Getting Ahead of Enrollment: Steps to Being Prepared for the Next Enrollment Season

As you and your staff begin to prepare for school enrollment season, you may want to start making your plans and carrying them out as early as possible. Earlier preparation can help ensure you give your potential students and their family the best care as they consider your school for the upcoming enrollment season. You can better cater to their interests and desires by creating a thorough plan with highly detailed steps.

Particularly if you have a smaller staff, early planning can give you the time to carry out steps so enrollment can still have the optimal effect. Your potential students will see the care and dedication you put into every interaction with you, reflecting in their decision to pick your school over others.

1. Update Forms, Website Information and Requirements

When you and your staff begin to plan for the upcoming enrollment season, you will want to consider all your online information to ensure it is up-to-date and accurate. Information should pertain to the new enrollment season, so make sure anything relating only to the previous or past enrollment seasons are not available to your potential students and their families.

Creating consistent and relevant information is crucial in translating important information to potential students. They will need to know what to expect for the upcoming enrollment season for your school since dates and requirements will look different for each school. Some elements to consider updating before the enrollment season include:

• Forms.
• Seasonal information and dates.
• Tuition information and requirements.
• Addresses and contact information.
• Unique school events, like field trips and speakers.

Including relevant and updated information can help you eliminate confusion and increase certainty in the information your potential students are processing. Further, it can be helpful to create a timeline of what enrollment will look like with various due dates and expectations listed. Students can then visualize due dates and understand opportunities to receive more information and speak with faculty and staff, like interest meetings or campus tours.

2. Establish Communication Methods

While you’ll ensure all information your potential students and their families see is current to help minimize confusion, students and families will still want to ask questions and receive more information from qualified staff members. Before approaching the enrollment season, your team should sit down and discuss the best way for potential students and families to reach you. Making that information clear to families is essential for when they need to reach out to you.

During the enrollment season, families need to reach you, but you should also maintain contact with interested students and families. Continuing contact and sharing more information with them can show potential students and families that you care about their admission process and their interest in your school. Send them information to school events, like open houses or games, so they can continue to learn more about your school.

Further, as you remain in contact with your potential students, try to incorporate as much personalization as possible. Including individualized messages or follow-ups can help show students and their families that you care about them and their interests.

3. Develop a Consistent Brand

After determining how you want to reach students and address their interests, you can then move on to creating a solid brand that will share your school’s values and interests with potential students and families. Branding can help relay subtle messages and align with your students’ interests to help them evaluate if they are a good match for the school.

Including visual elements is important and can be a very powerful tool. You have likely already taken the time to create a school crest and motto and select the perfect colors to represent your school. When your students see information with your creat, colors and other visual elements, they will associate those symbols with your school and what your school represents. Using a software solution that automatically incorporates your school’s visual marketing tools can help save your staff time and still produce quality visuals.

In addition to cultivating your visual brand, think about the tone and voice you are using in your written content. Like with visual content, your written content will also help translate your values to your potential students. However, tone and voice can also give students a chance to see what the environment and attitude of the school are like and if they will fit with those expectations.

4. Consider a Student-Lead Orientation

While many of your efforts for preparing for school enrollment will involve your professional school staff, you can also include students to create impactful experiences for potential students. If your campus hosts tours or open houses where students and their families can meet with faculty and get a feel for your school’s environment, consider setting up an orientation program run by students themselves.

Your team can manage and train students to ensure they help share the school’s message and can talk about information, but connecting your existing students and with potential ones can help students ask other people their age what they like about the school, what they do on campus and what teachers and other students are like. Furthermore, if students decide to enroll and get admitted, they already know someone at your school, which can lessen any fears a new student may have.

5. Incorporate Easy-to-Use Solutions

Developing and executing a strong enrollment season plan can require many hours of work and preparation. However, you can invest in management tools to help you and potential students with enrollment and admissions. Consider implementing enrollment software that can help you and potential students:

• Track application process.
• Pay and collect fees.
• Access and fill out required documents.
• Contact the right people with questions.

With an enrollment and admissions system, your team can better prepare for enrollment season and put your planning efforts towards doing more for your potential students and their families.

Ease Your Enrollment and Admissions Process This Season With TADS

Preparing for enrollment and creating a strong program that will bring in the best students to your school can require a lot of planning. While beginning planning far in advance can help you stretch your efforts, you can also heighten your enrollment process and ease the load on your staff by integrating enrollment and admissions software solutions.

At TADS, we offer a high-quality enrollment and admissions solution that your admissions team and students can use to navigate enrollment season. We designed our program to fit K-12 private institutions and assist with all facets of admissions and enrollment, from branding your documents with your school’s crest and colors to managing payments and documents. Our program is customizable, so you can select which services you want based on what you need to implement the solutions that will best benefit your school.

Request a demo of our solutions today and discover how TADS can help you create a smooth, efficient enrollment and admissions process.