Writing Your School’s: Data-Driven Enrollment Story

Admission Offices are usually great at collecting data – but once you collect it, what do you do with it? How do you turn it into action? What story does it tell?

At Friends Community School (FCS), a Kindergarten through 8th Grade Quaker school just outside of Washington, DC, enrollment had been strong for several years, largely due to a reactive, rather than forward-thinking, strategy. FCS was initially founded as a small school that relied on a grassroots and word-of-mouth approach, but in the past five years, applications went up, enrollment increased, leadership shifted, and the school’s place in the market evolved, so a transition towards intentional, data-driven decision-making became increasingly necessary. Rather than continue “business as usual,” we used school, local, and national data to re-envision our outreach strategies, resulting in a higher profile, and then educated our Board of Trustees on the importance of data-informed decisions, ultimately shifting their mindset regarding enrollment as well as the customers we serve.

Establish Your Questions (What’s Your Why?)

Before you collect and analyze your data, determine the institutional questions you need and want to address: In short, what are you hoping to achieve out of your data?

• Would you like to identify outreach areas of strength or areas of growth?
• Would you like to provide a broad overview to your Board or a deep dive?
• Would you like to zero in on specific aspects of your model and program, such as your tuition, admission events, or marketing strategies?

Identifying these questions at the outset will help ensure that you actually use your data to make data-informed decisions. For example, at FCS, we hoped to intentionally expand our visibility in the region and guide our Board in their long-term planning, so we began by gathering tuition and financial aid data. Based on our analysis of this data, we then suggested that the Board take a closer look at our tuition and financial aid model to ensure it suited the size of our school, our customer base, and our location and community.

Expand Your Circle

It’s easy to gather internal admissions and enrollment data, but the enrollment story of your school extends well beyond the number of applications, student demographics, or financial aid percentages.

At FCS, we started by conducting a thorough analysis of our customer base, from geography to income to demographics, then moved into an exploration of the cross-section of those areas. Previously, the Admissions Office at FCS relied somewhat on external identifiers rather than true demographic data, resulting

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