Electronic Toolbox

I have a meeting with the Board of Governors in less than hour.  Why wouldn’t I be working on a blog post??  Well, frankly, my head and my notebook are so full of stats, charts, quaint stories, tales of woe, and predictions for the future that my brain needs a rest before I go in the big room.  But one of the things I will be addressing today is our plan to step back and do a serious communications audit this summer.

We have certainly jumped with reckless abandon onto the social media and in-bound marketing wagon.  In the last two years we have launched a very active Facebook and Twitter account.  They are updated almost daily.  We have launched a new website, built for maximum SEO.  We have an equally active blog up and running and we have over 100 videos on our YouTube Channel.  We even have a full-time employee dedicated to the maintenance of all these media.  Our proverbial toolbox is full.  Our proverbial cup overfloweth.

But two statements in the last month have been ricocheting around in my head.  The first comes from the famous columnist Peggy Noonan.  Whether or not you agree with her politics, she is a brilliant writer and her books are wonderful.  The other comes from my dear friend JT Hanley at Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California.  He does not have the fame of Peggy Noonan but he should.  He is an educator and a coach without peer.

Talking about President Obama and how his campaign has become expert at mining the internet and the data to be found therein, Noonan, who is not a fan of the president, asks in this column, “If you have fabulous new ways to reach everyone in the world but you have little to say, does that really help you?”  And then my friend JT, speaking on a topic I honestly don’t remember (we were a few martinis and glasses of wine into dinner at that point!), asked, “If you don’t have focus, isn’t your camera just a plastic box?” 

All this got me thinking of our electronic arsenal.  Now that we have built up these resources and filled our toolbox, what do we do next?  We have spent the last two years creating and staffing for this 21st century world of recruitment in which we must be successful but I will admit we have not figured out exactly what to do with it now that we have it.  Or more accurately, we have not figured out the best use of what to do with it.  How do we harness their power, craft the messages, maximize the potential, and build a strategy?

Ask me in September what we accomplished this summer.

Relationships.

I had the personal and professional pleasure to have dinner with a favourite consultant at IECA this month. The real treat was she invited me to dinner—what an honour. You would know her. We all know her. And we all love her. She is kind, patient and has immeasurable time for all of us, all while running her own practice and helping mentor new consultants in the profession.

Around April 10th when we all constantly vacillate between celebration and frustration, I lost one kid each from two key feeder schools to the same boarding school. I’d heard of this boarding school but, frankly, it wasn’t on my radar and I never had reason to think it was in the same league. (To be honest, I knew so little of it, I didn’t have any reason to think it wasn’t in the same league either.) So, I told this to our consultant friend and asked her what she knew of the school.

She loves the school. She has sent a number of clients there over the years. She had great things to say about it and said her clients had all been quite happy there. She respected their mission and felt they held true to who they were, something very important to her. No complaints.

But then the admissions director left.

And she’s sent nobody since.

She doesn’t know the new admissions director. She doesn’t have a contact, doesn’t have someone with whom she can have a frank conversation about a client, someone with whom she can test the waters. There is nobody at that school who will roll out the red carpet for her clients when they visit, nobody to give them an extra bit of attention and to recognize who sent them. She still thinks very highly of the school but her relationships are the key to her confidence in recommending a school. And she has none there now.

 Four days later I had the professional privilege to stand next to Pat Gimbel from Deerfield at a fair in California. Pat has been doing this forever and is a role model and mentor to so many of us. And if you haven’t heard, she’s retiring next year. What a loss for us. But Pat and I got chatting, making note of who was attending the fair. Directors? Other staff? Local parent or alumni volunteers? I noted with admiration and congratulations that she’s enrolled five kids from this prestigious feeder school out of 13 graduates who were continuing onto boarding school. We then talked about the importance of relationships and why someone of her stature from a school like hers still hits the road and travels the world. Pat doesn’t pawn off Asia on someone else. She’s there in the trenches in Korea like the rest of us. And after a grueling admissions year, just weeks after April 10th, she was on that long 6 ½ flight from Boston to San Francisco to attend this fair, at this school where Deerfield is so beloved that they got over 33% of the boarding-bound graduates. She was on the 6am flight back to Boston the next morning to get back to her office. Why does she do this? To maintain her ties and relationships. They are key to her and to her success.

