment activities. Utilizing their influence and their knowledge can provide an impactful lift to your marketing and recruiting efforts.
It can be difficult to get your staff engaged because they are all busy doing their own job. But helping them understand that sustaining and boosting enrollment provides job security and helps to ensure the financial health of your school, may inspire action in even the most reluctant of staff members.
In addition, these four steps are all fairly small things that shouldn’t take a huge time commitment from any single staff member. Collectively, though, they can have a very positive impact on how both prospective and current parents perceive your school and your school community, ideally resulting in a boost to your charter school enrollment numbers.

Digital Marketing for Charter Schools: An Actionable Workbook to Help You Achieve Your School’s Goals!
Still scratching your head as to how to go about implementing marketing efforts to support your charter school enrollment efforts? You’re not alone! This free manual will be your go-to guide for all of your school’s digital marketing needs! Download this actionable workbook to help build get your marketing plans started, guide you as you define your audience and key differentiators, choose your tactics, and start to build your campaigns.

DOWNLOAD NOW

The What, Why, and How-to for Designing a School Satisfaction Survey for your Charter School

Your charter school’s success depends on many things, but key among them is how satisfied your key stakeholders are with your school. The easiest way to understand this is to ask them! For example, here are a few vital questions a school satisfaction survey can answer: How satisfied are your parents? How satisfied is your staff?

What is their risk of defection? What parts of the school are they satisfied with and what parts do they find lacking?

Your students (and their families) are your ‘customers’ so keeping them satisfied with the quality of your school’s offerings is vital to maintaining – and ideally increasing – enrollment, and therefore important to your school’s financial wellbeing.

There are two ways to increase enrollment at your school: attracting new families or retaining more of your existing families. Schools spend a lot of time, money and effort in attracting new families, but retention is often somewhat considered an afterthought.

But, it is a lot easier to keep families than it is to attract new ones—and there is a significant cost benefit. Different sources will cite different costs, but the standard rule of thumb that I have found is that it generally costs five times more to attract a new customer than it is to retain one. This is one very good reason that understanding the true satisfaction levels of your ‘customers’ can be imperative to your school’s health and retention rates.

Many school leaders shape their perception of parental satisfaction by the interactions that they have with parents. But this is generally not representative of how your entire parental base feels, and often, it is skewed towards the very engaged, the often so-named “high maintenance” parents – or simply the loudest voices in the room.

But, parents are just one of your key stakeholders. Your staff forms the backbone of your school, so understanding how to keep them satisfied and motivated in their job also needs to be a critical part of any principal’s (or leadership team’s) goals for the year.

A simple school satisfaction survey, administered yearly to both your parents and staff, will give you a wealth of information and allow you to understand how the majority of your parents and staff feel about your school.

Here are the five key questions you should ask yourself when you are planning your school satisfaction surveys:

1. Should you conduct the survey on your own or should you pay to have this done?

The Do-it-Yourself Option:
There are several free online survey vehicles out there. You can use Survey Monkey, Survey Gizmo, or you can even create a survey using Google Forms. If you have the time and knowledge, you can pull together a decent survey.
But a DIY approach can have some noteworthy drawbacks:

Parents are often leery of being completely honest if they think that in some way their answers can be tied back to them or their child. Even though you tell them it is anonymous, they may not believe you. You run the risk of getting watered down feedback.
If you are doing this for staff – they will never be honest since they feel that this is not anonymous, and it will impact their job if they voice a negative opinion.
Writing good questions is an art as well as a science. There is a skill in crafting questions that can get at the underlying issues. You can probably get there eventually, but you might find that this is taking more time than you wanted to spend.
Analyzing survey results is another time-consuming task. Is this really where your time is best spent?

Professional Survey Service Options
Market research firms regularly conduct customer satisfaction surveys for their clients. The one caution I would make is to try to find a firm that does these for schools. There are often nuances in education that need to be considered when conducting these types of surveys.
Additionally, these organizations will be able to provide context and benchmarks from other schools similar to yours so you know if you are truly doing well or need to make some improvements.

Some options for survey firms:

2. How long should your survey be?

If this is your first time running a school satisfaction survey, there might be a tendency to ask too many questions. Schools often take the “kitchen-sink” approach in their surveys because, although some of those the answers may be interesting, they may not really be actionable or helpful for achieving your specific survey goals.

