Re-Recruitment, Re-Enrollment, Right Now

It’s hard to believe that 2011 is just a few days away. After you have watched the ball drop and you have rang in the New Year, you will hit the ground running at your school with re-enrollment.

I know, it’s hard to believe you will be re-enrolling your families since you just started school back in August. And yet, it is now time to focus on re-recruiting your current students and families back for the 2011-12 year.

As you know, it is more cost effective to re-enroll a current family than it is to recruit a new one. While we know this is true, why do we spend our marketing dollars focused externally instead of on re-recruiting our current families for another year?

Based on my experience assessing a school’s marketing effort, I rarely see any dollars allocated in a school’s budget to internal marketing.

I believe that internal marketing is often more important than external marketing. Just because a family enrolled this year doesn’t mean that they will be back for another year. If your brand is strong on the inside and your parents are satisfied and sold on your school’s experience, they will be your best investment in external marketing.

Therefore, we must do everything we can to re-recruit our families back for another year by marketing to our parents and students.

As we consider this key issue, what are some of the strategies and initiatives that you have planned for the next several months to re-recruit your families back to your school? Do you have an internal marketing strategy in place to motivate your families to re-enroll?

During my next several blog posts I will discuss some internal marketing and re-enrollment strategies to re-recruit your families back to your school in 2011-12. I also invite you to share some strategies you plan to implement at your school in the New Year.