EXPLO Elevate shares good ideas, practices, and wisdom to help
schools and their communities flourish.

Dear Friend,

Back in the olden days … our admission team would pounce on the mail as it was delivered to North Farmhouse. With letter openers in hand we would slice open envelopes peering in to see if the reply card was accompanied by a check. That’s how we’d know that we had landed the student. There was a student and a family I really wanted. I knew the student would be accepted everywhere and I wasn’t holding out much hope. I saw the envelope with their return address, steeled myself against the bad news, and opened the envelope. But lo and behold, there was a check!! I couldn’t believe it. I let out a whoop. I pulled the check and the reply card out of the envelope and I was … gobsmacked. On the reply card they had written the loveliest of notes saying that they couldn’t have asked for a better admission experience and though they were choosing another school, they felt they still owed us a deposit. 

Sometimes you can do everything right and still a family won’t choose you. The old sports cliche was that sometimes you could play very well and lose and you could play poorly and win. A good coach would take the lessons from how you played rather than the final score because sometimes you won even when you played badly. What I think we all know is that we have entered an era when it is unlikely that you can play poorly and win. There was a time when a school’s reputation or role in a family’s history was enough to carry the day. That time is gone. 

But all is not doom and gloom. There are moves to make. Gaps to fill and markets to expand into. We dive into a few things to consider.

You’re Fluent. Are They?

I began my independent school career having never set foot on an independent school campus. What I had to learn — how to become fluent in a language I didn't grow up speaking — is at the heart of my belief that schools need to become multilingual, at least those schools that want to grow their applicant pools. Too many schools are monolingual: fluent with families who already know how this world works, and largely silent with families who don't. I’ve taken a dive into how you can begin to speak another language in First Generation Independent School Families: What Your Website and Campus Visits Aren’t Telling Them.

JOIN US!!

We’re excited to partner with NJAIS for a virtual working session. Adam Newman of Tyton Partners and I will be sharing research and insights. Our friend, Dayna Catropa, an expert in using the Harvard case method, will help us all unpack some real independent school case studies. We’ll look at how to frame what you already do and explore treating market intelligence as a foundational capability for sound decisions about strategy, budget and positioning.

From Anecdote to Insight: Applying Market Intelligence to Enrollment Strategy

Tuesday, October 6|4p ET Open to all and free. Register here.

Your Dashboard is Incomplete. Your Board Just Doesn’t Know It.

Every board reads the dashboard — enrollment, discount rate, yield. Far fewer read what the dashboard was never built to show: the state of the relationships that are a school's actual product. In this piece, John Barrengos borrows an idea from graphic design — the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo — to make the case for what boards miss when they stop at the numbers, and offers a practical way to start looking for it.

Anti-fragile schools are like sailboats with great crews

Ross didn't grow up loving sailing — he grew up bored on his mother's boat, dodging the boom and waiting for wind that never seemed to come. But that dead-air frustration taught him something schools often miss: you rarely reach your destination by pointing straight at it. In this piece, Ross makes the case for institutional antifragility — the discipline of holding fast to what should never change about a school's identity, while trusting a strong crew to read the wind and adjust course when it shifts. It's a sharp reframe for any leadership team wondering whether their strategic plan is a fixed route or a living one.

In the Fall Issue of Independent School Magazine – the Enrollment and Admissions edition – we’ve got two companion articles.

Market Maintenance: Treating Market Intelligence as Infrastructure
Enrollment pressure is rarely just a marketing problem — it's a market intelligence problem. In this piece, Adam Newman and I unpack why so many independent schools are "anecdote-rich and data-poor," and show how real market research — not gut instinct from the carpool line — helps schools reframe what they already do well to reach the families who haven't found them yet. We dive into how the same fact (four levels of math, four academic tracks) can be read as a weakness or a strength, depending entirely on how you frame things to families. Plus we lay out what boards and senior leadership teams should be tracking.

Diagnostic Distress: Identifying the Enrollment Gaps 
Most schools facing enrollment trouble reach for the same fix: better messaging, a new CRM, a stronger admission director. John Barrengos argues that it's treating the symptom, not the disease. He identifies three conditions — often compounding — that actually drive enrollment distress, and makes the case that no admission strategy can hold a line an institution hasn't decided to defend.

Give us a call to see if we might be of help. We’re currently working with schools on strategy, enrollment, schedules, and helping leadership teams build their metabolism and enterprise literacy. And always lots of board work and coaching.

The Elevate team is on the road this fall from Tampa to Chattanooga to Princeton to Washington D.C. We’re always up for a coffee and a good conversation. So let’s set up a time to connect.

Hope the school year is off to a great start for you all. I’m off to the airport, yet again, and looking forward to landing on campus and working with some terrific school folks.

Moira

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