In Alternate Realities, you’ll see how winning districts lead in blue, red, and purple states without changing who they are. You’ll leave the webinar with a 90-day plan you can actually execute—proof you can show your board, your team, and your community before next semester makes decisions for you.

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Transcript

Greg Turchetta: Alright, Bill, you ready?

Bill Good: Let's go!

Greg Turchetta: Let's rip it. Alright, here we go. As we said, this is going to be state and county, right? So we'll dive into this headfirst.

Here we go.

Greg Turchetta: My name's Greg Turchetta. We haven't met today, before today. I spent 10 years as a Senior Chief Communications Officer in 4 different school districts in Florida and South Carolina, so I've done red, red, red, really red. And I currently serve as the Apptegy Strategic Communications Advisor for K-12 districts.

Greg Turchetta: My greatest accomplishment in life are 3 well-adjusted kids down here in the bottom with, 3 well-adjusted,

Greg Turchetta: significant others, and they're all out of the house, so we're empty-nesting, which is great. Top right, I'm gonna violate my HIPAA right out of the gate here, that's how honest this webinar's gonna be. That's my back. That's a live picture of my lower back from 4 weeks ago.

I had spinal fusion surgery, so I'm literally standing here doing the webinar, can't sit. Well, I could sit a little.

Greg Turchetta: But I'm standing here, everything's going great, but next week, I'm back on the road, Alabama, if you're on, I'm coming for you. And in the bottom right.

Greg Turchetta: Bill, you could probably make the conclusion that what that bottom right picture led to the top right picture, and you probably wouldn't be wrong.

Greg Turchetta: But when I'm not doing… working with school districts, my wife and I, we're here in Florida, we're out on our jet skis.

Bill Good: So when can you beep out on jet skis again?

Greg Turchetta: Next weekend. Very easily.

Greg Turchetta: Not doctor's recommendation, Greg's need.

Bill Good: And hello everybody, I'm Bill Good. I've been in commun… well, almost 12 years now in communications at the school district. Prior to that, I was in military doing strategic communications.

Bill Good: My wife also, was in K-12 education communications for about a decade. She's in higher ed now. Well, actually, we're down to one dog. We just lost one recently, unfortunately.

3 kids, and you know, my wife is currently pending statehood, or sainthood.

Bill Good: Not statehood, she's…

Greg Turchetta: That'd be very different.

Bill Good: She's a force in and of herself, but she is not, you know, she is not her own state. And of course, you know, I'm a huge football fan, so the Lions, University of Michigan football is kind of my passion when I'm not doing school comps.

Greg Turchetta: Where you're not getting beat up in your school district, you're getting beat up on Sundays.

Bill Good: Yep.

Greg Turchetta: Okay, here we go.

Greg Turchetta: Let's dive into the doom and gloom right out of the gate, shall we? Our current K-12 public education reality is this. 1.2 million students have left public education since 2019.

That's not a pandemic blip, that's a looming budget problem. Many of you are probably here because it is a budget problem. How many people have travel restrictions, budget freezes, hiring freezes, and maybe getting to the point of cutting positions that 5 years ago

Greg Turchetta: Weren't even on the table.

Greg Turchetta: Because here's why. Every student took funding with them that left.

Greg Turchetta: And so we're gonna have to have a conversation about that, right?

Greg Turchetta: Students that are leaving have to come back.

Greg Turchetta: And let's talk our way through that.

Greg Turchetta: So, if your enrollment is down, you probably already know that revenue follows.

Greg Turchetta: And staffing follows that. So, today it's a student, tomorrow it's a teacher. Next month it could be a school.

Greg Turchetta: I told you, we're gonna hit this heavy out of the gate.

Greg Turchetta: Alright, Bill, necessary reframe, step one.

Bill Good: Oh, sorry, you were setting me up, I apologize. Yeah, so, you know, I think one of the big things we all face in a school district is how do… how do you market yourself without making it appear like marketing, right? Anytime you're doing actual marketing or advertising, there's a bit of distrust that's built into it, because people think you're just being a propagandist. So.

Bill Good: What you have to figure out a way to do in your school district is speak to your specific community, and one of the reasons we talk about red county, blue county, red state, blue state.

Bill Good: is how can you speak to your community and define for them why you are their family's best choice? And you don't want to do it in a cheesy commercial where you're like, hey, we're your best choice, come here. You gotta figure out how to speak their language and speak to them, so you're showing them that and not telling.

Greg Turchetta: And here's the truth, too. Choice isn't happening to you. Choice is currently happening without you. Because families are doing it on their own, and fighting school choice doesn't change any of that.

Greg Turchetta: We can get angry, we can stomp around, we can say… I can't tell you how many cabinet meetings I sat through where it's like, people are like, I can't believe this is happening. Well, believe it. Because your governments are pushing down that road, right? More is coming, not less.

Greg Turchetta: And to Bill's point, we… how many of you were like me, where you sit there and you go, we spend all day trying to defend this district, right? The vocal minority is making these attacks, they're calculated, they're… and they're just tying us in knots, right?

Greg Turchetta: And the superintendent, especially if you've got one of those that wants to fight every fight or take on every battle, it's exhausting, right? Defensive leadership feels responsible, but it's actually irresponsible, because definitive leadership actually works to move opinions. The vocal minority isn't going to come off their position.

Greg Turchetta: The great middle is the one we have to defend and define who we are. Because this, ladies and gentlemen, you're in a political campaign, whether you realize it or not.

Greg Turchetta: Right? Politics are all up in K-12 education right now. So, we have to clearly define why we are the best choice. And here's the reason Bill's with me today.

Greg Turchetta: Denver Public Schools is 100% district of choice.

Greg Turchetta: Doesn't that hit kind of different? I mean, Denver's a big…

Greg Turchetta: urban district, but 100%… Bill, how did you guys come to that term, and what does that mean to you?

Bill Good: You know, it's… you know, Colorado and Denver specifically is very, very… it's a fascinating area because, you know, it's a blue state now, a pretty solid blue state, but the bulk of the population is in, like, 4 or 5 major cities, but the rest of the state is solid red.

Bill Good: And so… and it's… you gotta remember, it's still the Wild West. So even though it's a… it's a blue state, you still have a lot of libertarian ideals. And so the education reform movement is very much alive and well in the state of Colorado. And so, I wasn't here when they went 100% choice, but it is something that's been going on for, I believe, almost a decade now.

Greg Turchetta: It's amazing. Alright, so, ladies and gentlemen, you've got two types of school districts. You're either on the left side or the right side, and it's time to vote.

Greg Turchetta: Are you defensive? Do you spend so much time explaining, apologizing for things that happen, reacting to things, debating the vocal minority, or arguing through press releases and media statements? Or are you definitive?

Greg Turchetta: You proactively set the narrative and talk points about who you are. I mean, this is a little bit beyond branding, and it's certainly beyond enrollment marketing. It's positioning. It's brand positioning of what the district is.

Do you boldly show proof of your school's successes? We're gonna get into that a lot more in a minute.

Greg Turchetta: Do you promote the exclusive learning opportunities do you have? Are you just the public school system?

Greg Turchetta: Or are you the place that's turning out students that are creating businesses?

