Written by Dr. Harry Bloom, SVP of Client Solutions
Heads of School manage many things. But, there is one vitally important factor that often remains undermanaged. Ultimately, it is the most important one. It determines the degree of support a school will receive from current and prospective families, donors, and the community. This factor is the school’s “perceived value” in the marketplace. For many school leaders, this is a nebulous and intangible term. But, in a precarious pandemic-impacted environment, such as the one we are all facing, it has never been more important.
Measuring Success has, not surprisingly given our name, developed a method to measure and manage perceived value.
Here is the equation that determines your school’s perceived value:
Now that we have a usable definition, how can a school ensure it is maximizing its perceived value? There are 3 key steps:
One note: In order to conduct research among prospective families, we have to understand who they are. Many schools do not have a clear handle on that. At Measuring Success we have developed a data-driven technique for determining a school’s best prospects called Lookalike Analysis. It uses data science to identify the very most likely prospects to pick our school so they can be contacted for research—and enrollment—purposes.
Thirty Jewish day schools utilized this benchmarking data-driven approach coming out of the recession of 2008-9 and identified $22 million in improvements to implement during the 2010-2012 period. More recently, St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, MA went through this same process and identified $9 million in improvements over five years in order to enhance its perceived value. (Read about St. John’s Prep in Net Assets here, and watch CFO Cynthia Fanikos describe the project here.)
We can now go on the offensive and aggressively work to retain families, recruit new ones, and attract donors because we have the key “perceived value” formula in our sights, and have the information and validation to showcase our strength. This is a great position to be in in any time period but particularly in the challenging one we are facing now.
To learn more about how your school can use data to maximize its perceived value, please contact Dr. Harry Bloom at 202-524-1532 or harry.bloom@measuring-success.com.
To help schools overcome the current and coming challenges, we’ve launched a weekly webinar series on topics critical to independent school vitality (full schedule below). To learn more about cultivating and communicating your school’s perceived value proposition, register for our April 14th webinar “Communicating Your School’s Value Proposition: What the Research Indicates is Key”
Since Measuring Success published its seminal 2016 research study on the effect of tuition changes on enrollment, many schools have been focused on the issue that most directly drives enrollment: Perceived Value Proposition. In this interactive webinar, Measuring Success will share its learning about the factors that do and do not drive perceived value, and about how to consistently maximize it and grow enrollment.
Since Measuring Success published its seminal 2016 research study on the effect of tuition changes on enrollment, many schools have been focused on the issue that most directly drives enrollment: Perceived Value Proposition. In this interactive webinar, Measuring Success will share its learning about the factors that do and do not drive perceived value, and about how to consistently maximize it and grow enrollment.
Since Measuring Success published its seminal 2016 research study on the effect of tuition changes on enrollment, many schools have been focused on the issue that most directly drives enrollment: Perceived Value Proposition. In this interactive webinar, Measuring Success will share its learning about the factors that do and do not drive perceived value, and about how to consistently maximize it and grow enrollment.