As she prepares to walk out the door, Pat still teaches us by her words and deeds that it is still all about the relationships.

International versus Global

So if you’re one of the original readers of my blog—and Bless You! if you are—you might remember I’ve written on the movie “The Blind Side” before, here. Now, picture it: the Sunday before the return to school after March break. I’ve got about four loads of unfolded laundry piled on the bed. I turn on the television in the bedroom for some background entertainment while I fold, sort, and put away. I happen upon the opening scene of “The Blind Side” and three hours later the laundry is folded, sorted, put away, and I’ve accomplished nothing else whilst I watched this entire movie…yet again. And the irony is I own the DVD so I don’t have to watch it on television, where it gets dragged out almost an hour longer due to commercials. But I do.

If you’ve seen the movie, now picture this scene: Leanne is at lunch with the other “mothers who lunch”. We know the type: our schools are filled with them. And thank goodness, as they’re not the ones asking about financial aid. She has shared with her shocked friends the tales of taking in Big Mike and giving him a home. One of them says, “Why Leanne, you have changed this boy’s life.” She replies, “No. He has changed our lives.”

I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural TABS Global Symposium over March break. More than the pleasure of attending, I had the privilege of helping think about its creation. It involved mostly schools from the USA but there was certainly a respectable representation from other countries, especially for the first time attempt.

In my mind (although I don’t attempt to speak for TABS), this was about the transition I think is necessary of taking American schools with international students and turning them into global schools with global student bodies. I have been at this a long time and I certainly remember and perpetuated the idea of bringing international students to the USA so that we could change them, help them become and understand and appreciate and embrace American values and education. And then help them into American universities. Isn't that their goal and dream? After all, if that wasn’t what they wanted, they shouldn’t have chosen us. "They" could have gone anywhere else instead.

But I think the symposium as well as 21st century schools are about tearing down the “us” and “they” concepts. Like Big Mike and Leanne, they are no longer about the international student being changed by being in our schools but, rather, about our schools open to being changed by the presence of our international students. It's not unlike the movement of the 1990's to change the curricular/departmental title from "foreign" languages (implying an "otherness" to the primacy of English) to modern and classical languages. Or just, simply, languages.

In my free time (as if—ha!), there’s a longer paper in me to write on this topic. My perspective has certainly changed greatly by being in Canada and by observing America and American education from over the border. No matter how long I’m here, that change will be permanent and I will be forever grateful for it. But for now, I’m honored to have played the smallest of roles in thinking about this topic and having participated in TABS’s effort to bring it to the forefront of our collective conscious.

It’s a big idea and a big topic to wrestle to the ground and it means fundamental changes in essentially very traditional and change-averse institutions in how we view our schools, how we view education, how we view our role on the world stage. It’s not easy but I’ve been impressed by those I have seen tackling the concept.

But isn’t that what the 21st century calls and encourages and challenges us to do?

Lessons from Mary

NOTE: this post is based in politics but is not political. Please continue to read without fear of partisanship. As well, no animals were harmed in the production of this post!

Question: what is more entertaining than Mary Matalin? Well, Mary Matalin when she appears with her husband, James Carville. But this past weekend on “This Week” it was just Mary. Being the Republican talking head that she is, she was sharing the many reasons why she believes that President Obama will lose and the public will choose the yet undetermined alternative, whoever he might be.

But one of her arguments was a very clear articulation of the concern I have been expressing for the last three years during our post-Lehman Brothers collapse economy. Her point: the voter in the election booth this fall won’t care about the employment rate, the participation rate in the national labor force, the stock market, or the growth of the GDP over the last three quarters. They will care about what is in their checking account, whether there’s money leftover at the end of the month, and their anxiety over every bill that arrives in the mail.

