Strategies to Boost Enrollment
Webinar Session Recording with our partner, ScholarLead.
Avela teamed up with Uriel Berrum from ScholarLead to present a live webinar on focused on strategies to boost enrollment. Just in time for 2024 planning, this interactive discussion offers practical ideas from K-12 school marketing and enrollment experts.
From building community awareness to simplifying application processes and providing personalized guidance, this session is a must for administrators, enrollment coordinators, and school leadership teams. Don't miss the chance to elevate your enrollment approach and create a positive experience for prospective families.
Session Transcript
Really excited to dive into today's discussion. I am Andrea Gronberg, marketing lead here at Avela, and will serve as your moderator today. A big welcome to our friends at ScholarLead, specifically Uriel, who's on camera and will be driving a lot of the discussion during our time today.
Gosh, Uriel, last time I think we were live with the Avela team earlier this month at the Charter School development conference, right?
Yeah, that's right. We were in Anaheim, California, talking to schools about how we could potentially partner together and offer our solutions while enjoying a view of Anaheim from a rooftop. We are going to have a lot of fun today. So excited to kick things off first. Let's just take a quick look at our agenda.
We've already started with welcome and intros. Uriel is actually going to go and step through both some, I think, amazing outreach strategies as well as some engagement best practices. I'll close us out with some tips on how to make that application experience seamless with all the great strategies you're going to hear from Uriel. And then we'll open it up for discussions and ideas from all of you. So let's dive in.
I want to share a little bit about Avela. We are the hosts of today's webinar, and a little bit of context on how this partnership came to be and why we're all here. We are really a complete suite of enrollment products. We have an unrivaled team of enrollment consultants and match experts, some of which are joining us today to really elevate the enrollment experience for schools and families.
Our roots are deep. So we have a rich history. We were founded by two MIT Professors of Economics, Prague Paddock and Josh Angus. Together for over 20 years, they've made huge social improvements by solving enrollment challenges and developing new systems for school choice and the rhythm that many charter networks use to run their lotteries and manage their student assignments.
So, they've done this in large communities across the country through different initiatives at MIT, most recently and currently through an initiative called Blueprint Labs. Because they were so impact-driven, in 2020, they founded Avela with social entrepreneur Greg Bebe, who's joining us today as our CEO to take their work to the next level and really scale and make this solution available for all education organizations, including you. So super excited to be hosting today's discussion. We are not going to be talking a ton about Avela, a little context setting.
So our roots obviously are in an enrollment process itself, and we want to make sure we're accurately and equitably driving that process forward. However, Avela clients often ask us about ideas and strategies to start that family experience even before the application. And we thought, what better way to do that than to invite one of our partners to join us and showcase how to attract families and the importance of enrollment for school growth and sustainability.
With that, I'll introduce formally our partner, ScholarLead and Uriel who's joining us today. Thank you very much, Andrea.
Great. It's so amazing to be with all of you today. want to obviously first thank Andrea and Greg for having me join you all today for this webinar. Looking forward to getting into the details of how our partnership has transformed. I also want to take a moment to acknowledge some of our current partners, some of our current ScholarLead partners who have joined us this afternoon. Thelma Banky from University prep is on, Tina Morales. Hey, Thelma, Tina Morales, and Graciella Santana, I believe, are on from Lincoln Leadership.
We had some other folks join, but I'm not sure if they're quite here yet or RCP. So I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge those two folks, our two schools. So, yeah, so we're really excited to be able to share with you what ScholarLead is all about. These are the three main points that you can expect to get when you work with us.
With ScholarLead, you can expect to expand your reach, engage families, and spark school interest. You'll save a lot of time and energy by automating the engagement process, the pre-acquisition process from engagement to outreach. And then ultimately, you'll conserve energy through better communication and relationships with families.
I wanted to quickly take a moment to talk about our founding story as well. So, my co-founder and I, Nick Brown, who's pictured with his students here. He was a teacher for TFA in the Mississippi Delta. We came together for our mutual interest in education inequality and trying to solve the problem of a lack of education, especially access for kids, especially black and brown kids in the United States.
I'm pictured here with my high school math teacher and longtime mentor, who is the founder of University of Prep, the school that Thelma is the Director of Enrollment at. The founding story of ScholarLead was essentially David calling me, and I'll get into it a little bit in just a second, calling me and saying we have a serious problem with enrollment. The families that we are trying to serve are being displaced in the neighborhood that we are serving. Do you think you can help us?
