Planning for admissions season is essential for enrollment and admissions staff to ensure the process runs smoothly and can best help parents and students. As your team approaches planning, you can consider some ways to organize your school’s admissions process to create a program that builds trust and rapport with students and their families.
1. Create Efficient Forms
As you begin to organize your school’s admissions process, think about the different things families and students will need to interact with along the way. All interactions and communications with parents and students will contribute to their growing relationship with the school and its staff, so organizing and improving smaller elements of the admissions process is essential.
The first thing you can do as you begin your school admissions planning is to update your forms and explore ways to make them more efficient. When parents have access to documents that are easy to fill out and full of accurate information, they will have more trust in the school and its admissions process. Here are some things you can do to foster a healthy relationship.
- Updating dates and seasonal information: Help show parents your organization and attention to detail by carefully reviewing forms and updating them with accurate information for the upcoming academic year. Mention the academic calendar for the semester or school year, and list holidays and teacher in-service dates. Even small details can help reassure parents that they can trust you to educate and care for their children.
- Condensing information to fewer forms: Filling out multiple forms that ask for the same information can be frustrating for busy parents. As you organize your school’s admissions process, eliminate unnecessary repetition to make the process smoother and more straightforward for parents. Though the gesture is small, they will appreciate that you value the time they put into filling out forms.
- Organizing through checklists: Checklists are helpful tools for parents to track forms and due dates they need to meet. Online checklists where completed items disappear or move to the bottom can give parents a sense of progress through admissions. Checklists can also make parents aware of optional opportunities like events or programs and help distinguish options and required forms for minimal confusion. Checklists can even help your staff track what they need to do during admissions.
- Including only relevant information: Each family has unique requirements that you will need from them when admissions come around. As you develop your admissions plan, create a system that can help weed out irrelevant information, so families only provide the details your school needs to keep on file. For example, U.S. families won’t need forms for international students. You can save them time and confusion by excluding those from their admissions experience.
Especially since forms are such a crucial part of the admissions process, dedicate time in your school admissions planning to organize and develop them so parents can have a positive admissions experience.
2. Establish Communication Methods
When you begin your school admissions planning, you will also want to think about how parents can reach you. While organizing your forms can help reduce confusion and build trust, parents may have other questions or concerns to discuss with faculty and the admissions staff. Defining how parents can reach you will help build confidence and cultivate your relationship with families before the school year begins.
As you plan for admissions season, set standards for communication and how you will reach parents. Many millennials are parents now and choose social media as their preferred source of information, like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Creating social media accounts for parents to follow can help you better share information with them about admissions tips, due dates and additional opportunities. Facebook groups are an ideal space for parents to raise concerns and ask questions, where staff moderators can provide accurate information from the source.
3. Cater to Student Interests
Admissions time is an excellent opportunity to reinforce that students belong at your school and that you have a place for them. At all steps of interacting with students, you will want to foster a relationship with them and their parents. While creating robust administrative processes, like communication and forms, can help you build trust with parents, you can strengthen your relationship with both by catering to students’ interests.
As they complete the admissions process, highlight different areas of your school and its programs that align with their passions, whether that’s specific courses they can look forward to at enrollment, specialized programs or even after-school clubs and organizations. Students can look forward to their time at your school, and parents will appreciate your dedication to their child’s future.
4. Prepare Engaging Events
Create a school admissions action plan by developing a schedule packed with events families and students can attend to maintain excitement throughout the process. Events give you a lot of freedom to discuss various topics with parents and students in many different ways. Some types of events you can include are:
- Online webinars
- Info sessions featuring various departments
- Q&As
- School spirit events
- Club fairs
Events can help give parents a break from filling out the application and get a better idea of what it will be like for their child to attend your school. They can ask questions and receive immediate answers or observe the school’s overall atmosphere. You can use events to assure parents that they are making the right decision by choosing your school.
You can further engage new students by involving existing students in events. Students can run club fairs or offer to speak in information sessions about different departments to give a unique perspective on what it is like to attend your school. Current students can help new ones connect with the student body and find a place at your school before attending.
Organize Your Admissions Process With TADS
Admissions are one of the earliest interactions families may have with your institution. To ensure their experience is positive, you can carefully plan and organize your admissions process to make it run smoothly and efficiently for parents as they work on their child’s application.
You can further improve and simplify admissions and enrollment through an online solution like TADS. At TADS, our software helps you organize and file forms for your staff and parents, offering a paperless approach to the admissions process. Parents will appreciate having everything they need online instead of working through a stack of papers they can easily lose.
With our automated solution, parents can easily submit forms and make payments, which you can efficiently process and track, saving your team valuable time. Our easy-to-use software comes with training modules and customer support, so your staff and parents can best understand how to use it. Further, our customizable payment options allow you to choose which services you want to purchase, so you can choose the plan that works best for your school.
Request a demo today and discover how TADS can help organize your school’s admissions process.