RESEARCHING THE ADMISSIONS EXPERIENCE

As well as improving overall recruitment numbers, you’re also likely to be able to save time and effort by streamlining the way you work.

Here are 7 tips to help you through the process…

1. Track Data:

2. Ask for feedback from visits:

It’s important to get genuine feedback from visits, so avoid the temptation to ask positive leading questions to generate positive responses. A good model, used by Google Digital Garage among others, is simply to hand out a form asking ‘what could we do better?’ and offering the chance for visitors to leave their contact details. You can then follow up any interesting suggestions or solve any concerns with a later email or telephone call. 

3. Check online feedback:

Visitors might not tell you what they think of your processes but might share their views on social media, review sites such as Google Maps, or discussion forums such as MumsNet. You can check out what people are saying about you using tools such as Social Mention.

4. Carry out regular focus groups:

Bring together people who have gone through the recruitment process – and ideally those who chose other schools (this is a lot harder!). Ask them open questions about the process, what they would do differently, and don’t be defensive.

5. Ask your internal audiences:

Make sure to ask support staff such as receptionists and teachers to feedback their experiences. Were they asked questions that they couldn’t answer? Do they have suggestions for improving the process. Remember that many of them might be parents who are going through the admissions process for other schools with their own children and might have some excellent insights!

6. Change processes as quickly as possible.

If you hear from parents that they are finding the application process hard to understand – or the proposed date of your Open Event clashes with another event that many will be going to – make changes quickly and evaluate the impact.

7. Think hard about longer term changes.

For example if you have a lot of people coming for tours but few convert to applications, consider whether you are giving people a poor experience in large tour groups. This was exactly the issue with one school who were only converting 1 in 6 visitors to apply – by moving to individual tours they were able to drastically improve this number and their overall recruitment figures.