Greg Turchetta: And then, this is the biggest piece, and we're going to spend a lot of time on this one at the end. Are you driving enrollment marketing through all your communications? And the answer is probably not. There's a couple districts I saw on here that are doing it, but for the majority of us, we're not, because we're just pushing information, right?

Greg Turchetta: And so, as we sat down to make this, Bill and I had many conversations, and it comes to kind of a startling realization, which is alternative realities, we talk about how you might be in different alternative realities, but it really is an illusion.

Greg Turchetta: Because politics change, but math and psychology don't.

Greg Turchetta: Parents behave relatively the same everywhere. They avoid friction, and they choose certainty. That's the same thing when they're picking a cell phone as they're picking an elementary school. But in education… Bill, why do we do this?

Why do we have this idea that when it comes to schools, parents are going to behave completely differently than they do when they buy anything else?

Bill Good: I think it gets down to, you know, I think…

Bill Good: We like to think of ourselves, and I mean myself included, as making decisions based on logic and reasoning, but we don't. We make them based on… we make decisions based on emotion, right? And I think that it's one of the things that you have to remember is when you're talking about schools, your parents are turning over their most valuable thing in their life, their kids.

Bill Good: And so…

Bill Good: how do you make… help make that decision for them, right? You have to give them an ideal. You have to give them… you know, you have to show them what they want

Bill Good: to get out of their child's education, and how it's feasible. And so you can do that through always telling stories about students who have overcome things, who align with the values of your community, who are doing great things, like Greg said. Maybe they started a business in high school, maybe they, you know, scored a perfect score on the SAT, or maybe they just overcame something that was really, really difficult, right? All of those things, no matter what the… no matter what the story is.

Bill Good: have the opportunity to speak to your community and to show your parents that, oh, if I send my kid here, that they're gonna be okay, because, look, that kid's okay, or my kid can be like that kid.

Greg Turchetta: And that applies to all districts, right? We're going to talk subtleties today of how you can massage this message a bit more in a red state versus a blue state in a purple state, but it's not really three different playbooks, right? It's gonna boil down to 3 things, and we're going to get to those in a second.

Greg Turchetta: People are people, right? How they purchase and engage with private sector brands is how they expect to engage with your schools, which is a challenge, right? So they expect to be advertised to, they expect to have instant availability of communication, they expect to have two-way communication, to be able to get questions answered instantly, and they don't expect it to be any different with the school system.

Greg Turchetta: 90% of private sector marketers consider brand experiences important or absolutely critical to the organization's success. And I'd ask you, when it comes to brand experiences at your school, what are they? What do they look like? Some might say open house.

Greg Turchetta: But that… that is an area where we really have to look at when we get to enrollment.

Bill Good: Yeah, and if I could just jump in, Greg, one of the things you have to remember as you're going to start embarking on doing these things, there's certain work you have to do first before you start putting billboards up around town, right? You have to go through your enrollment packet. What does it look like? What is that experience?

Bill Good: you have to talk to your enrollment secretary. When someone calls that school, or if you have centralized enrollment, calls the enrollment department.

Bill Good: is somebody going to answer the phone? Is somebody gonna get back to them quickly? What is that experience like? Because the last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money

Bill Good: put out a great campaign, get a lot of people excited, and then they call you, and they have some mean old lady on the phone, or they show up to the school, and they're treated poorly, or there's kids fighting out front, you know? So, what are all the things that you have to do? And I say that from experience, because one of the big fights I got into in my previous district in Ferndale, Michigan, which is just outside of Detroit, was they wanted to put the enrollment office in the… right at the main entrance of the high school.

Bill Good: And I said, no, we need to be at the Early Childhood Center, because when people show up to enroll, we want them to see the cute little kids. We don't want them seeing, you know, adult students, 18-year-old students, doing the things that 18-year-olds do hanging out outside of the high school, right? And so, what are the small things that you can do like that to make sure, to maximize that opportunity, that when you spend dollars.

Bill Good: That people are actually going to get the experience that you're telling them that they're going to get.

Greg Turchetta: Notice what he also said here. Bill's in charge of enrollment in his district, and that's intentional, right? Because he and I joke that

Greg Turchetta: Enrollment isn't the registration process.

Greg Turchetta: Right? That's the physical act of putting your kid in school. But there is 12 months' worth of work that goes into setting the enrollment marketing plan, having the events, following up, what's the school choice procedure look like, and doing all of that. And creating enrollment experiences, right?

We want our audience to feel more strongly about our schools. We want them to be, there's no question that this is the place for them to be, because if there's a question, listen.

Greg Turchetta: I spent a lot of time talking to charter schools on the other side. They've got a playbook, and some of what we're going to show you today is the same playbook they're using, but you've got to use it against them. So here we go.

Greg Turchetta: The required reframe. You have to define your identity. You have to make it hyper-local, you have to make it incredibly obvious why you're superior to your competition, and you have to make it valuable to me.

Greg Turchetta: Now?

Greg Turchetta: Bill, walk me through how you just did that with this campaign.

Bill Good: So, when we were developing this campaign, so number one, shout out to our Director of Marketing, Brittany Cowan. She's one of the best professionals. Just a quick aside, she was riffed in a… because of declining enrollment four years ago.

Bill Good: that we asked her to come back, this was prior to me taking over, and then I made her our director of marketing because she's just outstanding. And when I told her that, I finally talked the superintendent into doing a big district or citywide marketing campaign that we've been wanting to do for… since I got there. I said, you have a week to come up with your best ideas. A week?

Bill Good: a week, right? Because we had to get rolling, right? Because here's the thing, I finally got the thumbs up in June, open enrollment starts in November, that's a long, you know, that's not a lot of time to develop everything, right? So we had to get everything moving.

And, she came into a presentation to do… give me a presentation, me and a couple other folks in the department, and she had 3 ideas, each one was better than the last. And I said to her, like, how the heck did you come up with this? Because, you know, sometimes you sit through those presentations and, like.

Bill Good: They either structure it where the best one's up front, and the next two stink, or the first two stink, and then the last one's great. She had three that were just, like, bang, bang, bang, and you're like, holy moly, these are great!

Greg Turchetta: This is one of them.

Bill Good: And this is one of them, yeah. And we're gonna use the other two in some other more minor ways, because they were so good. But, she said, Bill, I've been sitting on these ideas for 10 years, I've just been waiting for somebody to ask me to do it.

Bill Good: And I was like, like, but right there is, like, the power of turning your team loose and letting them do it. But anyway, so what we did with this campaign is we replaced the word public, with different P words.

Bill Good: prestigious, passionate, powerful, pride, etc. But we still wanted to make sure that we were emphasizing public. That's why you still see public in the background, because we didn't want to try to make it appear that we were ashamed of that or running from that.

Bill Good: But we wanted to find a framing device to tell different types of stories. And it's really, really hard when you have, like, one word or one phrase to tell every kind of story that can come out of your school district. And so,

Bill Good: what we found with this was this is a way, it gives us avenues to tell every different little type of story that we want to tell. There's a different P word that we can use for that. And so, you know, when you talk about Denver prestigious Schools, for example.

Bill Good: You know, we're an urban school district. People don't really associate urban school districts with prestigious education, but our gifted and talented school is the number one school in the state of Colorado.

