I recently gave a presentation to the Seattle Archdiocese for Catholic Schools about surveys. Surveys are a great way to collect valuable information about your school community. It gives parents a way to help us help them. If you haven't been using surveys, or if you haven't been mindful about the way you use surveys they maybe haven't worked out that well for you, but if you take into consideration these five tips, I guarantee that you will start to get better results. And that's a win for...

Parents: “I’m getting too many emails” “I can’t find anything” 

School: “We've sent them these dates or this information multiple times — they should know/show up/have signed up”

Sound Familiar? Today we're going to talk about The School to Parent Communication Challenge

Everyone's busy, and time and attention are limited, but the reality is, Parents Need To Know Things, right? So how can we make this communication...

In one of our recent Small School Solutions trainings we went through best practices for low-budget in-house videos, what to shoot and when, and also tools that can support these efforts.

In this blog, we are hitting a few of the key points from that training, and the first one is...

Shoot, Shoot, Shoot! No one is ever comfortable doing something they haven't done, and the only way they get comfortable with it is to do it repeatedly until it doesn't feel weird or awkward anymore....

 

Natasha Soderberg, Associate Head at Butler Montessori, is very familiar with the ups and downs of small schools, as she's been in many different roles within Butler Montessori and will be starting as Head of School in July of 2023. Butler Montessori is located in Darnestown, Maryland, and has about 174 students.

We're so excited to have Natasha here to share how her school has used project management to move things forward, and streamline their efforts. It started in...

Do you often wonder how to get teachers to help out with marketing, retention, and development efforts?  As more and more responsibilities are being added to teachers' plates AND marketing/development/admissions efforts continue to evolve and need additional support, we need strategies to get teachers motivated to help us move things forward. 

During one of our Small School Solutions trainings this month, Aubrey shared a variety of strategies to help schools develop an effective...

We're going to talk about the one email that you need to send every month to your community. And when I'm talking community, I'm talking about your admissions list, your summer camp list, your parents, your grandparents, and your donors. Everyone, okay.

And the goal of this one email is to connect people with the heart of your school, with the value you have to offer.

You want to feature some really cool things that are happening on campus. Highlight some students and what they're up to....

Admissions tours...you've scheduled them, prepared for them, sent a follow-up email...and then no one shows up. Frustrating right?

We're going to talk about two Admissions tips that will really help decrease no-shows at your tours and admissions events. Recently we were talking about this in our Small School Leaders meet-up and they had some great suggestions.

Number one, try texting. Texting is amazing, and if you think about how parents operate nowadays and what they're doing, ...

We're going to talk about Admissions Events, their return on investment, and conversions. So let's start with admissions events. Oftentimes as schools, we just do events because they've always been done. But really we need to track the return on investment. We need to consider the return on staff investment, and the return on investment for funds. I mean, those events aren't cheap. So looking at like the outcomes, what sort of conversions you see, and figuring out if it was worth the...

So we're going to talk about the three-year cycle. Why is this important? Well, let me explain how this works.

When you are planning to launch a project or make significant changes, maybe you’re going to launch a new event, get rid of an event, or trying to reorganize things in a department or anything like that.

Then you need to be aware of the three-year cycle. This is how almost everything works, on a three-year cycle. The first year is coming up with and implementing things. It's a...

I'm excited you're here with me today because we're going to talk about how to be successful in your role, particularly with delegating, deletion, and outsourcing. So a lot of times when schools come to me, they're very, very, very overwhelmed.

You all have very busy jobs. You're wearing many hats.  And a lot of times we see people burn out in schools rather quickly because they're just taking on too much.

I'm really passionate about making sure that school leaders stay in schools...