Board Reports

Spring sports, AP exams, flowering trees, and the final Board of Trustees meeting: the close of the school year is rapidly approaching.  What do you report; what do you share?  There are many factors, including the leadership and goals of your head, the culture of your board, and the health of your enrollment.  There is no simple formula but there are several things to consider.

Let’s start with Stephen Covey’s famous quote from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.”  When training tour guides, we talk about the goal for the tour before it even starts.  What do we want the family to walk away with?  What are the key messages we want a family to receive?  And then plan the tour accordingly.  You should be thinking similarly about your board report.  This might even be a good question for your head as you prepare, “When I walk out of the Board meeting, what do want me to have accomplished, what message should I have delivered?”

For me, my “end in mind” for any board meeting can be summed up in one word: confidence.  When I leave the room, I want my board to feel confident that the enrollment of our school is safe in my hands.  And then when I might need something from them or have a crazy idea for consideration or even—gasp—stumble, they will embrace it all because I have given them confidence in me, my staff, my direction, and my strategy.  What and how I present is all decided based on leaving them confident in the school’s admissions operation.  And by doing so, I take one more possible headache off the desk of my head and hopefully make him look good and feel proud.  After all, I work for him but he works for them.

Second, it’s important to remember the role of the board.  It serves a strategic, long-term function, not a day-to-day, management function.  As noted in NAIS’s Trustee Handbook, trustees, “…plan for the future of the school for which you care.”  Our role, as Leo Marshall of the Webb Schools wrote on this ALC blog last month, is to provide, “information that will help them make important strategic decisions.”  If all we are doing this month is giving a historical report of the past with a pile of statistics, then we are failing to fulfill our responsibility.  As Tommy Adams, Assistant Head of School for Enrollment at Mercersburg Academy says, “In order to be sustainable over the long haul, we must be strategic.”  What you should do with your historical data, is use it to inform trends and thinking that you should be engaging with your board.  Use what has happened in the past to help you understand what might happen in the future.  You best serve your board and your head if you can address where your admission is headed and where it should be headed. (Admittedly, not always the same thing!)

Finally, in considering your board report and presentation, consider your audience.  A good resource for this (and for all our work in admissions, actually) is Michael Thompson’s Understanding Independent School Parents.  While many on your board may not be current parents, in my experience many of them will nonetheless have the same profile: highly successful, well-educated, wealthy, and others often defer or report to them.  Thompson offers some great insights and some great suggestions.  It’s a good read.  This isn’t addressing the faculty or an open house group.  This isn’t speaking with your staff or meeting with your administrative colleagues.  Know and understand your audience and plan your presentation and messaging accordingly.

Your final board report of the year is your opportunity to tell the admissions narrative of the year just finishing and to show your expertise and competence in helping the board think strategically about your school’s enrollment, appreciate your and your department’s accomplishments, and understand the importance of your work.  Engage them professionally and thoughtfully and you will be valued and taken seriously.

The Last Step

Two whole comments: my last post on where to put the communications/marketing office took off!  Actually, I had several calls, a few emails, and it was picked up in the weekly newsletter from AISAP, The Funnel.  I’m actually quite honored—and have since subscribed to their newsletter.  But all this has had me engaged in some interesting conversations and thinking more on this topic.  (And ducking my advancement colleagues—someone ratted me out to them!)

Once upon a time and early in my career, there was no internet.  GASP—imagine that my younger readers!  There was, therefore, no Facebook or Google or Kayak.com.  Our marketing consisted of print advertising, paying for a listing in printed publications such as Peterson’s (yes, it was a book before it was a website!), and a lot of direct mail and postcards.  Word of mouth was still key, if not more so, because families had such fewer other resources for information.

So, what did a prospective family do for more thorough information?  They called us!