And you know, as any yes person says, they say yes. And then they figure it out later. Five years later, I'm happy to say that we have blossomed into what we are now. I'm a marketer, Uriel and team are marketers. Who doesn't like a great funnel, right? So this is sort of the way that we've visualized, I think, both today's discussion but also our partnership and how we complement each other.
Uriel, do you want to kick this up?
Yeah, totally. So piggybacking on what Andrea mentioned, right? We also are coming up with similar sorts of questions on the opposite side of the coin. So, you know, our work centralizes on helping schools on the front end of the funnel, the first two stages, outreach and engagement, right? Often, our schools ask us, can you take it a step further? Can you help us with our applications?
Can you help us manage our waitlist and do lotteries? Can you ultimately integrate with our SIS systems? And for the last two years, we've had to say, unfortunately, no, but now we're happy to say that we have established this sort of partnership with Avela where we can both say yes. So I am no longer saying no to our schools who are asking that; instead, I'm saying I have a partner who can help you with that. So I think this is the impetus really of why we decided to see how this partnership could work because it's very complementary to the holistic view of what schools need when it comes to raising awareness all the way through the pipeline to enrollment.
So with that, I think we can just get started and go into the first step, which is outreach. So one of the things that I really want to make sure that we leave you all with are some practical tools. You know, we mentioned that this is a post-Thanksgiving webinar, right? A lot of folks are starting to think about enrollment, believe it or not, for next year. We've often found that enrollment can be a year-long thing. So these are some of the main things that you should start to think about when you think about this top of the funnel.
The outreach stage, right? That's all about attracting families, right? If you have a goal of enrolling X number of students, the first stage of your goal should be at the very top. How many families do I need to engage so I can meet that enrollment number? And it really starts with optimizing your brand. Right? Think of your website, your social media presence, anywhere that you have an online presence as the front door of your school on the internet. You want to make sure that any time a family goes to your website or sees an ad on Facebook or goes to YouTube, they are met with a cohesive brand that highlights who you are as a school, what you're able to offer them, and makes it really easy for them to digest the fact that this might be a school that they want to send their kids to.
So I would say that's step number one. Take a look at your current presence. Is it cohesive? Do you have messaging that matches across your entire brand? Is it accessible? Is it easy for parents to digest what you're trying to say? And are you making capturing information easy? I want to really zone in on this one a little bit. Capturing information is probably the most important part of the first stage. We often work with schools that have an interest form that is very difficult or clunky or asks too much too soon, right? We always recommend that you strip the initial intake form to the basic essentials, right? Name, phone number, email, just so you can capture that basic information. So you can do the follow-up because later, as you'll see in the engagement and the application stage, all that information that you may be trying to capture at the very front end will eventually get filled in for the application purposes all the way to enrollment.
So if the goal is to generate 203, 100, however many leads, the best thing that you can do for yourself is making capturing the basic information as simple as possible. Last thing on this slide that I want to highlight, one of the things that I always get asked is, well, not everyone is on social media, on the internet, which is true. However, if you look at the data, over 92% of all folks in the United States are on the internet in some form, and of those, 75% of folks have some sort of social presence. So it may not be all, but the overwhelming majority of folks in the United States, including parents and families, are on social media, which is why we think post-pandemic, we have to have some sort of a digital-first approach to recruitment.
And with that being said, there's nothing going to replace human-to-human interaction, right? So we always encourage our schools to have community events, to have backpack giveaways, boots on the ground because that's always supplementary. And it's always good to be able to capture that component with your entire strategy. These are some of the examples that we've used in the past. On the left is University of Prep, which Thelma is very, very familiar with. These are just some of the things that really highlight my first point of having a cohesive brand. So we're going to follow up with this deck afterward. If you have some time, do me a favor and click into these schools' websites because you'll see this is an ad that a parent sees online. When they click on the website, they're met with very similar branding, very similar messaging. When you look across their channels, everything is going to be cohesive. It's going to be very much what folks can expect across the board all the way to them going to a school tour.