Bill Good: Right? Well, that's kind of hard for us to talk about without sounding braggadocious or over the top, but if you're talking about Denver prestigious schools, well, now you can start to tell stories like that of state champions, you know, people who are doing great, wonderful things. Passionate, obviously, is the one that's probably the most common for us, because so much of what we do with students and staff is just about passion.

Bill Good: And, you know, etc. But, we also did this bilingually as well. We have a large,

Bill Good: Latino-Hispanic population, and so we have this same campaign mirrored, but with the Hispanic P, you know, corresponding P word in the middle. So in certain parts of the town, certain pockets of the town that have a larger Hispanic or a Latino population, we would have those ads instead of just the English ones, because again, we want to make sure that we're as inclusive as possible.

Greg Turchetta: Hey, listen, if you've got questions as we go, feel free to put them in the chat. Bill and I will get to them in real time. Bill, what I love about this, this is redefining, right? You are redefining the term public, because let's be honest, too often, people want to compare public school to the DMV as opposed to some academy, right?

So, like, you're right, like, using the term prestigious, powerful, proud.

Greg Turchetta: And these graphics were on your homepage, they're on billboards, they were in email marketing campaigns, right? Like, you use these everywhere.

Bill Good: Yeah, yeah, we use them everywhere, and you know, also being hyper-targeted to different areas. So if there's a school with a certain type of reputation that we're trying to turn around, we'll, you know, we can hyper-target things on social media or with a billboard to talk about people at that specific school with the opposite. So if it's known for being maybe not a great school, we'll put a prestigious billboard up there.

Bill Good: With some kind of great story about how the school is, you know, prestigious, for example.

Greg Turchetta: And now I know what you're thinking. Bill works at Denver, they've got more money than God, this was probably really expensive to do. He spent some money on it, but you can do this graphically with nothing, right? You could roll out the first phase of this as a reframe of your district, not even the same campaign, but these are things you can just launch if you've got a graphic designer on your team.

Bill Good: Yeah, and what I'd say, Greg, is when I was in Ferndale Schools, 3,000 students, I had a $100,000 budget. I did this exact same thing on a much smaller scale. Yeah. Right?

Denver, we're only spending $250,000, and we got 90,000 students. I have a healthy team in Denver. In Ferndale, it was me and one other person. And so… Yeah, it's scalable.

Correct. Anybody can do the same type of thing.

Greg Turchetta: Alright, that's redefining. Let's keep going. If you're gonna redefine it, you're gonna have to be bold in your storytelling to prove it, because it's one thing to go out and say, hey, we're prestigious, we're successful, and then your audience is gonna go, prove it.

Greg Turchetta: Right? So, this requires scaling up your storytelling system. If you're a department of one, you cannot redefine your district with one post a day, one graphic created, and expect that to hit critical mass. I mean, it just won't.

We've got to tell the stories that create emotional connections to our schools.

Greg Turchetta: All of our schools, as many stories as we can.

Greg Turchetta: And then, as we said earlier, you've got to define and clearly prove your unquestionable success. As much as your critics want to fire on you and say, you're only at half the state average for reading, right? Fire back.

Greg Turchetta: This is where we're succeeding. This is the gains we've made in reading, right?

Greg Turchetta: I think data is an incredible, powerful storytelling tool. Not just the stuff we dump into a release, but where you can show growth anywhere. Like, kids that are in remedial classes, I love telling their stories, because they don't… those kids are never celebrated, and their gains are monumental, even if they're minimal or incremental.

Greg Turchetta: And that's what it takes. So, you've got to get from a department of one to deputizing your schools to be telling their own stories, right? That's going to take use of your tools, it's also going to take a strategy and a plan, we'll talk more about that in a minute. But I want to go back to Bill's, graphics here, because what you might not have noticed, and I'll let him talk through it, but I want to tell you why this one… this one moved me.

Greg Turchetta: There's two things going on here. He's making the redefining their district, but if you look at the subline, there's videos attached to every one of these graphics, and they're out telling their stories. So, passionate teaching, powerful results inside Cheryl Cordova's classroom. I'm clicking on that.

Greg Turchetta: I want passionate, powerful results. That line hits, I watch the video, I'm in. I want my kid in Cheryl's class after seeing that video, right?

Greg Turchetta: Floor's yours, Bill.

Bill Good: Yeah, one of the things that we did, you know, we have about 20 communicators in my department in total, and so one of the things we did was, this isn't, you know, when I talk about having a marketing department, we don't really have a marketing department. We have a marketing director, and so she can't do all of this. So one of the things that we did was we deputized everybody in the department to say, everybody's got to do at least one per year, right? Because that would give us 20.

Bill Good: Plus, if people do multiple ones. But we say pick your best, right? If you're in the schools, you hear about things, what's the one story you're passionate about telling?

Bill Good: And when you do that, and allow people… you know, we don't have, like, a big meeting where it's like, oh, okay, that idea stinks, that idea stinks. It's what if you go to your individual… and again, if you don't have a big communications team, you can go to principals, you can go to teachers, you can go to PTA members, right? What are you passionate about telling? Because you will always get a better story when somebody is talking about what's passionate to them.

Bill Good: what's important to them, and it's authentic, right? What works for me, which would sell me, is not gonna sell other people. But if you have a diverse set of stories, because you're speaking directly to people

Bill Good: or allowing people to create things they're passionate or they feel are important, you're going to speak to a much wider audience, and we'll have a much higher opportunity to connect with your community. So, when Greg talks about scaling up your storytelling, again, it doesn't have to be a polished communicator. Anybody can write a 300-word story about something that's awesome in one of your schools, in one of your classrooms, or that your district does as a whole.

Bill Good: or whatever. And then you just have to do a quick edit, make sure everything's good, and then, you know, put it up on your website, on social media, or wherever.

Greg Turchetta: Right, they're not always 3-minute broadcast quality videos. It can be a still image with one line that's on the live feed of your website, right? And if you have 100 people doing that, the ability to redefine and tell your stories that prove that is now a system that's in play.

Bill Good: Yeah, and the one thing I'd say is, just keep in mind, especially with video content nowadays, it's not like it was 10 years ago, where if you were going to put video content up, it had to be extremely polished and professional quality. Look at what people are doing now.

Bill Good: We had a situation last week where a rumor had gone out in the community that one of our schools was closing. It's not, and so the principal called me in a panic, and I said, listen, here's what you're gonna do. We're gonna make this into a joke. Like, they would really close us?

Come on. And I had her just at her computer, record a video that she sent out to her entire community, and it basically said, hey, just so you know, we're hearing this rumor that we're closing. We're not closing. We're awesome.

We got

Bill Good: you know, banger test results, this is a great community, blah blah blah blah blah, and by the way, here's how you enroll. So please, as my community, tell everybody out there, let's make sure we spread the word that we're not closing. And she sent that out a half an hour after the

Bill Good: she sent it to me, right? Like, we didn't need to bring her into our studio and sit her down and do a set. Like, again, make it a joke, make it like, oh, we're so awesome, why the hell would they even think about closing us, right? And it worked out great, and now it's become a rallying cry in that community.

Greg Turchetta: And that's so much more powerful than waiting for the fire to start burning on social media, and then you as the district going and commenting on Facebook, no, the school isn't closing, right? That sounds like damage control.

Bill Good: Yeah, the biggest thing that everybody wants is authenticity. So just be yourself. Whoever your district is, be it. Own it.

