The Power of Authentic Storytelling for Enrollment, Retention & Advancement

When the Palisades fire hit on January 7, 2025, St. Matthew’s Parish School faced the hardest moment in its 75-year history. What followed is a case study in how intentional storytelling holds a community together.

On January 7, 2025, the Palisades fire swept through Pacific Palisades. Within that same day, 65% of St. Matthew’s families had lost their homes. Half of those relocated out of Los Angeles entirely. The school lost roughly 50% of its physical campus — the early childhood center, lower school, library, and administration building, where the yearbooks and physical photo archives were stored.

What happened next is a case study in how a school uses storytelling not to survive, but to hold together a community that had every reason to scatter.

From Strong to Seen

The school’s pre-fire moment was genuinely exceptional. Record applications at every grade level. Only two students seeking to leave for middle school — a striking retention number for a K–8 in Los Angeles. A second year of a new head of school, Allie Michelsen, herself an alumna of St. Matthew’s, who had earned real trust from the community.

The school evacuated every student, faculty member, and staff member in 51 minutes. Within five days, classes had reopened at a public park with a nonprofit partner. Leadership then secured two temporary campuses in Santa Monica — an office building for K–8, an abandoned preschool for the youngest children.

The logistical response was remarkable. But the strategic communication decision may have been more important.

The Choice Not to Show the Rubble

The conventional playbook for disaster fundraising is well established: share the damage, show the loss, ask for help. St. Matthew’s chose a different path.

Instead of devastation imagery, the school leaned into forward-looking content: architectural renderings of the rebuilt campus, joyful photos of students at their new sites, and a deliberate cover image for their communications magazine — a first-grader named Everly, quietly holding a teddy bear, on a campus that wasn’t theirs.

The school also made a counterintuitive call on fundraising. Many advisors urged them to capitalize on the sympathy moment. Katie and leadership held firm.

Faculty as Marketers

Before the fire, Vidigami was used as a scrapbook. Teachers uploaded photos at the end of each month. Katie pulled from them for newsletters and the magazine. It was useful — but passive.

After the fire, that changed entirely. Katie brought faculty into the marketing mission directly. She told them the enrollment numbers, gave them the goal, and translated the stakes into something personal.

Within weeks, a science teacher ran to Katie’s office with a photo of a student with fire shooting up during an experiment, the school logo clearly visible in the background. He knew he’d just made a marketing asset. That kind of cultural shift — teachers thinking like content creators — is hard to manufacture. It came from helping faculty understand what was at stake.

Now, Katie reviews Vidigami every Friday, pulling the best uploads into a folder she calls “future magazine.” The pipeline from classroom moment to published content is measured in days, not months.

The Archive That Survived

The administration building burned. Inside it: years of physical yearbooks, printed photos, and institutional records. None of it survived.

St. Matthew’s has been on Vidigami since 2018, with a photo archive dating back to 2008 — 20 years of school history organized by class and year, all of it searchable.

The school is now planning an alumni engagement event: 10 to 12 computers set up with Vidigami open, organized by graduating class, so that alumni who lost their homes can browse 20 years of school photos and download what they find on a USB drive. A photo archive built for school communications became a disaster recovery tool — and now a community healing project.

The Inbound Framework Behind the Story

Brendan Schneider, who spent 20 years working in independent schools before founding Schneider B Media, opened the webinar with the strategic framework that makes intentional storytelling work at scale. His five-step model — personas, keywords, SEO, content, and social media with intent — reframes how schools think about marketing.

The core insight: social media alone will not solve enrollment. Schools need to treat their website as the hub and every social channel as a spoke driving traffic inward. Every piece of content should do one of two things — deepen retention (engagement on platform) or drive recruitment (clicks through to the site). The distinction matters because the tactics are different.