Mindful School Marketing

Your athletics program may not have changed dramatically in the last decade. But everything around it has.

NIL (Name, Image, Likeness). Changing college recruiting and eligibility. Club sports. Specialized training. Sports academies. Rising parent expectations. Families today have more options, more information, and often very different expectations for what a strong athletic experience should provide.

So what does that mean for independent and private schools?

In this episode of the Mindful School Marketing Podcast, Aubrey talks with Mike Marich, founder of Mindset Curated, about why schools need to look beyond wins, losses, championships, and college commitments and think more strategically about the role athletics plays in the overall school experience.

Mike brings a unique perspective to the conversation as a former college athlete, independent school marketing and communications director, athletic director, and coach. Together, Aubrey and Mike explore how the changing athletics landscape affects not only athletic departments, but also enrollment, retention, marketing, and the way schools communicate their value to families.

Even if your school would never describe itself as an “athletic powerhouse,” athletics can be an important part of how students find belonging, how families experience your community, and how prospective parents evaluate your school.

The bigger question is whether your school is being intentional about the experience it wants to create and whether your marketing actually communicates that experience.

In this conversation, you’ll hear about:

One of Mike’s biggest challenges to schools is simple: be strategic about your programs, own the narrative around why you offer them, and invest in the people who lead them.

Because families don’t just need to hear that you have “great coaches” or a “great athletics program.”

They need to understand why it’s great, what their child will experience, and what makes your program worth choosing.

That framing comes directly from Mike’s emphasis on going beneath generic claims like “great coaches,” using the 4 C’s to evaluate programs, and showing the real moments of connection and development happening away from the scoreboard. He also repeatedly connects clear expectations and alignment among athletics, enrollment, marketing, and leadership to stronger enrollment and retention outcomes.

Families aren’t just Googling “best private school near me” anymore. They may be asking AI detailed questions about their child, comparing schools across multiple platforms, reading reviews, watching videos, and researching your school for months—or even years—before they ever fill out an inquiry form.

In this episode, Aubrey talks with Heather Burchfield and Moira Anderson of Truth Tree about what this changing enrollment journey means for school marketers and admissions teams.

They explore how schools can make sure AI—and families—understand what truly makes them different, why generic claims without proof are becoming even less effective, what happens inside the “dark funnel” before a family inquires, and how Google, Meta, YouTube, retargeting, reviews, and website content work together.

And Heather and Moira leave listeners with a few simple “Monday morning” actions that can immediately strengthen a school’s digital presence and enrollment experience.

As we kick off a new school year, I’m bringing back one of our favorite conversations, a live panel recorded at the Small School Leaders Conference. It captures something I hear constantly from small school marketing teams: the reality of being one person, or maybe one and a half, trying to keep up with an ever-growing list of channels, campaigns, and expectations.

I’m joined by three marketers who live in that reality every day. Lori Kriegel from Wooster School, Andrea Jenkins from St. Luke’s Episcopal School, and Barb Doyle from Renbrook School sat down with me to talk through what they’d outsource if they could, where they’d put extra budget, and how AI has actually changed their day-to-day work. It’s an honest, practical conversation, and a great one to have in your ears as you set your priorities for the fall.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

As we head into a new school year, this is exactly the kind of episode I want school leaders to hear early. I sat in on Jason Craige Harris’s session at the LeadTeam Summit, where he broke down what it actually takes to build a strategy for culture that works, and I left that room energized in a way that stuck with me.

So when he joined us on the podcast, I wanted to go even deeper. Jason is a strategist, mediator, and mindfulness teacher who spends his time helping leaders navigate conflict and uncertainty without losing themselves in the process. We talk about what resilience actually requires, the difference between reacting to a moment and being ready for one, and how the small, consistent practices we build in private show up in how we lead in public.

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Every spring, schools pour weeks of staff time and thousands of dollars into a gala or auction because that’s what has always been done, even as the return on all that effort keeps shrinking. Barbara Barron joins us in this conversation to talk about why that model is running out of road and what a school might do instead if it actually let it go.

We also get into how many separate asks a family absorbs in a single school year before the annual fund even launches, why alumni giving looks so different for day schools than it does for boarding schools, and what it actually means to bring mindfulness into a fundraising conversation instead of running through a script.

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Andrea Gribble manages social media for around 85 schools across the country, so she’s usually the first person to notice when something is shifting for school communicators. In this conversation, we get into the real tension a lot of schools are sitting with right now, how to protect students from deepfakes and misuse without disappearing from social media altogether, and how to keep posting consistently without leaning on AI so much that everything starts to look the same.

We also get into the pressure to make every post perfect before it goes out, and why that instinct is often the thing holding school marketers back the most. Andrea shares what has actually worked in her own small district, from a photo that was never supposed to perform well to a reel strategy that took almost no equipment and reached more people than her page’s follower count would suggest.

In This Episode, I Discuss:

There’s a version of busy that gets worn like a badge of honor in schools. Wearing a lot of hats, doing more with less, the kind of overload that gets praised right up until it doesn’t.

Rebecca Malotke-Meslin, founder of Pleasantly Aggressive Coaching and Consulting, coaches women leaders in schools and nonprofits, and she’s watched this pattern play out over and over; that instinct to keep giving until something breaks. We get into why over-delegating feels like dumping work instead of building trust, the real reason women hesitate to ask for a raise when their role quietly expands, and what a script for saying no can actually sound like.

Should This School Event Stay or Go? How Schools Can Evaluate Events and Programs with Miriam Stein

Schools are really good at adding things. A new event, a new tradition, a new fundraiser, another community-building moment, and every one of them started for a real reason. The problem is that almost nothing ever comes back off the calendar. So you end up with programs that look successful from the outside while quietly draining staff time, volunteer energy, and budget that could be going somewhere with more return.

In this episode, I sit down with Miriam Stein of Thrive Hive to talk through the part nobody loves to say out loud, which is that some of our events have run their course. Miriam shares a simple decision-making matrix she adapted from a corporate CFO and rebuilt for schools, and it gives teams a way to move past the emotion around a beloved program and into a shared, honest conversation about whether it still serves the mission, the enrollment goals, and the people doing the work.

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We put a lot into our websites. The pages look good, the content is thorough, and we assume families will move through it the way we mapped it out. Then we actually look at the data and realize a lot of them are not navigating it at all. They are researching on their own time, often late at night when no one is at the desk, and showing up as fully formed applicants we have never spoken to.

In this episode, I sit down with Angela Brown from Halda AI, Stephanie Vasta of Moravian Academy, and Lori Kriegel of Wooster School to talk about what happens when you put a chatbot in front of those families. Two of them are running chatbots in their admissions and marketing right now, and Angela works with schools implementing them every day. What comes up is less about the technology itself and more about what it reveals about how families actually research a school.

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Enrollment looks different than it did even two years ago, and the pressure to figure out what’s actually moving families from inquiry to enrolled is real. The COVID bump has leveled off, parent expectations have shifted, and the mental load of carrying your school’s enrollment goals while wearing every other hat is not getting lighter.

In this episode, I sit down with Marnie Schattgen from Fredericksburg Academy, Matt Thornton from Robert C. Parker School, and Matthew Farley from James River Day School for an honest panel conversation about what’s working right now. These are small school leaders doing this work every day, and what they share is grounded, practical, and immediately useful.

In This Episode, We Discuss: