Hitting targets

Is a programme of concerted marketing critical to every school? Sheila Hallsworth argues that it is. Here, she explains why and shows how and when you should use it, even if your school is regularly oversubscribed

The environment in which independent schools are competing is changing fast. High-performing academies are growing in number and the tough economic climate is making parents think much more carefully about educating their children privately. This means that even the best schools can no longer be complacent about securing pupil numbers.

Sir William Perkins’s School in Surrey is a highly regarded school for girls aged 11 to 18. There are a number of good schools in the area, so competition to attract pupils is intense.

Although we consistently meet our pupil intake targets, this could change at any time. In the current environment, every pupil counts and schools need successful marketing strategies in place that will increase their chances of being the first choice school for parents.

Keep one step ahead
One way of evaluating our performance is to monitor our conversion ratios – the objective being to convert as many enquiries from parents into pupil joiners – so we track the progress of every enquiry we receive right through to the child sitting their entrance exam.

To keep administration time and paperwork to a minimum, when a parent calls about the school all the details of the enquiry are entered into our management information system (MIS). The added advantage of this is that we can monitor each stage of the application easily and ensure prospective parents get all the information they need to take the decision to send their daughter to our school.

We run open days and events throughout the year to encourage parents to visit the school. Using the data in our MIS, we can see whether parents who previously contacted us have attended one of these events. If not, we can generate invitation letters automatically through the system to encourage them to do so. This has been very effective and we have seen a marked increase in the number of prospective parents visiting the school.

Having all the information available from when a parent first contacts us has enabled us to see where enquiries are not progressing to the next stage and, ultimately, to the acceptance of a school place. We can even search the system to follow up those parents who have not accepted their child’s school place offer before the deadline expires. Often parents have simply been busy or were not aware that the deadline was approaching, so this helps give them a gentle reminder.

Target your marketing
In these difficult economic times, it is important for schools to be able to demonstrate to bursars and governors that marketing budgets are spent wisely. Using an MIS gives a wealth of data that can be used to measure the impact of marketing, and target activity where it will have the greatest impact on increasing pupil numbers.

Our system allows us to see which marketing activity that we undertake is most successful at generating those all-important enquiries. We have found that some of our most productive activities are often relatively inexpensive: displaying banners locally, keeping our website up-to-date and providing feeder schools with information about our open days. We also use the system to identify which of our advertisements have successfully generated enquiries from parents in the areas we want to target. This enables us to concentrate on doing more of what works and reduces unnecessary investment.

At Sir William Perkins, we consistently exceed the published benchmarks for converting parental enquiries into pupils joining the school. The data we gather on parents from the first point of contact is central to our achieving this, now and in the future.

Sheila Hallsworth is director of communication and admissions at Sir William Perkins’s School.

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