Our guest today is Bill Diskin. He is Director of Admission and Financial Aid at Cannon School. Bill specializes in serving students through helping independent schools with enrollment management, admissions, and financial aid for families. 

In this episode, Bill shares the path of increasing enrollment through defining the school’s mission, refining their focus, and how they put relationships and trust ahead of statistical considerations, but they also use data to target their search for prospects. He gives specific strategies for dynamically broadening the reach of a marketing plan by engaging parents as ambassadors for the school. 

Listen and take note of how the school uses available data to focus on and reach families who are already a good fit with their values by engaging the word-of-mouth resource of “ambassador parents”. 

Quotes: 

5:00 “Schools can’t just wait for the phone to ring.”

24:00 “Families want to get past the admin office and see what teachers are doing and who students are talking to.”27:19 “From day 1, focus on building a network of parent ambassadors.”

35:20 “Parent-to-parent conversations are so good; you couldn’t script it any better.”

37:10 “If tuition continues to climb faster than household income climbs, we’re sabotaging our own industry.” 

44:40 “I try to remember that the most important piece of my day is building relationships with families.”

Here are some resources mentioned in our discussion:

Peter Drucker’s “5 Most Important Questions” - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Important-Questions-Institute-Drucker-Foundation/dp/0470227567

Seth Godin, This Is Marketing - https://seths.blog/tim/

Where to learn more about Bill Diskin:

Email - [email protected]

Twitter - @billdiskin

Blog - wilddayssite.wordpress.com

Bill on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/billdiskin/

Where to learn more about Enrollhand:

Our website: www.enrollhand.com

Our webinar: https://webinar-replay.enrollhand.com

Our free Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/schoolgrowth/