Greg Turchetta: And if I'm ever considering going to that school, seeing the principal put that message out, seeing the principal has a sense of humor and pride.

Greg Turchetta: How often does somebody actually looking at a school ever meet the principal unless there's an open house? They don't tour anymore, right? They just… they make decisions, so even a video that could start out as a negative turns into a positive enrollment message just by being present, and that's huge. I love that, Bill.

Greg Turchetta: Alright.

Greg Turchetta: You gotta define who you are, you have to put the shared storytelling systems in place to prove that at scale, but none of this works if you don't have something that generates interest for students to be in the building.

Greg Turchetta: Right? So this is where this gets a little more granular and a little bit technical. Now, I alluded to earlier that Bill runs enrollment, and he and I have spent a lot of time presenting together at different conferences.

Greg Turchetta: But what I love about it is how he ended up there, right? He told you he's done this in a couple districts. You don't currently oversee enrollment. I don't think there's anybody on this call besides Bill that can make that claim, probably, right?

It's not in our communications set. Student Services owns it. Somebody over in Operations side owns it.

Greg Turchetta: You need to own it, the marketing experience, not the registration process. So, to do that, there's a couple things we've got to do, right? Bill, you taught me this one early and often. You gotta get the data, and you gotta put the systems in place to be able to respond to that.

Well, that starts with, you have to evaluate every enrollment step from start to finish, and it's gotta be like Amazon purchased one click easy.

Greg Turchetta: Right? But you… no one else is doing that right now.

Greg Turchetta: I did a pre-station in Texas about a month ago.

Greg Turchetta: on enrollment marketing, and I made the people in the room go to their website and try to enroll, to see how hard the process is. And they struggled. And they knew their own website, right? I mean, it's crazy.

But what do parents do? What do English as a second language parents do when they have to go through that? So you need to know that, right?

Greg Turchetta: That's the physical system. That's… that's a task force unto itself that you need to create in your district, that we're reevaluating this and making it Amazon easy. Okay, great.

Greg Turchetta: Then you gotta create excitement and anticipation to be at your schools. Now we're getting the principals involved. What are we doing at the school level to have open houses, to put on the marquee out front? Whether it's a social media campaign, much like Bill was describing our schools not closing, a principal could lead a marketing campaign on their own channels of why this is the place to be.

Greg Turchetta: Right? You do that about 3 months prior to school choice window opening, and now you got some momentum.

Greg Turchetta: And here's why you have to do it.

Greg Turchetta: You gotta protect the revenue source required to keep this whole thing in the sky. Otherwise, it comes crashing down.

Greg Turchetta: And that's the part people

Greg Turchetta: are struggling with. I'll tell you a quick story. I'm about to do a LinkedIn post on this this week. I was talking to two comms chiefs this past week who told me they were working with… at a school level, to try to put an enrollment marketing plan in place, and the principal said, we're good, we don't need any more students.

Greg Turchetta: And I went, is the school at capacity? And they said, no, the schools are only at, like, half capacity.

Greg Turchetta: Now, that's a problem, right? If you're going to put an enrollment system in place, everybody's got to be rowing the boat. Now, one could say that might be a principal who's gonna retire soon, because they're obviously clueless to the bigger part that when FTE comes in and student money comes in, we don't have to let go of teachers and close schools.

Greg Turchetta: So yes, we need to be at capacity. But listen, my point in this is, when you start digging into enrollment, you're going to find roadblocks.

Greg Turchetta: Right, Bill? I mean, you found roadblocks.

Bill Good: What I… I get myself in a lot of trouble wherever I'm working, because my kind of saying that I live by is I have… because people always say, Bill, that's not your job, stay in your lane. And I always say I have one… pardon my French, but I have one big-ass lane, and it's either Ferndale Schools or Denver Public Schools, right? Because, you know, I was actually just talking with our CFO in Denver this week about how are we going to get questions

Bill Good: on the screenings for principal applications about how they're going to market schools, how they're going to sell schools, right? Because when you start following down this rabbit hole, again, you start to… once you get all this stuff out, and you get it rolling, and you got your enrollment set, blah, blah, blah.

Bill Good: Then you start to find all the other small issues along the way. For example, Brittany Cowan, our marketing director, her son is starting kindergarten next year in Denver. So she went to, like, 5 different schools, and she found that every single school had a different tour, and were giving contradictory information, incorrect information.

Bill Good: So what are we doing now? Next year, we're going to go and teach every single school how to do a tour, with the information, with the tour, with the data. And again, because we find these things, then you gotta fix them. One of the big things you're going to find is with your principals who either don't want to do this or are not capable of doing this.

Bill Good: Right? And so you… it's your job to identify that, because if you don't, no one else is. And so, again, this isn't just about putting up cool-looking billboards or having a cool catchphrase. It's about all those incremental things that you're gonna do over the years in your district that no one's ever gonna see or know about.

Greg Turchetta: But they all have big results and impact.

Greg Turchetta: I'll give you another one. I've… a couple districts I've done case studies on, they use students to lead tours. There's a district, Okaloosa, Iowa, where with 20 minutes notice and a text message, they can have a student at any one of the three levels ready to give a tour.

Greg Turchetta: Think about that for a second. That's a system you have to put in place

Greg Turchetta: But how powerful would it be to walk into an elementary school, and a fifth grader is giving you a tour of their school with no adult oversight? They're there in a blazer, ready to go, right?

Bill Good: One of the things I say is, you know, when we talk about this stuff, I can see it seems overwhelming, right? But don't worry about it. You don't have to do… number one, you don't have to do it all at once. You do it incrementally over years.

Bill Good: And number… and again, as long as you keep moving and getting a little bit closer each year, you're doing… you're doing your job, number one. And number two, you… that's why it's really important that you get the superintendent to deputize you to do this work, so that when you're in those rooms saying, this is what I want to set up, and this is what we're going to set up, it's not just you doing it, it's you working with the principal, with the counselor, with the students. You're going to tell them what to do.

Bill Good: you're gonna help them with that, but then when they're making the phone calls, it's not you taking the phone calls, it's that school, and they're implementing a system that you put in place. So it's not you doing everything day-to-day, it's you having the idea, and setting up the system, and then let the system run itself.

Greg Turchetta: and you having the authority to ask questions. At my last district, my superintendent said, we're down 3,000 students, I want a marketing campaign in 8 weeks to get them back.

Greg Turchetta: First place I went to was the data people, right? And so, if you go in and start asking data questions to data people, and you're the comms person, they're gonna be like, whoa, you're not the academic head, what are we doing here?

Greg Turchetta: But you need that permission to go figure out, okay, so if you want to take this on, you need to know where you are losing kids. And it was powerful to me. One of the things I learned was you would assume it was your lowest scoring schools that would be bleeding the most.

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Greg Turchetta: We bled everywhere. The highest performing schools were losing top-tier kids. So, the marketing campaign to go after them is very different for each area that you're going after, but you need the data to actually put any kind of marketing strategy together.

Greg Turchetta: Okay.

Greg Turchetta: I alluded earlier about the application. I'm gonna leave the application alone, but I know this. Every job I ever applied for at a K-12 district, every time I ever registered my kid, it was miserable. It was 16 pages of doom scrolling.

