Does God Believe in a Marketing Plan for Christian Schools? I am not sure that God is or is not advocating for schools to adopt a marketing plan, but let me recount this tale about the devout Christian man trapped in a flood in his home. As the water began to rise and flood his first floor home, a person in a row boat came along and offered to rescue him. He responded, “I don’t need help, God will save me.” As the water entered the second floor, a motor boat came along and a rescuer offered again. The man responded, “God will save me.” After a short while, the man was on the roof when a helicopter roared up to his home and offered to rescue him. The man responded, “God will save me.” The man drowned and he angrily approached the gates of heaven. There Peter stood. He asked Peter, “Why didn’t God save me?.” Peter responded, “God sent you a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter.”
The real question is, “Will marketing strategies keep Christian schools from closing so that they can achieve their purpose? Great marketing strategies are a viable solution to help Christian Schools strengthen their financial positions, so they don’t join this list
- Marketing for schools provide a focused approach for getting information out to prospects who can pay your tuition and support achieving your mission.
- Marketing takes resources, but a strategic approach can help you to get the most out of the resources and increase your net tuition revenues.
- Marketing is about building relationships with the customer. Schools should be great at building relationship; it’s a natural part of what schools do. So with a minimum of effort they can leverage those relationships into building the full-pay applicant pool. It just needs to be directed, focused and disciplined.
- Marketing helps schools to define themselves better. Once the schools start to identify their strengths, they may see opportunities to reduce expenditures in unnecessary areas.
Some schools will close before they implement a marketing strategy. In fact, if matters continue in the same direction as it did from the 05/06 (35,034 schools) to the 11/12 (30,861 schools) year which was the last year reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, we could continue to watch schools close at a rate of about 700 schools per year. Because the Christian school’s mission is at stake, it seems that they have an obligation to use the right strategies to sustain them. Should you wait until your school closes and then, ask Peter, “Why didn’t God save our school?”
The Five Pillars Strategy is a great solution to help you develop an effective school marketing program. Start with the links below to learn the strategies, study them and work on applying them. Follow the blogs on Marketing to Full-pay to advance your marketing skills further. None of this will cost you anything; only the time which you are putting forth for good reasons.
Read these.