So we will spend so much more time on this. Just wanted to give you some examples, what better way to kind of highlight the first step than with the story. So I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the Legacy School. This is a brand new public charter school high school that opened in Cleveland, East Cleveland, this fall. I get a call from Sean Crosby pictured here in about March saying after two years of trying, they finally got approved for a charter in March, but they had only a few months to enroll at least 50 kids in order for them to open. So we really had to be one resourceful because they didn't have that much money as a brand new school. And two, we had to be very creative. So with the combination of digital ads outreach, we were able to help a school that had virtually zero name ID in a new community enroll 50 kids to be able to open this fall. And this was pretty much all on using digital online strategies. Shout out to Legacy School. We're super excited for them.
Secondly, so this is the engagement process. Think of this one as the immediate step right after you generate your leads, right? This is after a parent has indicated interest. What do you do with that? Right. This is the step that I think is sometimes overlooked a little bit because this is where you have, you run the risk of losing interest in families the most. This is where you have to make sure that you have in place automated follow-ups, right? You could certainly do it manually though. We don't recommend it. And what I mean by that is when you generate a lead, make sure that there is some sort of follow-up mechanism. Are you sending a parent an email saying thank you for your interest?
Here's more information, here are events that we have on the horizon. Here are more resources that you may need for gathering information for the application, right? We always recommend using tools like Zapier or some of these other automated tools that you could use within your, even your email, send like Mailchimp. Always make sure that you are staying top of mind with the family. Even after you generate the lead, it's not enough to just generate a lead, folks. And we, I mean, we know this from personal experience; we have so many things going on. Anytime you go on the internet, there's always like a million different things that you can start to research and go off to. So it's not enough to just hit folks with an ad, get their information, and then think that that's good. Follow up, you know, months later, always make sure that you're following up. Even if it's just for the sake of being top of mind, this is how you avoid losing interest from your families and this is how you ensure that you're coordinating with your team so that you can take them from an interested lead to a completed application.
So I think, and here I got some gimmes too right before I get into the example, one tool that we use a lot to help our schools is called Text Request. This tool essentially is a very cheap and effective way to be able to follow up with families and have real-time conversations about it. The reason I, you know, we have Thelma here is that I'd like her to take maybe 30 seconds to talk about this process. But Text Request is a really good tool that you could use, and we'll follow up with this information afterward, to be able to, you know, have your team spend some time following up with families and having real-time conversations right before they apply for the actual application and even beyond that.
So with this next slide, Thelma, do you mind talking a little bit about how we were able to automate your process last year?
Yes. Hi, everyone. I'm Thelma Behnke. I'm with University Prep Schools here in Denver. I've been with University Prep for 13 years. So a long time, seeing the ups and downs, and gentrification is real, a lot of families moving out, less moving in with kids also. So a big challenge in Denver. The whole team and effect and through ScholarLead, they have been an incredible help keeping us stable as a school and even growing in a very tough market with their texting. They really, what I love about the team also is that they really take their time to learn about us. And it's such a turnkey service because after they do say through all the conversations in the texting program, for example, then they get us the ones that we really should be talking to. So that's a great time saver.
And when we talk about ScholarLead itself, it has helped us so much because I have stay-at-home moms that connect through the application and are able to help us with phone calls and getting other people excited about the school and keeping track of their work and all the leads and keeping them organized. Because that's a huge challenge for everyone, I think, is to keep everything moving in a way that it feels organized when you have so much activity at the same time. So all of that. So when he they talk about the automated follow-up process, that is very real and very easy also to see because you see like the little postcards that are a specific family moving through the process and who has talked to them and who maybe is the owner of that particular contact. And it really helps me also because I can enlist maybe teachers who want to make a little extra money over breaks, stay-at-home parents, as I said, or parents that want to show up and do it at the school, but it's so flexible. And we are so excited to also have them help us as we start our new campus north of here about 30 minutes, 20 minutes about in Commerce City is a whole different district, but they are also back to help us not only with the ongoing enrollment but also with the new campus that we're preparing to open. Thank you, Thelma, very much, grateful for you and appreciate that.
With that being said, the first two stages, outreach, very important to make sure that your brand is on point. So you can communicate with parents across the web and then engagement, making sure that you have systems in place to automate follow-ups to ensure that when it comes time to then good transition to hand over to Avela to have them apply. Actually, it makes it so much easier. You have information and you have a seamless process to walk them through all the way to enrollment.