And if I got something wrong, all of a sudden I go to hit submit, and 30 red boxes would pop up, and they're not right, and I have to go back and play whack-a-mole, and figure out which one I had to get to get to the next page. What you're looking at on the screen is Fortune 500 companies and how

Greg Turchetta: How long it takes to apply for a job there.

Greg Turchetta: When I say Amazon easy, this is what I mean. That application is a roadblock.

Greg Turchetta: Just about everywhere. Make it easy. And in fact, Amazon isn't even the easiest on this screen. Netflix is, right?

One minute to apply for a job. All they need… Netflix needs your first name, last name, and an email address, and then they're gonna be in contact. That's all you need!

Greg Turchetta: Right? Get the process rolling.

Greg Turchetta: Alright, let's get to the state level real quick. Here we go. Red state reality. Dollars walk fast.

Winning districts stop assuming families understand public education's value. Chew on that one for a minute.

Greg Turchetta: Your average person in your neighborhood doesn't know what you do.

Greg Turchetta: Think about this. The last time a senior citizen who votes was in one of your schools was, what, 30, 40 years ago, unless they have grandkids in them?

Greg Turchetta: How many times have you given a tour of one of your schools and somebody said, I didn't know that. I didn't know high school kids could do that. I didn't know kindergarten kids could read.

Greg Turchetta: Every time somebody says, I didn't know that, that's on us.

Greg Turchetta: That's on us, because if we had the storytelling system in place, we'd be getting more of that out. Now, you may think, what do you care what the old person thinks? If you're in a red state, they vote. They vote for bond initiatives, they vote for funding.

They need to know.

Greg Turchetta: Right? So we're talking about proving it. Prove it, prove it, prove it. Real students, real outcomes.

Talk, set the talking points that you want to talk about, and stop debating the fools who want to drag you into the mud.

Greg Turchetta: Storytelling. Bold storytelling that doesn't hide imperfections. I used to, in my former TV news career for 22 years, I trained a lot of reporters how to tell stories, and the thing we always told them was transparency. Show them the process.

Greg Turchetta: Right? Education's the same way. Education's messy. Unless you happen to be in a district where everything's going well, you need to show people where you're improving and the struggles of that, and how hard it is.

Oh, and maybe if the state makes it even harder on you, show a little of that with tact.

Greg Turchetta: But share your wins and challenges authentically. Tell your stories to build trust over time. Trust is a bank that you've got to keep making deposits into, because every time one of your employees does something stupid, a withdrawal is made.

Greg Turchetta: Right? That's just the truth. And then give the schools the ability to create their content and publish it everywhere. Because again, storytelling at scale builds more trust.

Greg Turchetta: We talked about that… that experience, make enrollment everyone's top priority. If no one owns enrollment, Bill, who owns enrollment? No one, right? It doesn't get done.

Greg Turchetta: Your name has to be on it. Year-round, always enrolling, and always recapturing lost students. I can't tell you how many districts I've talked to, just in the last week, who actually, one of them used a term, share of market.

Greg Turchetta: Right? You know what that is, Bill, right? What share of students in Denver City proper do we own?

Greg Turchetta: 88%, okay? Where are the other 12%, and how do we recapture them back?

Greg Turchetta: That's a business term that in K-12 education, 5 years ago, no one was talking about. Go ahead.

Bill Good: But that's the other thing, too, is you want to talk about how do you sell this… how do you walk into your superintendent's office and say, hey, I need $100,000, I need $200,000, I need $250,000, whatever, right? That's a huge amount of money. And especially in declining enrollment, people go… people never want to give you more money, right? We're talking about how we're going to cut.

Bill Good: But if you can walk in there and say, hey, listen.

Bill Good: We have 500 students that live within our district boundaries that do not attend our school district. If each one of them is worth 10 grand, that's a lot of money. That's way more than… I'm not going to do quick math, but that's way more than, you know, the $100,000 I want to spend, or $150,000 I want to spend. Here is what our exit interviews say, right, as to why we're losing these families, and here's my plan that I want to go out to try to go

Bill Good: go out and get them. And then you sit there and say, if I get 10 of them, we've paid for this campaign. If I get 20 of them, we're making money. And, it's really hard when you present it like that for a superintendent to say, oh, no, we shouldn't do that, you know?

Greg Turchetta: And Bill, you're living this, right? The quarter million dollars you just referenced was an extra ask to a superintendent who said yes, and you're currently in the middle of proving that return.

Bill Good: Yeah, and so we just had our first round of school choice wrap-up. We're in the middle of our round two. Our school choice process is crazy, but in that round one, we got more,

Bill Good: We got about 750 applications from outside of our district, which is the most… actually, no, I take that back. 1,250, sorry, from outside of our district, it's the most we've ever gotten in round one, and then we had 250

Bill Good: returning students who were with DPS left and now want to come back. And so, if we just close the… if we just, you know, get 1,000 of those 1,500,

Bill Good: right there, that's an incredible amount of money, right? Like, that's an incredible return on a $250,000 investment. And that's not even counting all the other ones we brought in that, you know, because we can track that we are responsible for about 4,000 applications in Round 1.

Bill Good: Because we can… because of the way we track everything on the back end, we can see.

Greg Turchetta: Because you use Salesforce.

Bill Good: Right. We can see that these people clicked on one of our ads and then applied. And so that… who's to say how many of those would have applied naturally on our own, and rather than just taking the convenient thing of clicking on an ad? But regardless, it's showing… we are easily able to demonstrate our value of $250,000.

Greg Turchetta: And he's in a blue state. Yes, it's got red tendencies, but it's a blue state.

Greg Turchetta: here's… this one gets me fired up. Bill alluded to it earlier. If you're in a district that's making across-the-board budget cuts, that is the dumbest thing any superintendent can do.

Greg Turchetta: And here's why. Exactly what Bill just described. Cutting communications and marketing right now is slitting your own throat, because that's the only pathway back to getting more student dollars in the system.

Greg Turchetta: cutting the marketing department in half, you're destined to bleed out, right? And so, if you're in one of those situations now, this is what my former superintendent used to call, put the keys on the desk moment. Walk into the superintendent, put your keys on the desk, and say, listen.

Greg Turchetta: I can fix this.

Greg Turchetta: But I need your help to do this, and if we can't do this, there's no point in me being here.

Greg Turchetta: Right? That… I've done that a couple of times, and let me tell you, that gets their attention. I've never followed through with it, but it gets their attention to, this is a watershed communications moment, and I'm not leaving till you hear me, ma'am.

Greg Turchetta: And that's not just red states, that's going to be everywhere in a year or two, is enrollment is going to be that conversation that people don't get, but they're going to have to, because it's the only path out of the doom slope that some districts are in right now.

Bill Good: Yeah, and it's one… it's the one way that you can get more students, right? Yeah. Other than getting… figuring out how to make people move to your city and procreate, the only way out of it is attracting more people to your city, period.

Greg Turchetta: It's not happening, because birth rates are down nationwide, right?

Bill Good: Correct.

Greg Turchetta: There's not more babies coming.

Bill Good: Correct. So, so, that, that is… if anything, the communications and marketing department should be added to during down times, because they are the only people in your district that can actually actively go out and get you more students.

Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. I don't like… Bill and I don't like to sit here, and obviously he's got real case examples from Denver, but I want to show you as many places that can say, this is what it looks like, right? I want to take you to Socorro, Texas. This is just outside of El Paso.