Survey Monkey recently published some interesting data about survey completion. They looked at surveys ranging from 1-30 questions from 100,000 users. This research uncovered some interesting data.
This chart shows that the higher the number of questions, the smaller amount of time people are thinking about the answer. Additionally, Survey Monkey found that the abandonment rate increased for longer surveys. Surveys that were longer than 7 – 8 minutes saw their completion rates drop by 5 – 20%.

3. What should you ask?

This will vary by school, but the most important question to ask is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a simple question and is widely used across businesses to measure satisfaction. It is a simple question and states, “On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend (your school) to a friend or colleague”.

To gain your NPS, you break your respondents into three groups. Parents who scored you a 9 or 10 are your “promoters”. 7-8 are passives and 0 – 6 are “detractors”. To get your score, take the percentage of promoters, subtract the percentage of detractors and throw out the passives. Voila! You have your NPS score.

Understanding how your NPS score compares against other schools is a bit tricky. (Another potential reason to use an outside consultant), but Temkin Group publishes yearly statistics on industry NPS scores. You really want to approach the level of Amazon at an NPS score of 47 versus that of the cable companies which average around -11!

This NPS is a good standard question that you can use every year to track your progress on improvement.
Here are other topical questions that you may want to ask:

Opinion on overall academic quality
Use of technology in the classroom
How safe is the school
The effectiveness of differentiated instructional programs
Enrichment / after school programs
Communication programs
The overall trend of the school (getting better, staying the same, getting worse)
Quality of the cafeteria and food offerings

The last one may seem to be of low importance, but in the surveys that I have run, this is an important criterion for the younger (millennial) parents.
If you are also surveying your staff – you will want to include questions related to their overall job satisfaction:

Do they feel valued by the administrative team?
Do they feel that the administrative team supports their efforts in the classroom?
Do they feel that they have enough professional development opportunities?

I also generally recommend to clients that we include a number of “open-ended questions”. These are questions such as:

What is the one thing you would like to see improved at our school?
Are there additional things you would like the administration to know that weren’t covered in this survey?

Since these questions are qualitative in nature, you can’t track them through a simple metric, but they will give you a lot of very interesting insights into what your parents (and staff) are thinking

4. When should you conduct a school satisfaction survey?

Generally, you have three windows to run your surveys:

October – November
January – February
March – April – May

These avoid a lot of the holidays and you always want to give new parents a couple of months to familiarize themselves with your school before you survey them.

You should also consider running your satisfaction survey every year. It can be easy to fall into the habit of just doing a satisfaction survey as part of your reaccreditation process. However, running a survey once every 5 – 7 years only gives you a snapshot, not a trend.

Considering that every year, 15% of your families are new to your school, you’ll definitely want to run this every year to capture each incoming class and be able to map their satisfaction trends over time.

5. What should you do with the results?

Use the data for planning for improvements for next year, and to track how well you are hitting your satisfaction goals. Take them to your board of directors and share with your leadership team so that they have key insights into your school’s success—and an understanding of any areas that may need work.

Be very careful if you choose to not release the results of the school survey to your parent base. I always advocate to my clients that transparency on results is best, but only if you are also telling parents what your plan is to address their critical feedback.

If you choose not to release the results, don’t be surprised if parents don’t answer your next survey, or assume that the reason why you didn’t release the results is because they were bad.

I hope that this information helps you to understand the value of creating and implementing a school satisfaction survey and why it benefits your school to do one each and every year.

Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email tonick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call them at 317-361-5255.

Since the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.6 billion in support of 600 charter schools that educate 800,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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Assessing the State of Indiana Charter Schools

Introduction

Before we dive into the state of Indiana charter schools, here’s a little background on the history of the charter school movement and where it stands today.:

In 1991, the first law allowing public charter schools was passed in Minnesota.
Today, more than 3.2 million students attend over 7,000 public charter schools in 44 states and Puerto Rico. Public Charter Schools are excelling in educating students with public charter schools representing seven of the top 10 public high schools in US News and World Report Best High Schools.
According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), over the past five years, enrollment at charter schools has grown by 62 percent and now represents over 6% of all students in the United States.

Indiana

Although late to the game as the 38th state to authorize public charter schools in 2001, Indiana’s law provided a model charter school environment:

It allows multiple entities to authorize charter schools;
It doesn’t place a cap on charter school numbers; and
It requires an equivalent level of accountability as public district schools.