Awesome. Thanks so much. So, moving on into the process that we're describing here, you've built an amazing school brand. You've mastered your killer outreach strategy and you're building this awesome audience of engaged families. The next steps in the process are so important to get right. So let me tell you a quick story. The other day, I was served up this beautiful ad on Instagram for a theater camp for kids. My eight-year-old daughter loves the stage, but she can't audition to our local children's theater until she's 10. I immediately clicked on the ad to explore more. This is going to be a great bridge until she can really get into theater. And I got to the application form, and I felt like I stepped back into 1998. The form was long, I could barely pinch it to sort of see everything on my phone, and I think three of the fields I couldn't actually complete. I had to email the link to myself and finish it on my computer. So that is a scenario that we see in a lot of programming and we want to make sure that we really keep that elevated experience as earlier said, meet them where they're at, ensure applications work on a mobile device. At Avela, the education organizations, we work with seeing about 70 to 80% of their applications completed from smartphones. And in some communities, that's all that families have, that's what they use. So we really encourage making sure they're accessible in the languages that you know are spoken in your community.
And that you really, again, just like that interest form, ask what is absolutely necessary for them for you to be able to make that offer. The shorter the form, the more likely they are to complete it. So you can always gather that information later on in the process. Now you're seeing great results from your recruitment efforts. You have a solid conversion rate to those applications. You will most likely need a waitlist or some way or mechanism to scale your ability to make those offers. So we recommend to facilitate this in a really straightforward way, make sure you provide as much transparency on your lottery process or your waitlisting policies, whatever direction you choose, as you can. We find most schools publish this on their website. Our client services team actually has great experience helping schools and networks communicate this in a really clear way. And to really build trust with parents and families. In the follow-up communications, we can even share some examples just for guidance and inspiration for all of you. And then as you grow, you're working with larger numbers of applications. Thelma opening a new campus, right? You want to make sure that you are really automating that process. I think both for efficiency for your team. So making offers isn't such a cumbersome activity but also for equity in the community and really removes that bias from the process. And then real quick before we move on to the Q and A portion is enrollment. So that, you know, so in some communities, we call this registration, which can sometimes be the most cumbersome parts of the process and where that elevated experience can sometimes fall short. You're dealing with paperwork and information that maybe your state requires. Really look for opportunities to continue to delight students and families. And really make that moment they get the offer to when they walk into your building the first day a really, really positive experience. So we encourage folks to keep communications going. You know, make them timely, deliver them in the way that families prefer to communicate. So we're seeing more and more families be responsive to text messages than emails, as I mentioned. So look for solutions for that dreaded paperwork. Make it really easy to grab that birth certificate from a photo on your phone and upload it in seconds versus, I think, with some of the form solutions can offer, and make it fun. Again, keep that same level of elevated experience as you did when you were recording them in the first place. So that is really taking you through our funnel. Uriel, do you want to walk us through our big takeaways from today?
Yes, thank you so much Andrea. So these are the three sort of high-level takeaways that I would love for all of you to consider. You have to engage and keep families interested. It's not enough to just generate leads. You have to make sure that you stay top of mind with them all the way through the first day of school. You have to follow and act on the data, right? So I think this is that engagement process, making sure that you have a coordinated effort with your team, with your enrollment brigade, whoever it is that is handling recruitment and enrollment to ensure that you're not doubling up on efforts and you're saving time and energy. And I think for me, number three is probably the most important. Keep the process and the experience as simple as possible, strip down forms to just the necessities, don't overcomplicate things. Parents are humans just like us. And families want to make sure that their experience is seamless, and your experience also needs to be seamless at the same time. So those three things I think are the most important takeaways as you start to plan for recruitment and enrollment starting next month and into January as you look to achieve and exceed your goals next year.
