Enrollment Increase 20% Alongside Fundraising at K-12 on Two Campuses

Arlene Hogan

Head of School, Bentley School, CA, USA

“Now, we are now unified in our messaging. For a K-12 school with students on two campuses, that’s not easy to accomplish!”

By Arlene Hogan, Head of School
Bentley School, K-12 Coed Day School, Oakland, California and Founding Head, The Archer School for Girls, Los Angeles, California

Forging the Link Between Identity and Enrollment

We first hired Connor Associates during my founding Headship at The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, and later when I became Head at Bentley School in the Bay Area. We wanted and we needed objectivity based on experience from someone who really knew independent schools.

At Archer, we internally thought we had a clear message. Yet we weren’t getting the numbers we expected. It was imperative to know what people thought of us. After engaging Connor Associates in an Image Audit, we learned that what insiders knew for certain, the rest of the world new very little about. We were the best kept secret in Los Angeles and we needed to do something about it.  Working with Connor Associates tightened up our messaging as we became more certain of our identity and more proactive in marketing. With this in place and the School’s academic identity continuing to strengthen, Archer moved forward at a rapid clip from 216 students to over 400 in a four-year period.

At Bentley, similar challenges around identity and outreach challenged the School. What Connor Associates revealed for us was our vision and identity wasn’t being communicated. We thought we were well known. But what we learned was that our prospective families couldn’t articulate or describe our mission, and more critically, could not discern why Bentley was worth the investment.  We felt we were doing these great things, and then Connor Associates came in and held up the mirror. We wanted an objective truth-teller, and that’s what we got.

At both Archer and Bentley, higher enrollment of mission-appropriate families helped us in many critical ways. Once we became clearer about the traits and programs that set us apart, we were able to engage more perfect match families in meaningful ways. 

We not only grew our applicant pool and enrollment results by 20% at Bentley, but were also able to increase fundraising. A second critical revelation came from Connor Associate’s work in canvassing other schools and community members about Bentley where we learned that, as clear as we thought we were, we had considerable work to do. 

Getting Everyone in the School to Support Enrollment, Retention, and Philanthropy.

 Connor’s work also emphasized the importance of everyone - faculty, staff, administrators and trustees - being on the same page as we described our School. Now, we are now unified in our messaging. For a K-12 school with students on two campuses, that’s not easy to accomplish!

Was It Worth It?

 While the upfront cost of this kind of engagement may seem daunting, the long-term impact more than pays for itself with greater student selectivity, more mission-appropriate families, a clearer sense of purpose, and greater pride among the various school constituencies. At Bentley, we recouped our investment in less than a year.

 We continue to monitor our message and the results of our enrollment efforts. Whenever we need more information, we call on Connor Associates to conduct mini surveys which are meaningful in tweaking and improving our efforts going forward. 

 I remain impressed by their ability to personalize each study they have performed in two of the School's I've headed. They operate at a high professional level, listen carefully, and respond quickly -- which evidences the high quality of connection they make with their client schools.