Since that time, policymakers have continued to refine and improve Indiana’s public charter school laws, and the state has been recognized as having the best charter school laws in the nation by NAPCS for the last three years.
But looking behind its well-regarded law and policy environment, how well is the charter school movement doing in Indiana?
Indiana has approximately 100 charter schools that are a mixture of both traditional “brick-and-mortar” charter schools and schools that are 100% virtual (online instruction). Up until 2018, there were also a third group of schools who were providing a hybrid model of 50% online instruction and 50% in-class instruction. However, those schools closed their doors at the end of the 2017-2018 school year.
Only 4% of students in Indiana attend a public charter school—below the national average of 6%. Indiana’s public charter school enrollment is markedly eclipsed by other states like Arizona where 16% of all students attend a public charter school – or DC where a whopping 43% of students are enrolled in a public charter school.
However, looking deeper at the district and city level, in some areas of the state, public charter schools are flourishing.
Forty-three percent of all charter school students in Indiana reside in four school districts: Indianapolis Public Schools, Gary Community School Corporation, South Bend Community School Corporation and Anderson Community School Corporation.
In fact, two school systems have some of the highest percentages of students attending charters in the U.S. In Gary, 46 percent of students attend a charter school, the 5th highest, and Indianapolis is not far behind with 33 percent of all students within the district attending a charter school — the 10th highest charter school percentage in the nation.

Performance

Indiana’s public charter schools take the same set of standardized tests (I-STEP, I-READ & ECA) as traditional public district schools. They also receive a grade on the same A to F rating system. This standardization allows for an easy comparison of academic performance.
Several charter schools have seen strong academic success. According to US News and World Report, the top two high schools in the state of Indiana are public charter schools: Signature School in Evansville and Herron High School in Indianapolis. Additionally, the Excel Centers (schools focused on adults who have dropped out) has been touted as a national example and is being implemented in other states.
When comparing pure academic results, there are some variables that are important to consider. Whenever one compares schools, it is important to account for the different type of student populations. Comparing the academic performance of a high-poverty school against one in a wealthy suburb can represent a skewed comparison.
In April of 2017, the Indiana State Board of Education released a report on the performance of Indiana’s charter school sector. This report, authored by Ron Sandlin, Senior Director of School Performance and Transformation, provides an excellent, data-driven, report on Indiana’s charter schools. It also compared public charter schools with nearby public district schools that shared similar student characteristics.
Comparing public charter schools with “like-traditional” public district schools allows a much more balanced approach.

Using data from the State Department of Education, this report illustrated that:
Public Charter Schools enroll a greater percentage of low-income and minority students than like-traditional public-school corporations;
Indiana’s Public Charter Schools serve a greater percentage of students who qualify for free/reduced priced meals; and
Indiana’s Public Charter Schools serve a similar percentage of students with special needs when compared to like-traditional public district schools.

When it comes to academic performance, there is a bit more of a mixed message. The more traditional brick-and-mortar charter schools had strong academic performance compared to the virtual (and now closed) hybrid charter schools.
In 2017, brick-and-mortar charter schools outperformed similar public schools in the A-F accountability system with 36.2% of these charter schools achieving an A or a B rating, compared to 30.4% of similar public district schools achieving an A or a B.
However, the performance of the virtual charter schools is still some of the worst in the state with every virtual charter school scoring an F.

What does the future hold for public charter schools in Indiana?

Making predictions can be tricky. But as someone who is deep into the charter school space, allow me to suggest some trends that I see happening in Indiana:
• Look for more charter schools to expand into the townships of Indianapolis.
The saturation of public charter schools in Center Township will make it harder to recruit new students, so operators will have to move further out of the city core. It will be very interesting to see if township superintendents will adopt the co-operative model of IPS’s Superintendent Dr. Ferebee and work with public charter schools or if they will continue to create a hostile environment.
• Continuing expansion of the successful models, especially the high schools.
Most public charter schools in Indiana are generally single-site schools, however, we are starting to see a push by some of these operators to replicate their models. Both Purdue and Indianapolis Classical Schools will continue to expand. Though the fate of Broad Ripple High School remains uncertain, it is a pretty good bet, that you will see one or both of those schools operating in that facility within the next two years. Additionally, KIPP, who currently runs a successful elementary and middle school will probably get serious about a high school in the next couple of years.
• More rural charter schools.
Both Dugger Union Community School and Mays Community Academy are examples of communities facing school closure who rallied behind and were successful at opening their own charter schools. Both of those schools have done well with Mays recently expanding into a junior high as well. As traditional districts continue to struggle, look for charter school operators to attempt to fill the void.
Indiana has done a great job of creating a policy and legal environment for public charter schools to succeed. Examining the data of who attends a public charter school in Indiana shows that public charter schools in Indiana remain true to the original vision of helping to provide an alternative for all students when the traditional public-school option is sub-par. Because the data is showing that public charter schools are performing very well against similar traditional public schools, I think it’s a safe bet to look for the sector and for Indiana charter schools to continue to expand and flourish.