Greg Turchetta: These are four elements from their homepage I just pulled off. Highest scoring district in the region. Nationally certified STEM, first in West Texas, third in the nation.

Greg Turchetta: 49 Purple Star-designated schools. That matters if you're near a military base. And they are. And then they have a box of achievements.

This is telling your story boldly to prospective families, because if your homepage is talking to your current families, you're fighting the wrong fight.

Bill Good: Yeah, and I would also say, with regards to, like, at the school level, you should have one of those achievement boxes on every single one of your school websites. A bread sheet.

Greg Turchetta: Yep.

Bill Good: Because if nothing else, it forces your principals to think about what they're going to talk about when they talk to… when they talk to students. When I first got to Ferndale, I asked each principal, give me three accomplishments in your school, and honest to God, my middle school principal told me she had 5 meetings that day, or something like that. It was something crazy. I'm like, what?

Like, what are you even talking about? Like, this is… this is insane!

Greg Turchetta: I had principals who couldn't give me 3.

Bill Good: Right, but so that's the thing is, it forces them into that mindset, so that they have to then have that on their website, and then they know what to talk about when they're talking to prospective parents.

Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. Alright, blue states, start early.

Greg Turchetta: Your unique play in a blue state is early education, early childhood, right? That's your front door. Get them to be in the system and making the argument that this is where they need to be their entire career. Don't lose them before you ever see them.

Greg Turchetta: Right? Charter schools and private are making an argument, and with all their exclusive waiting lists. Do you have a waiting list? Do you have an early childhood academy?

That sounds prestigious.

Greg Turchetta: But at the end of the day, your scale and services are guarantees that charters can't match, right? Same thing with the storytelling, no different there. Same thing with the enrollment process, right? This, like I said, there's subtle nuances between the difference.

Greg Turchetta: Here's an example in Massachusetts. Bill Rooney is the superintendent of Dighton Rehoboth. I've got a… he's gonna be in our School CEO Magazine coming up, because his ability to market and brand as a superintendent, I haven't seen anything quite like it. Look at the top left corner here, his little Falcons preschool.

Greg Turchetta: Right? He's starting that Falcons brand. They're a smaller district, 3,000 students. Everything's a Falcon.

Be a Falcon, right? From the time they're 3 or 4, they're already baptizing him as Falcons so that they stay within the system. But the marketing effort just continues across the board of being active, telling a story. In the bottom right.

Greg Turchetta: The local news wanted to talk about school enrollment decline, and he said, yeah, I'll do that interview. How many superintendents would volunteer to go be interviewed about school enrollment decline? His enrollment was down. His high school at the time was down 30% in one year, but he was going on the news to talk about all the things they're doing to improve it.

Greg Turchetta: And he's the only superintendent who said yes, and next thing you know, he's in the studio getting 3 minutes of airtime to talk about Dighton Rehoboth and all the great things they're doing to turn it around. That takes courage, but that gets results. And guess what? He's turned it around.

Blue state.

Greg Turchetta: Alright, purple states. Results over rhetoric.

Greg Turchetta: If you read this, you're gonna go, Greg, Bill, that's the same thing you had for the red slide. And the answer is, yes, it is. Because it's no different.

Greg Turchetta: The blue state's subtlety with the early childhood, that could be applied in a red state, too. I know people in Texas that are going after early childhood, and they're going after online and homeschooling, right?

Greg Turchetta: Those are great plays, but it still starts with the same three things. Defining who you are, telling your stories at scale, and creating an enrollment experience that works. Because families are looking for clarity, competence, and results.

Greg Turchetta: Can you demonstrate clarity? Can you demonstrate confidence? And can you demonstrate results in a way that makes the argument that this is where my kid needs to be?

Bill Good: Yeah, and I would just add to that, that the difference between the different states or different, you know, colors, red, blue, purple, it isn't in what needs to be done, it's in how you talk about it, right? Because your values as a school district are probably going to be a little bit different in a red state than they are in a blue state, right? So, so…

Bill Good: when Greg said earlier you need to make it hyper-local, that's what he means, right? Like, that is… that's where the rubber meets the road. It's what are the specific values of your community, and then how do you reinforce those in all the communications that you send out, whether it's a marketing or just a weekly newsletter.

Greg Turchetta: So let me tell you what's not hyperlocal. The trends I'm seeing nationwide that are eroding your enrollment. They'll come to you for elementary school, but they leave for middle school. Why?

Greg Turchetta: Because there's a national belief that middle school is full of bullying, violence, it's not a place I want to be. Yet, miraculously, these same kids that leave for homeschooling or charter come back to your high schools because you have more sports and extracurricular and academic offerings than any charter school currently has to offer.

Greg Turchetta: So this ebb and flow of belief.

Greg Turchetta: If I was running a school system right now, I would have a middle school enrollment marketing campaign talking about all the ways we've made our schools safer. You don't have to talk about your safety plan, but you can talk about the $20 million you put into the building. You could talk about bullying. I can't tell you how many times I had to explain to a parent that bullying is a repetitive act.

It's not the first time your kid gets picked on.

Greg Turchetta: And they pull their kids, right? You need to talk about all the supports you have in place, all the interventions you have in place to deal with bullying, especially when it comes to social media, right? That's school-specific targeting of what the issues are.

Greg Turchetta: And that is hyperlocal, because from school to school, it may be different.

Greg Turchetta: And that's what it takes to show those results. I want to show you, because at the end of the day.

Greg Turchetta: enrollment is brand, and this is brand management, but it's also revenue protection, right? The one thing your superintendent understands right now is deficit spending.

Greg Turchetta: is fund reserve dripping and draining. So, having this in place is revenue protection, and that's how you get their ear. The CFO will listen to this.

Greg Turchetta: So here we go. Define your identity, don't offend it. What is each school great at? My friends in Duval County have a saying,

Greg Turchetta: People that are football fans don't buy the NFL, they buy their local team. That's what they're a fan of. So if you're marketing the district.

Greg Turchetta: That's great, but people aren't buying a district. They're buying the elementary school, they're buying the high school. So, it has to get to a granular level where you're talking at the school-level marketing campaigns of what they're great at. What makes your school a parent's best choice?

Now, there's different subtleties to this, too.

Greg Turchetta: There are parents that will tell you in elementary school, I don't care about the academics. I want my kid to feel like they belong. I want the teacher to know that… I want a teacher that I know cares. I want it to be an environment where emotionally they're thriving.

Greg Turchetta: Right? Then there's other people who are like, what are your academic offerings, and do you have rigor?

Greg Turchetta: So you gotta speak to those different arguments.

Greg Turchetta: Your district school homepages, your app, your social media feeds have to be screaming your excellence. And here's the new wrinkle, kids. AI is a new search tool, it's not Google.

Greg Turchetta: So AI is scrubbing every one of your web pages when a parent puts in and goes, hi, I'm thinking about moving to Colorado, should I consider Denver Public Schools? If you have not gone to ChatGPT or Claude and put in, should I choose blank school district, do it. It will blow your mind how much detail is in that. Write down the test scores.

Greg Turchetta: You need to do that, because you need to go back, because that's what parents are doing, and then you need to go back and feed the information to your website that makes a better argument than what currently… the data that's being pulled.

