Reeling them in
The Autumn term is finally over, the open days are complete and (hopefully) applications are looking healthy, both in number and calibre of students. Carolyn Reed explains how you can sharpen up your act for future promotions to parents
Financial uncertainty means that more schools are adopting an increasingly professional approach to marketing and sales, so you have to work just that bit harder. After all, you know the competition is tough.
Reflect on your open days from a few weeks ago and ask some searching questions:
• how well did they go compared to recent years? What feedback did you get from parents?
• do you know which parts were successful and which weren’t?
• how did you compare to your rivals?
• were staff communicating the right messages?
• did the tour guides manage to fit everything in and get back in time for refreshments?
• did the displays in the science block go with a bang or were they more of a damp squib? and
• did any superb candidates slip through the net because no one took their details?
More importantly, was there anything else you could have done to ensure families went home feeling both welcomed and inspired to make an application, ultimately choosing you over the competition?
The most effective way of getting answers to these questions is to commission an open day audit (ODA). This is a school version of retail mystery shopping, only better. Whereas a mystery shopper will report on one isolated experience, a good ODA will assess the effectiveness of all the key aspects of your event and benchmark it against best practice and, better still, the competition.
The open day auditor, assuming the identity of a prospective parent, will go through all the actions of looking for a school for their child, to give you an independent, objective and informed view of your event.
It goes in three stages:
1 Contacting the school via website/email and telephone enquiry.
2 Visiting the open day and completing a thorough tour, marking it on a range of key performance indicators (covering everything from how friendly and helpful the receptionist is, through to the content and style of the head’s talk).
3 Debriefing your team on the results: what worked well, what needs attention and creating an action plan with suggestions for improvements.
The results should be fed back to you a few days after the event, while it’s still fresh in everyone’s minds.
A few tips
To get the best value from an ODA, provide as much information as you can in advance:
• give a clear idea of the overall message your school should be communicating, so the auditor can judge how effectively that is being done;
• inform them about any special issues or problems you’re experiencing so that they can look out for pointers why this may be happening. These can vary from why top academic students often don’t take up a place even though they’ve been offered a valuable scholarship down to whether the signage is located in the best place; and
• list your closest competitors. The auditor can bring them up in conversation while touring the school to get other parents’ (and children’s) perceptions of them.
Making these preparations will also force you and your staff to formalise the key messages you’d like parents to see and hear.
It’s surprising how many teachers, when representing their school on an open day, cannot say what makes their school special. If they’re confused, just imagine how the parents will feel.
Carolyn Reed is director of Reed Brand Communication for Schools. Carolyn can be contacted on carolyn@reed-bc.co.uk
Return to Marketing
