Independent school inquiries once began with a phone call. A guaranteed personal connection. But today, there are many entry points for families—online application portals, email and texts, and live chat and chatbots, as well as human interactions with alumni and student ambassadors, counselors, and consultants. In today’s context, all these entry points demand that admission teams intentionally cultivate both the efficiency of digital tools and the empathy of real interactions, both of which are important in telling a school’s story and building trust.
But even as technology continues to evolve and help admission teams level up, it’s exceedingly more important to emphasize the importance of human interaction as part of the process. A targeted email might bring a family to an admission event on campus and an automated communication strategy will keep a family who signed up for a newsletter informed about events and news, but it’s the in-person connections that can help families truly envision themselves as part of the school community. Student tour guides and school staff can share insights about school culture in a way that prospective families won’t get from a website.
As I’ve navigated the use of technology in admission over the years, I’ve come to believe even more that the differentiator in the admission process will be how schools complement the experience through human connection. It’s something that machines just cannot replicate. And in my four years as associate head of school at St. Anne’s-Belfield School (VA), I have developed a compelling and replicable process that integrates technology with a personal touch.
Guiding Principles
NAIS’s Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) research, based on the idea that parents and guardians “hire” an independent school for their child’s education for various reasons, has helped guide our work and shape the admission process at St. Anne’s-Belfield. Using this framework helps shape how our admission team collects data and helps to influence the way it should pursue and continue relationships with families.
Although families may not explicitly state what role they expect schools to play, our teams can discern families’ desires through various touchpoints throughout the admission process to help us identify what Job they might be hiring us to do. We are listening keenly to their reasons for considering our school. Are they worried their student is falling behind at their current school (Job 1)? Are they seeking a learning community that shares similar values (Job 2)? Do they feel like their student’s current school is too focused on test scores and not enough on developing the whole child (Job 3)? Is college and career success the aim (Job 4)?
And when we have this sense, we’re better able to create a more tailored connection. For example, a Job 4 parent will expect to hear more information about the school’s college counseling process and perhaps will want to meet with a member of the college counseling team during a visit. They may be less concerned about items that don’t go on a college transcript, such as learning accommodations, whereas a Job 1 parent will be highly focused on that question.
As a leadership team, we monitor these underlying motivations on the aggregate level, especially as they change and evolve over our students’ journeys in our age two through grade 12 community. This knowledge helps shape everything from our marketing messages to the information our academic leaders present during orientation meetings.
Inside the Process
Every school community is unique, so the technology-to-personal-connection equation will undoubtedly vary from one institution to another. At St. Anne’s-Belfield, we’ve built an eight-step process that integrates technology and personal touch from inquiry through retention:
- Inquiry
- Tour
- Application
- Family interview and student evaluation (as appropriate)
- Decision by the admission committee
- Offer of acceptance
- Yielding those accepted
- Retention
For example, for our prospective residential students, completing an inquiry form initiates an email communications sequence. The content of the messages is designed to address the most frequently cited reasons people choose our school and the most frequently cited reasons for not choosing our school, as tracked in our annual matriculation and non-matriculation outreach. This is accompanied by direct outreach from an upper school admission officer.
To establish a personable, repeatable, and successful admission process, we commit to consistently interacting with each family in the same way and logging the data in our Student Information System (SIS). We record data and comments from all of our integrated touchpoints throughout the admission process in our SIS and review our work during and after admission season. After enrollment, we survey families to learn what we could have done better or differently during the process, and we track this feedback to refine the questions we ask.
We listen to the data. For example, I had always produced a yield video that we emailed to accepted students, but our data showed that the views were decreasing every year. So we decided to stop producing a yield video, which was a difficult decision to make as it has long been my practice and an industry standard. And, in trusting the data, we’ve found that it hasn’t impacted our yield. The trust and connection we’ve built with the family by that point in the admission funnel allows them to envision their child in our space. This is true even for international residential families who can’t always visit campus before deciding.
Fostering Trust
No matter the tech-to-human equation, building meaningful connections with families during the process goes beyond simply tracking inquiries and recording survey data. It’s about fostering a feeling of connection, excitement, and trust. It’s about building a sustainable experience, ensuring that families and their children feel seen, known, and supported as they navigate critical decisions about their futures.
While admission teams can automate routine tasks, build out their customer relationship management systems, and collect lots of data from prospective families, a level of human touch is needed along the journey. It’s not just about selecting qualified students, it’s about inspiring families to choose the right school. The best approach is a tech- and human-driven process that merges efficiency and empathy, reach and relevance, and the modern expectations for how today’s families shop, learn, and make the decision to enroll.