Greg Turchetta: And honestly, you're gonna struggle with your principles at times, because educators are not marketers, and they're not inclined to brag.

Greg Turchetta: We're at a point where we have to brag.

Greg Turchetta: Because I even… I was doing a training in Wisconsin recently, and the school board member said to me, you mean we… our schools have to compete with each other? I don't know if I'm comfortable with that. And I said, you're gonna have to get real comfortable with it real fast, because your parents are. Your parents are already doing it.

Greg Turchetta: Now, we don't need to be cutthroat killer to each other, but unless you have the same academic offerings in every school, which I doubt you do, there's subtleties to everything. Each school has something to brag about that makes them unique and excellent. If they don't know it, and they're not screaming it, we're losing.

Greg Turchetta: Because if you don't control what families see first, someone else will.

Greg Turchetta: Alright, empowering that storytelling, expand the systems. That functionality, if your tool that you're putting in the hands of your school leaders doesn't have an approval function, you're behind.

Greg Turchetta: Because that's how you scale this up to shared storytelling. Set up a system that either the principal has local approval, or you as the comms chief have district-wide approval, and now you're doing curation, not just creation.

Greg Turchetta: Let people create content, send it to you. You send it back to be edited, you send it to the feed to be published, or you hold it, and you create that pipeline where you spoon-feed it out so you've got content every day. Small districts, this is you. If you don't have this system in place, you're not gonna hit critical mass.

Greg Turchetta: And the other part of it, when people give you resistance, I don't have time for that, the golden standard is 5 minutes a day. One picture, one line, publish. If every person did that in a school, you would change the narrative, because families trust teachers and principals more than they trust us, the district.

Greg Turchetta: They expect we're gonna give them spin. When teachers and principals are showcasing what's going on in their building, that's authentic.

Bill Good: Yeah, and one other thing I would just throw in there, real quick, because that's brilliant, Greg. I love that, that, you know, 5 minutes a day, that's fantastic.

Bill Good: But one of the issues that we had in Denver with our social media was it was just a dumping ground, right? Like, where people would say, oh, I'm doing this event, put this on social media, I'm doing this, put it on social media. And we've seen,

Bill Good: our social media grow by orders of magnitude the last 18 months because we stopped doing that. If you want to advertise an event, great. It's gonna go in a newsletter, or it's going to go on your website. Our social media now is only positive student and staff stories.

That's it. And again, we have seen our likes, our follows, our engagement, every metric is up by 100% or more over the last

Bill Good: 18 months, just by not… by making it useful and engaging, as opposed to just being a dumping ground for everything. So, if you're gonna make your social media, these five-minute, right, a picture and a tag and a line, awesome.

Bill Good: Right? And then if you keep doing that and don't do all the other garbage that people tell us to put on social media, you will watch your social media explode.

Greg Turchetta: And here's why. Social media right now is a cesspool. You have all the positive stories to put out there among all this political garbage that's going on. People will click on your stuff because they'll be drawn to it, even if they don't have a kid in there.

If they see a kid who did something amazing, I want to be inspired, because right now, world events are scaring me, right? So you really have an opportunity this week to do this.

Greg Turchetta: All right, launch why we choose… I'll call it DPS, because I've got Bill here. Why do we choose Denver Public School Stories, right? Families trust other families. Peer-to-peer marketing is huge.

Fortune 500 companies are doing this. They're… you can call it user-generated content, where they have customers telling the story that are…

Greg Turchetta: authentic about why they like the product. That's the new form of marketing that's going on

Greg Turchetta: And companies are spending billions of dollars on this.

Greg Turchetta: But you can do it locally, just by identifying 5 to 10 families, and have them tell their why we chose DPS story in their own words. That could be why they chose to stay, or why they chose to come back. This isn't telling… this isn't them telling Bill why Denver Public Schools is great. They're talking about how it resonated with their child, with their family.

Greg Turchetta: You share that across your website, social media, and your enrollment emails, you are now having impact.

Greg Turchetta: Because it's not branding, right? There's enrollment, marketing, and branding built into everything. It's always built into the storytelling if you write it correctly, or if you just let the parents tell their own story.

Bill Good: Not to step on you, Greg, but the big thing is, again, everything we put out as a district will always be viewed as some sort of propaganda. So how do you minimize that perception that what you're doing is propaganda? And the best way to do that is to have students and families telling their stories authentically.

Bill Good: that's something that people… if it's Bill Good telling you, it's gonna be, well, that's his job. But when it's a family that had an authentic experience that you get to hear about, that will always be the best kind of marketing that you can do.

Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. Here's an example. This is Klein ISD in Houston, Texas. If you look down at the bottom, this is the bottom of their homepage.

Why choose Kline ISD? Here's reason 89, 51, 63, 32, and 18 in a student's own voice. This is wildly successful, and I've seen this now on multiple webpages, and I'm trying to evangelize this to everybody.

Greg Turchetta: Here's the best part about it. Justin Elbert, their Executive Director of Communications, and I did a presentation on this in Texas.

Greg Turchetta: A lot of Texas here, because Texas is high school choice. But his videographer came to him, they didn't have 89 stories to tell.

Greg Turchetta: They had 8. And so he was about to put them up there, and Justin said, no, no, no, don't number them 1 through 8. Just randomize it.

Greg Turchetta: Because then people will have FOMO, and they'll think that there really are 89 different reasons why you should be a client, and they'll be looking for the videos. And damn it, they did it. People started looking for it, but that's the point, right? And this… when I saw this, this looked familiar, and I said to Justin.

Greg Turchetta: That looks a lot like Apple, right? Here's Apple's homepage. Here's the tiles, and they were very… and he goes, yep, you caught me. We're very deliberate about mirroring business, because that's what parents are used to, right?

Making those kind of arguments.

Greg Turchetta: That's where we're at. Alright, we're running out of time, so we're gonna laser this. We've got 9 minutes. There's 90 days you could just turn… start turning this around, right?

Number one, secret shop your own enrollment process, from the website to registration to first response.

Greg Turchetta: First response to parents. What does that look like? What does it take? Measure response time to inquiries.

Bill and I talk about this a lot. The school choice process is long. There's long gaps in there where a parent may not hear anything. How do we build in some more storytelling in there to keep them excited about what they're waiting for?

Bill Good: Again, if I could just add one thing in there, closing the loop. End of September, send an email out to everybody, say, did what we promised you, did we deliver on it? Where did we fall short? And then use that to start fixing things that you didn't even know were there.

Greg Turchetta: Yeah, simplify the language on your enrollment pages. This shouldn't… I mean, you work with a lot of people with PhDs at the end of their name, and they use $100 words. That's not the place for it on the enrollment page. No internal jargon, make it simple for parents to understand.

Greg Turchetta: Add a chatbot to your homepage to answer questions 24-7. This is what parents are expecting. If they have a question and they have it on Saturday at 6pm about how to enroll.

Greg Turchetta: Are they gonna wait till Monday at 9am to call?

Greg Turchetta: No, they might move on, or it goes unanswered and they drift away.

Greg Turchetta: Ladies and gentlemen, if you take anything from me today about building something that's an enrollment marketing machine, I alluded to Duval County earlier, this is Jacksonville, Florida, Duval County. This website is a tour de force of reasons you should choose them.