Her visual: the mom at the gas pump with the SUV watching the pump and the price escalate and escalate. As she talked about this mom, the admissions professional in me saw car seats in the back and lacrosse equipment in the cargo area. She maybe had one of those round, white stickers on her back window and she could be on her way to the meeting of the volunteer parent auction committee. She’s not voting on 8.8% versus 8.3% unemployment. She’s voting on the fact that the pump now reads $84 to fill her SUV’s tank and she knows it won’t be her only visit to the gas station this week.

And those are our parents and our worries. As inflation goes up around 1% and our tuition rates go up 3-6%, we have to worry about those prospective families with their SUVs. They aren’t choosing an independent school because the market recently closed up over 13,000 points or because unemployment has come down slightly. Whether or not they can comfortably afford our schools is determined by what’s in the bank, what’s in the checkbook, and what bills show up near the end of the month. It’s determined by what it costs to fill the SUV and what it costs at the grocery store to fill the family at dinner.

Until any recovery trickles down into the bank accounts of the individual citizen, we are going to have to factor in their daily reality and not the national trends. After all, they pay their tuition from their checkbook, not from the 12 month trailing average of national import/export ratios.

It’s a great and comforting thing to see the economy slowly—oh so very slowly—recovering but it’s not trickling down into the checkbooks. Not yet. Like it or not, like her or not, there’s a few things Mary can teach us about consumer behavior and consumer reality. We should listen.

Starting from scratch

Through a professional connection from my friend Sam Herrick at Live Oak School in San Francisco, I was introduced to the East Bay School for Boys, also known as e.b.s.b.. (And, yes, their graphic is done with that e.e. cummings look.) This is a brand new, single-sex middle school. They opened last year with 17 students; this year they have 90. And as of my visit earlier this month, they were investigating new, larger facilities to meet the continued demand they foresee.

What really struck me about my visit is the incredible thought that went into the design of this school. I had a wonderful tour from the head of school, Jason Baeten, who shared with me the considerations, thoughts, and ideas behind every bit of the space, program, curriculum, philosophy and even their motto: empowering the engaged, thoughtful and courageous men of tomorrow…. We had a great exchange about their choice of “courageous” and he told me about the other words with which they wrestled and why they landed on courageous.

It was a real privilege to think and hear about how a 21st century school was carefully crafted from scratch, how nothing was taken for granted or done “because it’d always been done that way”. They were unencumbered in their construction of this new school, limited by only their imaginations. How daunting. But how exciting!

And then I returned from my trip to the disappointing news that I was losing my wonderful assistant director. With her pending departure this summer and a year-long maternity leave I need to fill in the next six weeks (you read that right: maternity leaves are a year up here!), that’s half the Upper School recruitment team of four! If anyone from the Lower School office or my support staff tells me they’re also leaving, I just may lose my marbles!

But then I thought of e.b.s.b. and paused. They inspire me. And as I type this, I am giving serious consideration to what a 21st century admissions team and office might look like. How has our practice and profession evolved? How, what and why should we be doing things differently than we did ten years ago, fifteen years ago? Two years ago? While staff changes are never easy and the process of hiring is arduous and takes up a tremendous amount of time and energy, when will I next have the gift of considering two full-time positions at once and designing how I might re-allocate those 80 hours a week?

I don’t have any answers yet and I certainly welcome anybody’s input. In the meantime, I’m going to try and tackle this living up to the inspiring and challenging ideals of e.b.s.b.: engaged, thoughtful and courageous….

Lucky us

Recently I was visiting a junior boarding school and I had the rare privilege to surprise an applicant by handing him in person his offer of admission and a $10,000 academic scholarship. The timing worked perfectly (thanks to coordination with his current headmaster) that we were able to receive the necessary school documents and get him through admission committee ahead of my visit.

Over my career I have had the opportunity on occasion to tell a student of their admission in person or over the phone before they got our packet, but this may well be the first time I have hand-delivered it. I have to say, it’s an impressive packet. We put a lot of time and effort in the design and presentation of our offer of admission and in our scholarship awards, and when they can be presented together, it looks darn good. After all, the greater the yield from your first round admits, the less you depend on your wait pool and the more selective you can be.

But I think I will remember forever watching this boy open the folder, start to scan the letter, and, like the sun easing over the horizon in the morning, see a smile start to slowly spread across his face. When he hit the key line in the letter that confirmed where he thought this letter was going, his eyes got huge and his smile even bigger and his head shot up like a jack-in-the-box as he looked at me. And then he looked right back down to finish reading the letter. When he was done, he looked up and he said nothing, the bright glare reflecting off his braces sending the message of his delight. I simply smiled back, shook his hand, said congratulations, and went on my way. We had only a minute for this transaction but it was a wonderfully powerful, simple minute.

By complete coincidence, his parents were up visiting that Sunday afternoon. I had the opportunity to speak with them and congratulate them on his offer of admission and his scholarship. When I saw them, they had not yet seen their son or his packet but they later wrote to me, “we were unable to pry the folder from our son’s fingers over lunch.” I love picturing that lunch in my head! It will carry me through some of the inevitable frustrations that always accompany this time of year in admissions.

We are in the business of changing lives by giving students the remarkable opportunities that come with admission to our schools. What a privilege.

Lucky us.

Tebow

So what does Tebow have to do with independent school admissions? I’m not sure I know. But one can’t help but to be caught up in Tebow-fever. It’s the day of the big game: Tebow vs. Brady. (Actually, Denver vs. New England.) And there is not one but two Tebow articles in today’s Wall Street Journal. That’s right: I’m not talking about the Denver Post or the Boston Globe. I’m talking about the country’s leading newspaper on business and economics. Two articles on professional football and on one particular player. And there’s an article in today’s New York Times and probably numerous papers around the country I did not have the time peruse. And there’s a good one posted to ESPN.com I read earlier today.

Personally, I abhor the excess of professional sport. Individual players make more than the payroll of teachers of most schools and probably some small school districts. And they seem to attract fans who would die before they approved a school board budget that would have an annual impact of $100 in taxes but they pay ten times that amount for season tickets to their local pro team. These premier and famous and overpaid athletes are more often than not—much more often than not—poor role models, have questionable values, and fail to use their influence and fame for good. There are exceptions, of course. Cal Ripken comes to mind. Tebow is currently the most well-known of them at the moment.

Did you know he wasn’t even the starting quarterback for Denver this season? That he saw little play at all last year? And now look how far and fast he has come. Impressive everyone is now talking about him given that he spends so much of his time helping the poor, dying, underprivileged, and downtrodden. He flies the suffering and hurting to every Denver game, home or away. And it’s not just a token. He spends time with them before and after the games, and attempts to corral others to do the same. He speaks of his faith, virginity, Baptist parents, and personal values without shame or hesitation. More than without shame or hesitation, he speaks of them with conviction, humility, sincerity, and power.

He’s a one-man brand and he attracts fans and haters alike. (Yup, sadly one of today’s articles was on those who have grown to hate him and anxiously, sadly await some fall or stumble, personal or professional.) But he is very clear in who he is, what he stands for, and in what he believes. He has won countless fans with his clarity and drawn many followers.

If he were an independent school, he’d be full with waiting lists. Long waiting lists. So what can we learn? Yes, many seem to dislike him and can’t wait for him to fail tonight but many adore him. And isn’t that the compelling argument for a strong brand: to strengthen the loyalty of those you seek and help those who are not a good match to go find their own Tebow elsewhere? Good luck to them.

Know who you are. Own who you are. Share who you are. And do it like Tebow: proudly and genuinely. And the right matches will be lining up at your admissions office door.

The great thing about tonight’s game is that whether or not Denver marches forward, Tim Tebow isn’t going to change.

Thank goodness.