The Evolution of School Marketing: What We’ve Learned and Where We’re Headed

45% of schools have no formal retention strategy. And retention is cheaper than recruitment.

That gap — between what schools know to be true and what they actually do about it — is the starting point for this webinar. Penny Abrahams, Senior Consultant at Independent School Management (ISM), has spent eight years working with schools on marketing, communications, and enrollment management. What she keeps finding is a sector that is still thinking about marketing the way it did in the 1990s: lead with the product, focus on getting families in the door, and assume they’ll stay.

They don’t always stay. And most schools aren’t set up to see it coming.

The Question Every School Fails to Answer

Penny opens with an exercise she runs at schools regularly. She asks ten people — staff, faculty, administrators — the same question: what’s special about your school?

Ten people, ten different answers. And then there are the five answers she tells schools they can no longer use:

If those five answers are gone, what’s left? That’s the question schools rarely sit with long enough to answer well. A genuine competitive position requires knowing what’s actually true about a school — not what sounds good, but what’s specific and defensible and different from the school across town.

From Funnel to Cycle

The framework Penny presents replaces the traditional admissions funnel with an enrollment management cycle. The difference matters: a funnel has an endpoint. The cycle doesn’t.

It moves from the mission promise — what a school communicates during the admissions process — through the parent experience and student experience, into alumni pride, and back to awareness. Every stage feeds the next. And the transition between stages, Penny argues, is not a handoff.

Marketing doesn’t stop when a family enrolls. It changes form. The question shifts from “how do we get them here?” to “how do we make sure they stay, and tell others why they did?”

Retention Is the Strategy

The 45% figure comes from an Inspired School Marketers survey: nearly half of independent schools operate without any formal process for understanding why families stay or leave. The schools that have cracked retention tend to share one trait: they’ve figured out how to make families feel continuously seen, not just during the enrollment process but throughout their time at the school.

That requires internal marketing — the communications that happen inside the school community rather than outward to the market. A head of school at an EMA conference put it plainly: every day is an open house. The family making their re-enrollment decision is not waiting for a formal presentation. They are making it based on everything they experience, every day, from September to May.

The Student Is the Brand

One of the clearest shifts Penny maps in the 20th-to-21st-century transition is the move from marketing the school to marketing the student experience. Families don’t want to see the product. They want to see what life is actually like.

The staged professional shoot — two or three days per year, twenty usable photos — produces exactly what students say they don’t trust. The candid from a field trip, the aftermath of a championship game, the lunch table conversation: those are the photos that communicate what enrollment actually feels like. They are also the photos that most schools are systematically failing to capture.

The Photos You’re Not Taking

Rob Kodama spent 28 years at Crespi Carmelite High School in Los Angeles, the last twenty as Director of Admissions, Marketing, and Enrollment Management. His reinforcement of Penny’s framework comes from the practitioner side: what does this actually look like when you try to execute it?

His most direct observation is about photo absence as a signal.

A student who doesn’t appear in the school’s photo record isn’t just un-photographed. They’re disconnected. And disconnected students are the ones families quietly decide not to re-enroll.

Penny makes the argument from a parent’s perspective. When her daughter graduated, she tried to put together a photo album from her school years.

Eight to ten photos across an entire school career. Not because nothing happened — but because the system for capturing and preserving it wasn’t there.

Rob describes what the alternative looks like: a student whose years at school are documented, album by album, from enrollment to graduation. He shares something a student said about Vidigami at the end of his time at school.

That is the outcome side of the retention argument. A family whose child feels genuinely documented, known, and present in the story of the school does not quietly disenroll at the end of the year. They stay. And they tell other families why.