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Charter School Enrollment: Unified Enrollment and Enroll Indy

Thirty years ago, the process for selecting and enrolling in a school was very easy. Parents would send their child to the neighborhood public school, or if they had the means and/or desire would choose to apply to a private and/or parochial school. With the introduction and growth of charter schools, choosing a school is now a more involved and often a complex decision. Though some would say that the free market approach to school choice – and the option for charter school enrollment – is good, others have suggested that it has created a challenging system that disproportionately skews towards parents who have the time and ability to ensure that their child gets into the best school.
In an attempt to address these concerns and simplify what had become a very complex process, cities are turning to unified enrollment systems which provide parents a single place to research schools, a common application and single process to “match” to the school of their choice.
Denver and New Orleans were the first to roll these out in 2011. Both systems were able to pull together both traditional public school enrollment and public charter school enrollment into a single, common system. New Orleans also included their private schools. Since then, other cities like Washington DC, Camden and Newark have instituted this unified enrollment system across both traditional public schools and public charter schools while others like Detroit, St. Louis and Kansas City have created these systems without traditional public school participation and only include the public charter schools.
Early research of the Denver system has shown that this program has brought more equity to the group of schools who participate with higher enrollment of minorities, lower-income students and English language learners to the charter sector.
However, the move to common enrollment has not been without controversy. In Boston and Oakland, the implementation of unified enrollment has been stifled by concerns about charter school expansion, believing that the implementation of a unified system will drive more students away from the local traditional public schools.
Recognizing some of the challenges that other cities had faced in rolling out unified enrollment, Indianapolis was very deliberate about garnering community support of a unified enrollment program. In the fall of 2017, Enroll Indy was launched with substantial support from the two key local players in education: The Mind Trust and the Mayor’s Office of Charter Schools. Caitlin Hanlon, the founder of Enroll Indy, was a Mind Trust fellow and had structured the system during her fellowship.
The organization conducted a well-designed community outreach program prior to launch. This outreach garnered support from many well-known neighborhood organizations, civic groups, and schools. In its first year, a total of 57 schools participated in Enroll Indy. This included all the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and most of the larger charter schools in the city. — few notable exceptions included the Christel House schools and the charter (non-innovation schools) of Phalen Leadership Academy.
Under the Enroll Indy system, any kindergarten or above student who is changing schools to a school that participates in the system is required to register with the Enroll Indy website and indicate their priority choice for a school. They are then matched to a school based upon their priority choices and the space available at the school.
Enroll Indy has changed the enrollment and recruitment dynamics within the city of Indianapolis. As a school enrollment consultant, I had the opportunity to work with several clients in Indianapolis during the roll-out. I wanted to share some of our experiences and ways that schools can maximize their recruitment efforts in a unified enrollment environment.

1. It is going to be harder to enroll students if you choose to operate outside of Enroll Indy.

As a charter school leader in Indianapolis, or really in any unified enrollment system, you need to ask the fundamental question: Should we participate in this system for our charter school’s enrollment? This is a judgment call based upon the success and quality of the existing enrollment strategy for your charter school. If you have a well-designed enrollment system, consistently have a waiting list, and can communicate to all prospects that they don’t need to use Enroll Indy to enroll in your school, you might be able to run independently. As I stated above, a couple of schools are going this route. However, generally, there are more positives (for the expansion of charter schools) than negatives to be gained from Enroll Indy, so I recommend to my clients that they participate. If you choose to operate independently, you are going to have to overcome the perception that all schools are part of this system. This can be done, but it will require more work. Enroll Indy participated in over 60 community events and did phone banking /canvasing of over 25,000 households in Center Township. That is tough to compete against.
If you choose to participate:

2. You need to be thoughtful and strategic about the information that you include on your school description

For a lot of parents, your page under the Enroll Indy school finder site may be the first time that they have heard about your school or have seen detailed information about what your school offers.

