How to Reach Parents During School Enrollment Season

It can be frustrating and challenging to try to reach a parent during enrollment season, especially if they are unresponsive or difficult to contact. It can be frustrating when prospective families, especially those who’ve engaged with your school fall through the cracks because of inconsistent messaging, failure to follow up, or because your messages never reached them.

To meet your school’s admissions and enrollment goals and reconnect with those parents who seem to unreachable, you need the winning combination of patience, a diverse communication strategy, and the right tools to take prospective families from “inquiry” to “enrolled.”

Here are a few strategies you can try to try to reach an unreachable parent during enrollment season:

Understand where and when families are losing interest

To achieve this, you need to incorporate a management system that will make it as easy as possible to identify when and where families may have dropped off in the admissions and enrollment funnel. This information is crucial for deciding how to best re-engage with these families and help determine if there are specific points in your funnel that aren’t performing to your standards or yielding the results you want.

If you have been trying to reach the parent by phone and they are not answering, try sending them an email, text message, or letter. You could also try reaching out to them through social media or by contacting their place of work.

Try multiple methods of communication

If the parent you’re trying to contact hasn’t been responding to messages sent, you can assume that continuing to send them emails will essentially be a waste of your time. Perhaps they are more responsive through other modes of communication, such as text messages, voice calls, or website notifications.

Instead, you can connect with this family through a variety of other communication methods to move them from “applicant” to “enrolled” before the quickly approaching deadline.

If you have been trying to reach the parent by phone and they are not answering, try sending them an email, text message, or letter. You could also try reaching out to them through social media or by contacting their place of work.

Follow up

If you have not heard back from the parent after your initial attempt to contact them, try following up with a second message. You could also try reaching out to them again at a different time of day or on a different day.

Consider alternative enrollment options

If you are unable to reach the parent, consider offering alternative enrollment options. For example, you could allow the student to enroll online or through a mail-in enrollment process.

Document your efforts

It is important to document your efforts to reach the parent so that you have a record of the steps you took to try to enroll the student. This can be helpful if you need to demonstrate that you made a good faith effort to enroll the student.

Benefits of a smart enrollment and admissions system

A smart enrollment and admissions system offers a comprehensive overview of your key admissions metrics so you can quickly identify and track inquiries, applicants, and accepted and enrolled students in real time or at specific times.

From there, your admissions and enrollment teams can add notes and reminders to each profile to track a family’s progress through the journey and keep tabs on important information, such as when a parent may have lost interest, have stopped responding to emails, or when to follow up with families about specific events, and so on.

It’s a rather simple feature, but we hear time and time again that the ability to add and review the status of individual contacts has allowed teams to follow up with families and secure their applications when they would have otherwise slipped through the cracks, costing the school crucial tuition revenue.

School Guider’s School Admin platform is home to dozens of features like these that make it easy to quickly identify where families are in the process, which families need special attention to guide them step-by-step and provide clear metrics that your school can track on a year-to-year basis.

Key takeaway

Diversifying and modernizing your approach to school-to-home communications for the admission, enrollment, and re-enrollment process can make all the difference for schools in this competitive educational marketplace.

Your admissions software can help identify the families that need additional messaging about important deadlines. Adapt how you engage and connect with those families, increase the number of conversions each year, and help support your school’s enrollment goals.

Food For Thought

While sending them reminders, take the opportunity to share interesting information about your school. This could be a topic school video or a recent commendation or award that the school has received. It goes s long way to renew interest in your school by reminding your prospects why you are the stand out learning institution of choice.

About Us

School Guider is helping private schools all over the country to connect with quality leads of prospective students and parents who are right now searching for a suitable school that will help advance their education career.

We have undertaken rigorous marketing efforts to ensure we get our clients quality leads by, among other strategies, collaborating with primary school Head Teachers and Teachers who have first hand access to students who will be seeking private school placement.

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