The admissions office was close to the first step in the school inquiry process and our friendly office receptionists performed magic on the phone and we followed up with our mailings and newsletters.  We had a communications strategy, beautiful printed materials, a calendar of contact points throughout the process, and calling campaigns with coaches, faculty, and student and parent volunteers.  We had Avery labels and bulk mail by zipcode, and banks of phones staffed by student callers stuffed with pizza and soda.  Ah, the good old days…

Today the admissions office is the last step in the process.  If a family wants information about your school, they will turn to friends, your website, and depositories of information such as Rate My Teacher and Boarding School Review.  They will Google you long before they ever call or email you.  Your communication strategies and viewbooks are the last step in the process and you only actually get to engage with a prospective student once they’ve completed all the other steps and still found you desirable.

So, you better have strong communications and marketing.  You better have an awesome website (fully coded for SEO), updated and current social media, and accurate data on the various school search engines.  You better be advertising in all the appropriate spots, sponsoring the right events, attending all the fairs, and building the best network possible.  Your marketing and communications and recruitment efforts are of paramount importance to families actually and finally contacting your admissions office for information.

Accordingly, you better have all the necessary communications and marketing resources you need from your school and your head.  After all, the admissions office is now actually the last step in the process.

Communications and Marketing

Shhhh…don’t tell any of your advancement and development colleagues about this.

I’ve been prompted recently to think about the role of communications/marketing offices (herein “c/m office”) in our work, and their proper placement in a school’s organizational chart. 

To start, there are two schools of thought (no pun intended!) on where in an organization to place this office.  Historically—and I think still the case at the vast majority of independent schools—the c/m office is seen as a support function to other offices.  In some cases this office stands alone but often it is a branch of the development/advancement office.  In a very limited number of schools, I have seen it elevated to the level of administration, with the director of communications (or some such title) at the big table.  But that’s still uncommon.

For now, I’m not inclined to think outside the box and look at the less conventional model and, instead, am giving thought to the support function model.  But within that model, I’d like to propose the idea of moving the c/m office out from under the development/advancement office and into an independent office of its own or as a branch of the admissions office.  I have two rationales and hopefully they might help facilitate or further some conversations you have had with your head of school.

First, it’s about money, plain and simple.  90% or more of the operating budget at most any independent school comes from tuition revenue.  No doubt the work done by advancement is critical to a school’s long-term survival, especially around the growth of an endowment and ability to raise funds for construction of facilities.  The operating budget will never be able to pay for such things. 

But in the year-by-year operation of a school, all schools are tuition-dependent.  So, if you’re a day school charging about $25K in upper school tuition, how much easier (relatively speaking!) is it for the admissions office to enroll four more students for an additional $100K in revenue than it is for the advancement office to find an additional $100K in donations?  And we shouldn’t forget that the $100K in tuition revenue repeats itself for the next four years, assuming the child stays through graduation.  If advancement can find an additional $100K in donations, what are the chances they can repeat that the next four years?  So, essentially, if a school is looking to increase revenue for the annual operating budget, they are going to turn to admissions, not fundraising.  Accordingly, the c/m office has to at least be equally available to the admissions office, if not part of the admissions office.

Second, the fundraising people are working with those who already know about the school or with organizations/foundations that are interested in education.  They are tapping alumni, parents of alumni, current parents and grandparents, etc. etc. etc.  They are not expecting or hoping that perfect strangers who may know nothing or very little of your school are going donate money.  However, that’s exactly what the admissions office is doing!  We are hoping that through our communications and marketing efforts (and outreach and recruitment and travel and networking) that we will convince total strangers with no affiliation with the school that they should give over both their child and their money to us. 

We are engaging in a very steep, uphill battle.  Accordingly, we need to commandeer and muster as much communications and marketing resources as we possibly can.  “You don’t know much about us but we’d like you to trust us with your child and pay us a lot of money to do so” is a bigger challenge than, “You know us and love us, and we’re asking you to give back and support us.” Our work is disproportionately dependent on communications and marking whereby advancement capitalizes on and depends more on a potential donor's existing ties to the school and personal relationships.

Again, relatively speaking! 

I’m not saying it’s easy to raise money from friends.  I’m just saying that it is a bit easier.  So, let’s make sure the admissions office has at least equal access to and priority within the marketing and communications resources of our schools.