The “Who We Are” section is your opportunity to make a great first impression. This section needs to be exciting and resonate with your potential parents. DO NOT take the description in your charter application and copy and paste! You need to think about who your audience is and what they want in a school. Many of the descriptions that I read from schools were chock full of academic jargon like “…leading literacy socio-emotional and neuroscientific research..” or were not very exciting like “We incorporate the environment into our instruction, and our students have opportunities for outdoor education.” Give your prospective parents an easy to understand but also a compelling description of your school. You are describing your school, but also selling it. Global Preparatory Academy, a dual language immersion program on the Near Westside, provides a good example of a parent-friendly description:

Example description from Global Preparatory Academy

Next, in the school highlights section, you can select six pictures and categories that highlight the uniqueness of your school. There were a few schools who struggled with this part. I saw a few that displayed their school mascot, or just the exterior of the facility. Those are important, but in this key selling stage, you want to continue to describe your school, but use the visuals to create excitement and allow the parent to envision their child at your school.
Don’t use stock photography or leave this section blank. Take this part seriously because parents are taking this seriously.
Finally, make sure that you are filling out all the different programs, clubs, sports and community partnerships that your school provides. Though the filtering program allows parents to search on a specific type of activity that your school offers, right now that filter does not “knock” a school off the consideration list, so it doesn’t remove you from consideration. However, if you don’t fill this section out, you give a very incomplete picture of your school.

Example of a school that is not very enticing

3. Utilize the event feature and participate in all the events that Enroll Indy hosts

Enroll Indy hosted four of events in the six months of the matching period. Attending these events gives you an excellent opportunity to get in front of parents who are currently looking for a school.
In addition to hosting their own events, Enroll Indy also allowed schools to use their platform to advertise upcoming open houses or other recruitment events. Surprisingly, only about a quarter of the schools used Enroll Indy to publicize their events.

Enroll Indy’s website averages about 2,000 users a month. This is a great (and free) platform for you to advertise your events. Additionally, in the monthly newsletters that Enroll Indy sends out to their entire parental database, they highlight and promote these events. Because my clients had events listed on the site, they were profiled in the newsletter. If you don’t list your events, you don’t get that opportunity.

4. Utilize the “like” or favorite feature to understand who is interested in your school

One of the complaints that I heard from schools using Enroll Indy was not being able to see who is interested in their school until they were matched. However, on your school page in the upper right corner, there is a heart, or a favorite, button.

Note the “like” button (heart) on the top right-hand corner

When a parent “likes” your school, they go into a separate list that you can access prior to match day to follow up with that parent. This is the only time you are going to see contact information for a parent prior to the official matching time. Encourage all your parents that you are recruiting to “like you”. This can be done in the description of your school or through your promotional efforts outside of Enroll Indy. Once you have a parent’s contact information, you need to follow up with the parents who have signaled a preference towards your school. Email them, call them, send them more information, personally invite them to an event, etc. They are giving you a buying signal, go out and court them. A personal outreach at this stage is going to make a huge impact on how they view your school.

5. Enroll Indy will not be a silver bullet if you constantly struggle with enrollment. You must still do the work!

Enroll Indy’s goals are not to ensure full enrollment at every school, but rather to try to spread enrollment more equally and equitably across all the schools in Indianapolis. Enroll Indy can help communicate to new parents who might not have heard about your school, but it should not in any way encourage you to stop doing all the recruitment activities that you have done in the past to attract students. It is a great addition to your marketing toolkit, but it shouldn’t be your sole tactic.
It is too soon to confidently talk about the impact that Enroll Indy will have upon education and enrollment within Indianapolis. However, if you are a charter school in Indianapolis, maximizing Enroll Indy should be a factor in the planning of your enrollment strategy. Hopefully, these five tips can help you to maximize it for your school.

Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email to nick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call them at 317-361-5255.

Digital Marketing for Charter Schools: An Actionable Workbook to Help You Achieve Your School’s Goals!
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