From Guesswork to Framework: A Better Approach to Enrollment Planning
Focused School Identity
Working in marketing or admissions at a private school, you’ve likely felt it: the weight of doing so much and still wondering if it’s moving the needle. You’re posting regularly on social media channels, running campaigns, hosting open houses, following up with inquiries, and trying to predict how many seats you need to fill next year.
Chances are, you could list all the things that keep you busy throughout the school year. But what if we asked you to describe your strategic enrollment plan?
Many enrollment marketing teams have plans in place, but they’re often fragmented, reactive, or based more on internal intuition than on how families actually make enrollment decisions. Other teams operate without a formal plan at all, relying on tactics cobbled together by their predecessors with high hopes of meeting their enrollment goals.
Either way, here’s the hard truth: Without a clear, structured framework that aligns with how families think and act, even the best efforts can stall out.
It’s not a resource issue. It’s a framework issue. And that’s where The Family Journey™ comes in.
What makes an enrollment plan strategic
Marketing and enrollment teams are busy, regardless of their school’s size, budget, or enrollment scenario. But activity is not the same as strategy.
A strategic enrollment plan has three critical components:
- Clear goals. These should include recruitment and retention goals, both overall and by grade level. The goals must be grounded in reality — shaped by historical trends and yield data — not dictated by what your school’s financial leadership team wishes were true.
- Prioritized focus. You can’t do everything at once. A strategic plan helps your team choose what to focus on in each season, based on where the biggest opportunities and gaps lie.
- Cadence. Strategy requires rhythm: annual planning, quarterly reviews, and monthly and weekly check-ins. Without a meeting cadence, strategy turns into a one-and-done document instead of a living guide for decision-making.
If your team is missing any of these three, you’re likely feeling stuck — even if your team is working hard.
Introducing the Family Journey™ as a strategic framework
Unlike traditional marketing funnels that operate top-down and gravity-fed, The Family Journey™ offers a bottom-up framework that reflects the intentional effort families must make to navigate the school selection process. It’s not passive. It takes real commitment — from both the family and the school — to move through each stage.
This five-phase model captures how families explore, evaluate, and engage with your school over time:
- Awareness: Families discover their options. They ask around, Google schools, and begin forming first impressions.
- Consideration: They evaluate alignment. This is when tours are taken, websites scoured, and questions asked.
- Decision: They apply and enroll. Families are navigating applications, financial aid, and onboarding.
- Evaluation: They determine if they made the right choice. Retention starts here.
- Advocacy: They share their experience. Word-of-mouth spreads — for better or worse.
These phases aren’t just milestones. They’re opportunities to connect with families in context — to meet them where they are with the right message, at the right time, through the right channels. When your enrollment strategy is mapped to The Family Journey™, your efforts aren’t scattered. They’re sequenced.
Mapping your enrollment plan to the Family Journey™
A strong enrollment plan doesn’t treat all families the same. It accounts for where they are in the journey and what grade level they’re considering. A parent looking at kindergarten isn’t weighing the same things as a parent considering 9th grade.
That’s why the Family Journey framework, paired with Age-and-Stage® segmentation, is so powerful.
Here’s how to start using it strategically:
- Assess your current efforts by phase
• Are you consistently generating awareness in the community?
• Does your campus visit experience actually help families in the consideration phase make a confident decision?
• Who owns retention, and will support families in the evaluation and advocacy phases? - Identify soft spots
• Where are you underinvested?
• Where are families stalling out?
• Which parts of the enrollment process are over-indexed with effort, but underperforming in results? - Set seasonal priorities
• Not every phase needs equal investment all year long. Your team should identify 1-2 active priorities per season based on current enrollment goals and challenges. - Align internal teams
• When marketing, admissions, divisional leadership, and even faculty understand the phases of the Family Journey™, everyone can play their part more effectively.
This level of clarity can turn vague goals into actionable strategies.
The payoff: clarity, confidence, and healthy enrollment™
When schools align their strategic enrollment plans to The Family Journey™, they start to see real momentum:
- Marketing efforts become more effective because they’re targeted to specific phases, not generic blasts.
- Admissions pipelines become more qualified because right-fit families are better informed and aligned.
- Retention improves because the onboarding and evaluation phases are treated with intentionality.
- Parent advocacy grows because families feel seen, supported, and proud of their decision.
Ultimately, the Family Journey™ framework helps schools move from reactive to proactive — from scattered tactics to strategic clarity.
And that makes everyone’s work more rewarding.
Ready to build or refine your enrollment plan?
Whether your school is building a strategic enrollment plan from scratch or refining an existing one, the Family Journey framework offers a clear, actionable path forward. Here are two opportunities to consider as a next step:
- Register for the July 2025 Family Journey Workshop with the Enrollment Marketing Geeks to go deeper into this proven framework. This workshop is a collaboration of Tassel™ and Enrollment Catalyst, and offers hands-on, practical applications.
- Talk with a Tassel Solutions Advisor about how to align your enrollment strategy with The Family Journey™.