Greg Turchetta: I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, but this hits all the boxes of what you want to tell people. They flipped their entire homepage to be enrollment. They told current families, sorry, your information is no longer on the homepage, that's going to be on the app, that's going to be on our parent portal, it's going to be on a lot of other places, but this is what this is designed to do. They even have a box that says more reasons.

More reasons to choose them.

Greg Turchetta: Right? So, if you get a chance, go check it out. This is what redefining your story looks like.

Greg Turchetta: Okay, if you're going to take on enrollment, which I hope you are, choose one to two schools or programs to pilot enrollment-focused work. If you're in a system of 40 schools, you're not taking all of it on at once, right? Assign a clear owner, by name, not department. Define one metric.

Is it going to be inquiries, tours, applications? What are you going to measure and monitor to know we're making movement here?

Greg Turchetta: And then evaluate that success, refine, and scale it up to the larger group.

Greg Turchetta: Okay, families who start with you are far more likely to stay with you, right? We talked about that early childhood. Create an academy. Change the name of your early childhood program to an academy.

That's what parents want. They want exclusivity. That's where charter schools and private schools win, because there's a waitlist. Create a waitlist!

Tell people they're on a waitlist!

Greg Turchetta: I mean, why not, right? It creates demand. Even if it's just a process that takes a couple days for them to find out. That's a quick win, and, you know, emphasize your continuity and your outcomes.

Let them know that we are excellent from start to finish.

Greg Turchetta: All right, Bill, you alluded to it earlier, real quick. This is some of the data behind some of the wins you were talking about with your school choice program.

Bill Good: Yeah, so, again, so we got about 4,500 apps that we can tie to a marketing link. 2,300 of those are the number of students that are brand new to DPS who submitted an application, and 290 are returning.

Bill Good: And, to me, if nothing else, if we just closed 90% of those 290, we more than paid for the entire marketing campaign.

Bill Good: And so, again.

Bill Good: One of the most important things you should do before you start looking at spending money is making sure you have a way to track all this. There's a lot of different companies out there that can do it. We use Salesforce, and the only reason we use Salesforce is because that's what our enrollment team was already using. But there's a bunch of different companies you can go with that do this.

Make sure you have a system in place to track this, because again, when you're talking about spending public dollars on anything other than pencils and curriculum and teachers.

Bill Good: you're gonna get pushback, either from a board of education, superintendent, whoever, but if you can prove that what you're spending is working.

Bill Good: Then they have no choice but to give you the money that you need to do it.

Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. Alright, so we talked about what do winning districts have in common. They stop defending and start clearly defining who they are. They create communication systems and storytelling at scale to shape their identity and prove it, and they're relentless in the pursuit of enrollment.

Greg Turchetta: And here's the final leadership shift. We've been talking about it throughout it, but I really need you to drive this home. Your communications chief becomes your chief of brand and enrollment management, right? If no one in your organization wakes up every day owning these areas, you're leaking revenue by default, which is what we're currently doing.

Greg Turchetta: You're uniquely positioned to do this. You already lead the enrollment data and annual campaigns, right? This is not a stretch for the superintendent to say, Jen's now in charge of this, because this falls naturally under a communication function. You just need the permission to go into other areas.

Greg Turchetta: you to be deputized to enlist other people, you can create a task force. Some of the districts I work with have created a task force. I think it's a great name. People love to be on a task force.

Greg Turchetta: But they're just in charge of looking at the application form. They're looking at the enrollment procedures.

Greg Turchetta: They're… how do we create open house experiences that are better than what we have? Because here's the final thought. Enrollment loss is not simply a declining birth rate or education policy problem. Yes, we know both of those are going on.

Greg Turchetta: It's a much bigger communication and identity problem, and the shame is that we can fix that. We can do that. Winning districts don't wait for legislation to change or budget shortfalls to force their hands. They clearly define and position their brand, boldly tell their stories, and then create a superior customer experience.

Greg Turchetta: Now, one last thing before we go. If you haven't been to the School CEO Conference, I highly encourage you to come. It is incredible, two days of PD. It's not in Little Rock this year, it's in Dallas.

We've moved it, down to Dallas for… so it's easier access.

Greg Turchetta: I know budgets are tight, I know travel's tight, and I know dollars are tight, but we're going to spend a whole lot of time on All In Branding Communications and talking more about what we talked about today. Speaking of what we talked about today, if you were on this webinar, or you signed up for this webinar, you will get an email from my friend Barrett, or it will actually come from me, that will have all the links of what we've talked about, it will have a recording of the presentation, and it will have the slides, so you don't have to take a picture or take notes of anything.

Greg Turchetta: If you have any questions, now's the time to throw them in there.

Greg Turchetta: Hey, Abby, great to see you here. Bill, thank you, as always, for being a part of this. We're gonna hang around and see if anybody has

Greg Turchetta: any questions on this, but thank you for your time, thank you for your interest, and again, if you ever want to have a more of a conversation, my email address is greg.turchetta@apptegy.com.

Greg Turchetta: I love these conversations, it's why I do what I do, is to help districts solve their way through this. I'll come to your cabinet meeting and explain it to your superintendent and your leadership team as to why this has to happen now.

Greg Turchetta: So, there you go. If you got any questions, fire them in. Like I said, worth sticking around, but otherwise, thank you guys for coming. Bill, final thought?

Bill Good: No, I was, there was a question that came in the Q&A, so I was just gonna answer that.

Greg Turchetta: Yeah, go for it.

Bill Good: So, one of the gentlemen was asking about one-star reviews on Google. That's… that's really tough. I'm not sure if there's a way to scrub those or get rid of those. Instead, what I would do is just try to drown them out.

So, see if you can get people…

Bill Good: To rate you. Doesn't have to be five stars, but just better than one. And so just try to find as many people as you can that can fill that out, because those 1 stars look really bad really quick. If you have people who actually… because you mentioned just one-star nameless reviews.

If you get people who will put their name on it and actually write a blurb about why you're awesome, that's… that… that's… that's the gold standard. So, you can start with PTA leaders, or just anybody that you know has had a good experience.

Bill Good: could you take 5 minutes and give us a Google review? Because… and you can even tell them, we got a couple of these one-star reviews that are BS. Could you help us out and see what you do from there?

Greg Turchetta: Also, follow me on LinkedIn. I actually wrote an article on this last week, because I was working with a district in Illinois who asked me a similar question, which is, how do you deal with Niche.com and bad reviews on there? And I actually have scripts in… I wrote scripts in there that you can use to encourage, exactly as Bill said, encourage your staff, encourage your families to say, hey, we want the public to have an accurate reflection of who we are, right?

That's still shared storytelling, it's just being off of

Greg Turchetta: your channels, right? Deputize the people that are your advocates to evangelize your story everywhere. And that's how you lock this thing down.

Bill Good: Yeah, and that also works for, like, negative stories about your district. Like, you're ultimately gonna have some, but the more good news you have when people Google your district, the less likely they are to see, you know, something really bad that has happened. Like, it's covered.

Greg Turchetta: All right, go forth, conquer. As I said, if you guys are chewing on this and you ever want more information, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you for your time. Apptegy is now… we're dialed in with a bunch of webinars that are coming every couple of weeks, so, stay in… stay in tune, stay informed, and, make this a regular part of your PD.

It's free. Thank you, guys.