Great. So just wanted to thank you all and incentivize you all for joining us today. So we have a course that we actually built, we call it the digital launch course. And we want to give it to you all for free. Usually, it's $1200 to gain access to it, but we want to make sure that you all have the resources that you need to be able to plan for the future, plan for enrollment. So we'll follow up after this webinar with details on how you can get access to that. And it's going to be self-learning at your own pace. And we just ask that if you're up to it that sometime in the new year, you schedule a 15-minute call with us to see how it's going. But with that love to open it up to Q and A, we do have a couple questions coming in. So, question number one, will the do you have any strategies for grassroots marketing rather than digital? That is a great question. Yes. So I think this is, this highlights a little bit Janisha to the point that we made earlier. You know, I think we've seen a shift to digital because of the pandemic in the world that we live in. However, that does not mean that we should not sleep on grassroots field marketing and face to face because we're always going to need that level of trust-building. So, one of the things that we've seen that works really well with some of our schools is actually hosting events. So hosting an open house, hosting, we've seen some of our schools do a petting zoo or some sort of bazaar. And what we do on our end is we supplement traffic to that event with digital. We'll send out an ad saying come to this event, right? So we're not, we're not necessarily saying give us your information on this ad instead saying go to this event, and then we drive folks to your event or you, you know, we help you drive attendance to that event. And that's kind of where you do the subsequent stages of it. All right, you have folks now at your, at your, your campus at your own event. You know, you have sign-in sheets there or what have you, and then you really start to make sure that you give them a feel of the school and the experience that their Children will have.
So, I think the biggest thing that I could offer is to see if you can host some sort of event for your prospective families because I know a lot of schools have family nights for their already enrolled families, which is great. See if you can extend that a little bit to some prospective families who haven't quite enrolled yet but are interested. I hope that answered the question. Yeah, go ahead and, and you want to keep going. Yeah, absolutely.
Got a couple of other questions in here. So one around, and I love this framing. Do you have a 30 60 90 day and one year kind of purview? Looking at strategies more on the retention side for families and students. That is a great question. Dr. Olivares, we have actually with you prep, saw the first couple of years, we were working with a high attrition rate. So we spent two years ago on the front end really planning our recruitment strategy to not only solve recruitment but also help solve retention. One of the things that we were dealing with there that we saw helped was we needed to be as transparent as possible about what the offering was of our school. In this case, U prep is very rigorous in their uniforms and their curriculum, college prep. I think a lot of our schools are this way that we work with. So our ads were very effective before then when we were getting leads. But a lot of times these families who would convert into enrollments, they started going to the school and they realized this is too much for me, right? Like this is not the school that I necessarily wanted to send my child to. So we decided we just need to be transparent on the front end, right? We need to make sure that every family that is enrolling with us knows from the very beginning what they're getting their family into. So I suggest going back to the messaging and the foundation, see if you can make sure that across your branding, it's very clear on the value proposition that you're offering so that you solve some of the potential attrition that you're seeing when it comes to families leaving. That's the biggest thing that I can say when it comes to my wheelhouse and how I help that. And then finally, one of the more technical things that we've been able to help with when it comes to retention goes actually in line with the engagement stage of the funnel. So setting processes in place to do this constant communication with families, right? Even not just prospective families, even in-role families. So making sure that you're sending out newsletters or making yourselves available, really just staying top of mind. And you know, I have no doubt that you all as educators really care about your families or care about your students. But I think sometimes parents need that extra step to just see how much you care, and a simple newsletter every month seems to help move the needle a little bit to try to help keep families engaged. And I think, you know, this is the classic, you know, stoic principle, there are things you can control and there are things you can't. So I was talking about the things I think we can control, some of the things we can't control, you know, our families moving out of the city or out of the state. So those are some of the things that I think will always be the case. But I think in the things you can control being as transparent and truthful on the front end with your recruitment strategies and then setting automations in place or sort of communication, automations in place to make sure that you're staying top of mind with your already enrolled families.
Great, great context. Alberto had sort of a follow-up question to this around keeping waitlisted families warm. So for those of you that are seeing a growing enrollment and maybe overcapacity, kind of maybe some strategies on how to keep them engaged and make sure that they understand sort of where they are on the list and that movement. Yeah, I think this would be a great question for you, Andrea. Yeah. And I don't want to make this all about the developed product, but we certainly have a very transparent way of doing that. So I'll talk a little bit more about the methodology. I just think keeping communication super clear, communicating to them in multiple ways. So one way we solve this is actually in Avela - a family will always understand where they are from a status perspective. And then we communicate them from an automated way when their application status changes in the methodology that they choose. So if they are signing up through their phone number on their phone, they'll get a text message, and if they are signed up through email, if that's their preferred communication, we will email them, and then our clients, the schools themselves have also the ability to do one-off if they want to do any communication or warming up in between those status changes.
Uriel, curious to hear your perspective if you have marketing strategies that your clients have leveraged to keep families warm during that process. Yeah. Oh yeah. I think the only thing that I'll add to that because I think you really hit on the main points. There is power in urgency language. We've seen some of our most successful ads, the ones that instill that sense of urgency. So even with your waitlisted families in order to keep them on the waitlist and not have them go elsewhere is, you know, things around, you know, space is still limited, but, you know, we're doing what we can to ensure we have capacity, right? This is very true across the entire funnel. I think when you say things like that, when you say there's a deadline, right? Like you have until this day to complete your application or to submit for a lottery, I just think psychologically that helps people really move the needle on giving you their information. So as much as you can really instill urgency language, not just on the waitlist but across your funnel. I think that will serve you very well. Awesome, great, great suggestions.
We have a question from Nicole, and she's offered to ask her question live. So Nicole, I am moving you into the panel there. She is. You can come off mute and share your ideas or questions live. Hello. Good afternoon. Hello. Hi. So my name is Nicole Jones, and I work at Legacy College Prep, and we are in the Bronx. So it's a middle school and a high school. Muriel, we actually met before about the product. So my question is more about strategies for a saturated market. So we are in the Bronx, we are in district seven, and there are millions, and I'm going to say millions because that's what it feels like, of charter schools right in the same area. So just thinking about what you said earlier when you're doing all your branding and your marketing, and of course, it's different than anyone else's branding and marketing, but the messaging is kind of the same. Do you have any suggestions on just finding that way to stick out when you have such a saturated market? Hm. Yeah. That's a great question, Nicole, and I feel your struggle. We worked with some schools like this in the past, and I think this one is difficult because I think there's no way around the fact that you're going to be offering a lot of the same things that other schools are offering. However, I think that there are tactics that you can use to be able to stand out. So, number one, definitely make sure that your brand is on point, right? Like when we talk about your foundation, it is your website, it is your messaging, it is everything to ensure that it's going to be consistent. So every time a parent goes anywhere to find your school, they're going to be met with very recognizable trustworthy things. And then I think the second thing is to be as persistent as possible. I think in this case, the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled first. So as much as you can be out there, so spend a lot of time on the outreach component of it, right? Because that might be the differentiator between you and other schools is that if you're constantly top of mind with prospective families, right? If they're going on the internet and they see your school 10 times, but they see a similar school only five times, they're probably most likely going to remember you even though you're similar. So that's what I would recommend is get really clear on your value proposition so you make sure that a family can trust what it is that you're offering them and then just be very top of mind and relevant to them as much as possible. So spending a lot of time on the outreach component of it. Thank you. It made a lot of sense. Thank you. It does. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks so much, Nicole, for your question.
All right. We have a follow-up question from Juliet, Uriel, on the text messaging. So when you are using the text messaging to qualify real student interest leads, is the text messaging like an automated process or do you need a physical person to manage and answer the text messages themselves? It's a very insightful question, Juliet. And the answer is we need someone to physically manage the conversations, and I'll tell you why. There are automated text messaging softwares out there. These are the spam text messages that you kind of hear about. These are the ones where you can pull a list of 1000 to 10,000 to 100,000 numbers, put it onto an automated process, and then it just fires off a text. The problem with that process, though, is that you're not getting your inbound text messages from your families. And that's where the true work happens. That's where the interest happens. That's where you generate the leads. So we opt for doing the little bit more manual process where we utilize our partner, which I mentioned through text, that that software is a little bit more 1 to 1. This software, you can, there's a limit to how many families that you can text at any given time. I think it's about 50,000. Rarely do we have a 50,000 person list. However, but this way we send out our messages, and we always send out an initial message that compels a response. So we always want families to respond back to us to say yes, I'm interested. Or who is the school that you're messaging me from? Where are you located? Because that's where the dialogue starts when they're responding back to us. And that's when we start to have these conversations, when we start to offer them solutions, answer their questions, and ultimately get their information as a warm lead.
Ultimately, I think at the bare minimum, every school should have some sort of automations, right?
