The Open House Podcast

Rocky and Sage are hitting the road. On November 5 and 6 they're leading "From Inquiry to Enrollment: AI for Waldorf Admissions" at the AWSNA Marketing & Admissions Symposium ("Why Waldorf? Why Now?"), November 4–7 at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee.

In this episode, Rocky walks through how AI actually rolled out at one school. It didn't start with a big audit. It started with one annoying spreadsheet. Web forms went straight into Constant Contact, tagged by grade. Then came read-only Gmail to catch phone and email leads, then FACTS and Google Analytics for a real funnel, then Google Ads, then a texting system for a school without a work phone.

The point of the workshop: this isn't a sales pitch. What used to cost thousands is now open to any school, and you'll leave with workflow documents you could hand to your IT person, a parent volunteer, or yourself.

There's still time to register through AWSNA: https://web.cvent.com/event/f1de098f-ac40-4ffb-a265-a5b1ff7a66a1/summary

Rocky

Rocky has spent two years going toe-to-toe with the AI inside Google Ads. In this episode, we walk through the battles: the words "open house" getting flagged as real estate (yes, on the Open House podcast), smart bidding quietly pulling in every old Google Analytics conversion ever created, auto-generated site links sending prospective parents to the donate page and the board roster, and Google's August update that squeezes budget-limited advertisers even harder.

We also get into why broad match is almost never your friend when your school is called Waldorf, and why a $7 lead is a bargain when a family could be worth years of tuition.

The takeaway: if you set up your Google Ads three months ago and haven't looked since, you're wasting money. Get in there and lock it down.

Stick around to the end. Rocky has an offer for the first five schools.

Rocky can’t sleep. Sage sleeps just fine.

In this episode, we wrestle with the thing we don’t hear enough people in the AI space say out loud: pushing AI adoption means helping to accelerate massive job loss — and we know it. We talk about what happened when America offshored manufacturing 50 years ago (spoiler: perpetual homelessness), why this wave is bigger and less optional, and how the consumer — not the tech — is what actually kills industries. Rocky shares the moral weight of doing this work, and Sage makes the case that maybe the comfortable class could stand to feel a little of what everyone else has been living with for decades. We get into AI running our books better than any human ever did, the awe of possibly witnessing a new species, and why you should learn to clean a chicken before it’s too late.

This one’s honest. It’s uncomfortable. It’s where we actually are.

Vicki Larson has spent over two decades in and around Waldorf and independent schools — as a development director, communications director, and now as co-founder of Alma Partners. In this episode, she and Sage get into the nitty-gritty of what “advancement” actually means, why the admissions person, the marketing person, and the fundraising person need to be telling the same story, and what happens when they’re not. They cover the enrollment funnel (awareness → interest → consideration → intent → inquiry), the courage it takes to tell your school’s real story, and Vicki’s concentric circles model — the idea that families need a relationship to their teacher, the school, and Waldorf education itself if you want them to stay. They also get into focus, systems, the myth of multitasking, and why giving yourself one intentional hour a month might be the most productive thing you do all year.

Click here for Vicki’s Advancement Team Essentials course, which starts September 28, 2026, at almapartners.net.

Every school needs a way to keep student information organized. But does that mean buying an all-in-one system, building something custom, or connecting the tools you already like?This week, Rocky brings her experience choosing and working with FACTS, and Sage asks the question she saw coming: could we build this with AI?We talk about what a student information system actually does, why even a small school needs shared access and clear permissions, and the maintenance that comes with building your own. Then we get into a practical middle ground: using AI to help connect your SIS with inquiry forms, spreadsheets, and email tools through APIs, where those integrations are available.Also in the conversation: software bloat, frustrating help desks, customization costs, and why keeping student data secure has to be part of the discussion.What does your school's SIS do well—and what still sends you back to a spreadsheet?

Every private school gets the Niche pitch. Most of us can’t figure out what it costs without getting on a sales call, which is why Rocky refused to touch it for years.

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Rocky did sign up, for one school, and she tracked everything. This episode is her real numbers side by side: $5,500 a year in Google paid search vs. $3,500 in Niche. Paid search brought 2,867 clicks. Niche brought 80. Then the conversion rates flip the story: 3.9% on paid search, 22% on Niche. And three of those Niche families enrolled, two of them relocating into the area.

We get into why Niche is worth more on the coasts than in the Midwest, why “your traffic is down 60%” might be Google’s fault and not yours, why Niche’s tracking matched GA4 to the person (rare and appreciated), and whether a free, open school directory will eventually eat Niche’s lunch.

Verdict: cancel a print ad, try Niche for a year, track it. And Niche, if you’re listening, just put the price on the website.

Full video above. Open House is Sage and Rocky Lewis from SageRock, practical help for the people running small schools.

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Rocky turns the tables and interviews Sage about AI from the ground up. We start with the basics — who’s actually making these models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and a whole world of open-source models, including the surprisingly strong ones coming out of China), which product goes with which company, and why “open” AI isn’t open at all.

From there: what the data-center arms race is really about (training, not you), why Sage would bet on Google despite everyone making fun of Gemini, and whether AI is genuinely behind the layoffs in the headlines.

Then the part that matters for schools and small nonprofits: the cheapest, lowest-risk way to start. Take the work you’d normally pay an outside contractor for — the ads, the SEO, the flyer you haven’t updated in sixteen years — and try it with a $20/month subscription first. We also get into where the line is: what you shouldn’t paste into a consumer chatbot, why the terms of service matter for your financials, and when it’s worth building something secure through the API instead.

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Do you know where your favorite Google Analytics report lives? Neither do we. Is it under Acquisition? Behavior? By the time you find it, the afternoon’s gone.

This week, Sage and Rocky show off the SageRock “Ask” tool — you email it a question in plain English and it goes and gets your analytics for you, no logging into GA4 required. We run a real year-over-year comparison, dig into a 94% traffic spike, and let the tool talk us through a possible conversion-tracking issue it caught on its own.

We also get into why a farmers-market QR code can beat an expensive print ad, how one video campaign quietly drove a flood of cross-network traffic, and why a tool with no horse in the race makes better recommendations than the ad platforms — which mostly just tell you to spend more.

Good data should be actionable. It should make you go do something, not stare at a report and shrug. That’s what we’re after here.

Welcome to The Open House Podcast, where Rocky and Sage Lewis talk independent school marketing, enrollment, and the technology reshaping both.

In episode one, we explain why — after running a digital marketing agency together since 1999 — we’re deliberately moving away from the retainer model and toward helping schools bring this work in-house. We talk about what “AI in-house implementation” actually means: connecting the tools you already use (your SIS, Gravity Forms, Google Analytics, Constant Contact, FACTS) through APIs into a secure, centralized database your AI can read from, so reports, lead follow-up, and annual reports build themselves.

We get into a real case study — automating meal and lodging data for the Center for Anthroposophy’s renewal weeks, replacing hours of manual export work with a nightly email to the chef — plus why nobody actually uses HubSpot, why the annual report is always the first thing to get dialed in, and why marketing is always the first budget line schools cut when it shouldn’t be.

With birth rates down and independent school enrollment under pressure, the real strategic shift is from marketing churn to retention. Our take: cut the consultant, keep the budget, and get out of the computer business so you can do the human work only you can do.