One interesting operational quirk of independent schools is the discrepancy between the energy spent marketing the annual fund and the energy spent marketing re-enrollment.
By my rough math, the annual fund represents somewhere around 8 percent of a school’s revenue. To secure that 8 percent, schools often create a committee with board oversight, recruit volunteers, produce educational collateral, labor over appeals, send postal mail and emails, create handwritten letters, host events, and make phone calls. The annual fund is frequently one person’s entire job.
And that’s great! Now, compare that to what schools typically do for re-enrollment: a thoughtful letter, formatted professionally, emailed home a week or so before a re-enrollment portal opens. You know the kind: “The board takes seriously its fiduciary responsibility and seeks to keep tuition attainable for all mission-aligned families.”
The annual fund gets a committee while re-enrollment, which secures roughly 10 times that revenue, gets a letter. It’s kind of weird!
I was no beacon of excellence in this arena myself. Every year, usually during Thanksgiving break, I would make myself a quiet promise: this is the year I get re-enrollment right. This is the year we plan and execute a campaign that inspires our community to sign their enrollment agreements the moment they are released! This is the year I make it unmistakably clear how my work impacts the school’s top line.
I never pulled off that glorious, Technicolor campaign I so easily imagined on break. By the time the re-enrollment discussion picked up steam in early winter, we had already tackled the start of the school year, the launch of admissions season, the annual fund, and calendar year-end communications, to say nothing of the flurry of fall events. The fatigue was ever-present.
So when the board finalized the next year’s tuition, and the overwhelming urgency to inform the community followed shortly thereafter, that thoughtful letter, formatted professionally, was about all I could muster.
A stronger approach is a communications arc that begins in the fall and treats re-enrollment as its conclusion. The annual fund stories we tell in October can do double duty (or triple duty if we’re thinking about galas and auctions in the spring) if we plan them that way.
Say the October appeal features a third-grade teacher and the way their students learn creative writing. In January, that same teacher can anchor the re-enrollment message with a note about that same program, alongside a few teachers from other grades who build on it. The re-enrollment moment taps into warm familiarity and expands upon it in a compelling way.
With a plan like that, the Thanksgiving promise gets smaller: make sure we are on track with the yearlong campaign.