And when we work with our schools, we handle all of that. Some of our schools like to see the back end to see what it looks like and how it feels and even have conversations with parents themselves. But kind of to Thelma's point, I really pride myself and extend this to my team to making sure that we fully understand every school that we work with, and we have a feel for your own value proposition so we can answer those questions on your behalf because at the end of the day, our goal is to hand-deliver you a list of qualified leads. So I love this question about texting because it is arduous. But it's so effective because if we can generate a lead from a texting strategy, that lead is so warm that it really is now up to the school to walk them through the remaining stages of the funnel, the way to enrollment.
Awesome, great question and really good discussion. This one is somewhat similar just around best practices for following up on with leads. I think the question gears specifically toward understanding more tactical strategies. Are there specific times of day that work? I think texting is relatively new to school recruitment and school marketing. And how much is too much or too little? I love these series of questions because I just told Nicole to be persistent and do it a lot, and now I'm going to have to tread the line a little bit. So this is a great question because I think there is a formula to this.
Ultimately, I think at the bare minimum, every school should have some sort of automations, right? So anytime a lead is generated, a very simple way to think about it is if you have an online intake form on your school's website that has some sort of "enroll now" or "apply now," a simple intake form to compel parents to give you their information as soon as they hit submit. There should be a trigger that automates an email that says, "Thank you for your interest in said school. Here is more information," right? It could be dynamic; here is what's on the horizon, we have this event coming up or these are the important dates, we have a lottery in the spring or this is the deadline to apply. I think that should be, you know, step number one when it comes to a follow-up is having some sort of automation that will trigger every time a new lead is generated. Now, after that process, this is where it becomes more of an art than a science, right? With the texting component, we definitely tread lightly on the texting. We don't want to pester families and turn them off from your school, right? So we make sure that we're respectful with them. So, you know, definitely don't send messages too early in the morning or too late at night. This is where the data notion that we talked about in the key takeaways is super important because you don't want to text a family that already said, "Yes, I'm interested" or "I want some more information," and then you send them a generic text. So that's why it's very important that you keep track of the communication that's going out because I think this is where I've seen schools get into trouble, and not necessarily that they are doing too much outreach, rather that they are kind of overlapping their outreach. They're sending a text campaign to a list of families who already got that same information via email, and then we're getting the responses being like, "Well, I already have this information." Right? So I would think about it from that perspective, right? Are you keeping your outreach and outward communication static so much so that it's unique to the families that are getting it and not overlapping? Because if you're doing the former and you're doing too much outreach of redundant information across different channels, that's where you might get into a little bit of trouble and might start pestering families and kind of turn them off to your school. So really make sure that you have these systems in place. I would recommend maybe designating a lead in your school that is in charge kind of of the higher-level strategy, right? Who's talking to who, how are we communicating to parents to ensure that these things don't overlap? And I could resonate a lot with working with our schools, especially in high seasons, right? In the late summer or the beginning of the year, there's a lot of hands-on enrollment. So making sure you're keeping track of who's communicating to who is really going to do wonders for you.
Thanks so much for all of the great questions and all of your wonderful insights. I think we'll, we're about five minutes to the top of the hour. I have a little plug for a couple of more programs that we're going through on the Avela side. So, 1st, 22 webinars opportunities coming up next month.
The first is actually next week with our head of client services. So, Soy, and formerly head of enrollment, both in New York City and Oakland, California, We'll be hosting sort of a fun, what our play on 2023 wrapped discussion around enrollment trends to really help you continue your efforts in planning for 2024 and beyond.
And then additionally, because driving enrollment is so key to all of your success. We have seasoned expert Lyman Miller who actually joined the webinar today, from Blue Mill Group. Really a great compliment to some of the key basics that Uriel recommended today. We'll explore even deeper through some cutting-edge practices that their firm has seen. And some campaign tested strategies to improve your enrollment from the inside out. So you can register for both of these via our web page at Avela.org backslash events. I think we'll close this out.
So appreciate your time and just really thoughtful dialogue today. I think Uriel and I will team up and put a follow-up communication together that will include the recording from today's webinar kind of a package of resources that we chatted about. We'll definitely make sure you have more information about that great offer that Uriel talked about from ScholarLead and links to our follow-up webinars.
Uriel, any closing thoughts or wisdom for the group? No, no, I think I had a good time today speaking to all of you and fielding some of these questions. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day and I do hope that you have a good and productive rest of the year as you start to think about your recruitment and enrollment.
