Choosing to pay for education is not a logical decision. It is emotional. And the emotion that converts a prospective family into an enrolled student — or keeps a current family engaged year after year — is almost always triggered by a single image: a candid moment, a student fully absorbed in something that matters to them, a community that looks like the one that family wants to be part of.
That was the central argument in this webinar, where enrollment management experts Cristy McNay and Shana Rossi joined Vidigami’s Rob Kodama to talk through what actually moves families across the admissions threshold — and why most schools are inadvertently working against themselves.
Time it takes the human brain to process an image
Of what people see they remember 3 days later. Of what they hear: 10%.
First impression window for digital-native visitors on your website
Of landing pages with video have higher conversion rates
Shana Rossi spent 27 years at Padua Academy before moving into enrollment management coaching. Her diagnosis of most school marketing is direct: schools talk about what they offer. They should be talking about what families receive.
If you ever look at Nike commercials, they’re not telling you all the amazing technology of their shoes — they’re telling you what you can do in their shoes. We need to make sure we flip that narrative to what do they receive, what do they get, what are they able to now do.
Shana Rossi, Enrollment Management CoachA list of AP courses tells a family what the school has. A photo of a student presenting her senior thesis to a full auditorium tells them who she became. The brochure describes the soccer program. The photo from the CIF Championship final shows what it felt like to be there. One is information. The other is proof.
The same logic applies across the entire enrollment funnel — from the first website visit through reenrollment and into alumni relations. At every stage, the question families are asking is not “what does this school offer?” It is “does this place feel right for us?” Photos answer that question faster than any copy can.
The reason most schools can’t make this shift is not a strategy problem. It is an infrastructure problem. The photos that could tell these stories are not accessible when you need them — because they were never gathered in the first place, or because they left with the person who took them.
When I left, they hadn’t transitioned to Vidigami yet. So what I did was I took the two hard drives that I had — with 28 years worth of photos — and I put them in a box. I said put them in a closet and when you’re ready to use them, use them. In most cases, most people when they leave schools, their photos disappear with them.
Rob Kodama, Director of Sales, Vidigami — former Director of Admissions, Marketing & International Programming, Crespi High SchoolThat is 28 years of institutional memory in a box in a closet. It happens at schools everywhere, every time a staff member leaves. And the photos that do stay behind are rarely findable — scattered across Google Drives that nobody else can navigate, buried in a photographer’s folder after two approved images were pulled and the rest went dark.
When teachers, parents, and students can all contribute to a shared library the school actually controls, two things happen. First, you get authentic content. Rob described a student photographer at Crespi who could get candid, genuine shots of his classmates simply because he was a peer. When a faculty member walked the halls with a camera, students posed or moved away. When a friend did it, they hung out and you got the real moment.
Second, you can surface the right photo at the right moment. A family who expressed interest in service learning sees those photos in their admissions portal. A prospective student curious about theater sees the fall production, not the science lab.
On retention through a single photo: “You can keep them happy by sending maybe a quick picture home to Mom and Dad who were worried that their child’s struggling in those first six weeks of school. Look, I caught them at lunch laughing — they’re okay. Those visual pieces are very powerful for retention, which again leads to recruitment success.” — Cristy McNay
Blair Academy built a campaign called “50 Things You Should Do Before You Graduate” — every item tied to a photo, designed not to show what the school has but to let prospective families imagine what their student would experience there. It inverts the typical admissions brochure entirely.
Shana’s framework for what photos do inside a school community: they function as both mirror and window. For current students, faculty, and families, they reflect back how meaningful the everyday experience is — the things people dismiss as ordinary deserve to be documented and remembered. For prospective families, they are a window into what is possible.
We are really called to be both a mirror and a window. For our faculty, staff, students, I want to mirror back to them how great they are because we’re humble by nature and we just dismiss it as all in a day’s work. And then we also need to be the window for those who need to see into what’s happening in our schools that makes our schools so transformational.
Shana Rossi, Enrollment Management CoachDirector of Sales, Vidigami. Former Director of Admissions, Marketing & International Programming, Crespi High School (28 years).
Enrollment Management Consultant. Works with close to 1,000 schools globally on stemming declining enrollment and empowering enrollment managers.
Enrollment Management Coach, Partners in Mission. Former admissions professional at Padua Academy (27 years).
The complete conversation — enrollment strategy, visual storytelling, and the photo infrastructure behind both.
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