When evaluating your private school’s marketing plan, you should realize that the full-pay family is coming for a campus visit is an opportunity to customize the experience for them. (If you are not customizing the experience and want to know why you need to make these special considerations, listen to this podcast.) Here are some thoughts to consider or institute as you prepare their experiences. Full-pay families come with higher expectations for a private school where they are paying tuition and have more educational choices; it will take more to impress them. Tweak these ideas to meet your particular target group.
- Extend the amount of time that they are expecting to be with you; this will allow you to customize their experience more. If you can’t do this in advance, ask them if they can take more time. You need to give them additional value in order to get them leaning your way.
- Get a heads up about them when possible. Who knows the family or child.
- Match them with an interviewer and student ambassador best suited to their personality and interests.
- A few days before their visit, contact the family to let them know what they can expect their day to be like. This can be done by your office family liaison specialist (an administrative assistant with the right phone skills), current parent, student, or teacher, if they are available.
- It is important for the visiting student to be comfortable. Ask a student to contact them and explain the dress expectations for the day. Have a school t-shirt as a backup just in case.
- Capture information during the interview that will help you strengthen your connection with the prospective student/parents. What is the family’s motivation for giving up their free public school option?
- Identify something in your conversation which will provide a natural follow-up. Usually an event coming up will be a good choice – birthday, sports, arts or other activity event. It could be a project or a test which is on the mind of the student.
- Determine the team with whom you will want the family to connect – current students and parents, teachers, coaches, and arts instructors, and the division head. Coordinating these efforts will take a lot of time and hard work, but the pay off (revenue and maybe a great student) from enrolling these families, needs to serve as your prize. Admission teams can’t always do this alone, so even if you don’t have enough staff, you can begin by asking current parent volunteers to help out or perhaps your head would see the value in having various faculty be part of this process.
- The head of school is an important person to many families. If the head is on campus, you can request that he or she says hello to the family during the tour, if possible.
- Invite families to come on specific day and combine it with an interview. It can be an open house or other informational events. It can also be a special day that is happening for the current students, such as science project or diversity day, special speaker visit, a play or concert.
- International families will have other needs that you would want to accommodate, such as having someone who speaks their language available or connecting them with your international program coordinator.
When the full-pay family is coming to visit, you have to created the best and most quality touchpoints available. If you can give this type of treatment to everyone, then do. Most schools don’t have the resources.
In the end you must have a smart school marketing plan. Know what your uniqueness is and key messages that will be delivered during their visit. Keep sharing and demonstrating them with the family throughout their experience.