Mindful School Marketing

The new-school-year excitement has started to wear off. Routines are established, workloads are growing, and between busy schedules, competing priorities, and everyday frustrations, it’s not uncommon for a little tension to creep into our school communities.

Sound familiar?

That’s why we’re bringing back this timely conversation with Bridget Johnson, founder of the Deans’ Roundtable and Bridget Johnson Coaching and Consulting, on the Mindful School Marketing podcast!

Whether you’re waiting on a decision from school leadership, navigating competing priorities between admissions and marketing, or facing a difficult conversation with a colleague or parent, conflict is an inevitable part of working in schools.

But how we approach those conversations can make all the difference.

Bridget shares practical strategies for managing emotions, communicating expectations, finding common ground, and building the relationships that help us navigate disagreements more effectively.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Whether you’re a head of school, admissions or marketing director, or part of a school leadership team, this conversation is full of practical reminders you can put to work immediately.

This episode originally aired on August 27, 2025. We’re bringing it back because its lessons are especially relevant as we move further into the school year.

When enrollment falls short, the instinct is often immediate. We need more marketing. We need more inquiries. We need more applications. But marketing isn’t always the real problem.

In this episode, I sit down with Tom Sheppard, Founder of 20 More Students, to talk about how independent schools can better diagnose what’s really happening when enrollment numbers start to shift. Tom argues that today’s schools are facing a convergence of forces, from changing family expectations and new school models to affordability, specialization, and questions around return on investment. Simply asking the enrollment or marketing office to “do more” may not solve the underlying issue.

Together, we explore how enrollment, retention, marketing, program, data, and the family experience all intersect, and why sustainable enrollment requires a much broader institutional conversation.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

Tom closes with a reminder that while the challenges facing independent schools are real, he remains optimistic about schools that are willing to work across departments, ask difficult questions, and rethink what the independent school model can become.

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.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

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.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

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.

In This Episode, We Discuss: