/)
Your enrollment numbers determine your funding—and your funding determines just about everything else. Enrollment marketing is a complex problem that can’t be solved with a simple answer, but one strategy can help: the customer journey. Learn the path to building exceptional enrollment marketing for your schools.
Related resources
Top 8 Enrollment Marketing Strategies for 2025
Running a sophisticated online enrollment marketing funnel for your district is challenging, but you don’t have to go it alone! These eight marketing strategies to increase student enrollment will help you show families the best of your district—and hopefully prove that your schools are the right fit for them.
Enrollment Marketing: The Customer Journey
The customer journey refers to the series of steps customers—or, in your case, families—move through as they learn more about an organization or brand. Applied to enrollment, it tells the story of how families join your district and how your happiest families become advocates for your schools.
How to Build a School Enrollment Page
Your enrollment page is one of your best tools for providing an exceptional customer experience and offering much-needed help. It’s the page that can turn a family who’s merely interested in your district into valuable members of your school community.
Shared storytelling reimagines school marketing by shifting from a singular, top-down narrative to a decentralized model where every staff member contributes to the district's story with their own voice.
Sarasota County Schools Enrollment Ads
Enrollment Success Stories
Transcript
Greg Turchetta: All right, it's two o'clock. I'm going respect your time. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's get going. If we haven't met yet, my name is Greg Turchetta. I'm the strategic communications advisor here at Apptegy.
Prior to joining Apptegy a year and a half ago, I spent ten years as Chief Communications Officer in K-12 in higher ed in districts in Florida and South Carolina. Up there on the right, I have three kids that are all out of the house, which is my greatest accomplishment, and we have three dogs, including Bagel up there, who loves to wear the medals. My oldest daughter wins when running marathons. And down to the right here, this is a turtle at SeaWorld on Thanksgiving.
I always appreciate when the theme park animals understand the assignment when it comes to brand. But today's not brand, today's enrollment. I've got a special guest host with me today too because it's one thing to sit here and talk about research. It's another when you can bring somebody in who's doing something about it.
So I want to introduce real quick right now Craig Maniglia. He is the Director of Communications for Sarasota County Schools in Florida. Craig say hey everybody.
Craig Maniglia: Hey, everybody.
Greg Turchetta: Give him a quick little background of who you are.
Craig Maniglia: Okay, well, I'm Craig Maniglia. I'm the director of communications and government affairs for Sarasota County Schools. Prior to that, I was in Fairfax County Public Schools for a little bit working out of the HR, running HR communications. And then prior to that, I had a pretty big marketing firm, public relations firm in Washington, DC, where I did a lot of presidential gubernatorial state and level political spots, discovery channel work, all kinds of high end broadcast production. So that's a little bit about me.
Greg Turchetta: Awesome. Listen, if you want to know everything there is to know about enrollment marketing, you need our winter 2024 School CEO Magazine. You can go to schoolceo.com or you can click on the QR code on the screen and get it that way. There's a lot of research.
I mean, obviously this is a whole edition just on enrollment. Today, we're really going to talk to you outside of just the five steps of the framework. But what kind of enrollment problem are we in and how do we get out of it? I want to spend more time in those two areas and that's again why I brought Craig in because Craig has started to build a map out and we'll talk about that in a minute.
So, agenda part one. What is this enrollment crisis that's brewing? Depending on where you are in the country, you're having very different realities and maybe slightly different conversations or dramatically different conversations about what happened and how do we get out of this? Part two, what are the five phases of enrollment marketing?
We'll go through that. And then part three, the real part of this. Okay, that's great. What do I do about it?
How do I build a district of choice through enrollment marketing? So let's start with the crisis that's brewing. Craig's sitting on the front line here in Florida. In Florida, it is ground zero.
Right now, I like to say Florida Texas are having a hold my beer competition for who can come up with the wildest education policy in Arizona and Arkansas and Iowa aren't far behind. But you really need to have your eye on Florida and here's why. Florida has universal vouchers and what does that mean? That means very simply each student's worth about nine grand.
And if Greg decides that I'm gonna pull my three kids out of public school, that's twenty seven thousand dollars handed to me, no questions asked. Because my kids like to play travel sports. So putting them in virtual school and getting that money certainly offsets some of the cost. Here's the problem.
Say a month later Greg decides that was a horrible idea and I don't want to do virtual school or anything like that.
I put my kids back in the public school. The money doesn't come back till next year.
So now you're educating these kids for free. So that is leading to districts here in Florida losing thousands of students and in turn millions of dollars. These are numbers from last summer. The numbers have gotten worse but nine out of the top ten Florida districts have seen a drop in enrollment and some as high as or more than thirteen percent.
And when you look at these budget numbers, this is real. This is a real problem. This ends up being more than, hey, we're just gonna have a budget freeze across the board. This leads to cutting conversations that no one at the cabinet level ever thought they might have But here we are.
And then the spending and slashing goes to levels that you just go, what do we do with this? And here's why. Many of you may be going, oh my, I don't have that in my community yet, thank God, but it's coming.
And for too long we were the only game in town as public ed. And we didn't have to market or compete ourselves and that has changed.
And that's where I want to show you today some of what Craig's been up to in Sarasota. Craig, we tee up how you attack this and then we'll get into the particular pieces and tactics.
Craig Maniglia: Yeah, sure. Here in Sarasota County Schools, we're really no different than any other Florida district school in that we're constantly battling enrollment. Enrollment changes here are from a variety of reasons. Some kids just aren't being born anymore. There's a lot of data on that where we're actually shrinking the actual ability to even have kids come to school.
But the way we approached this was I looked at, if we have one hundred percent of the kids here, Sarasota had a seventy one percent market share of kids in our traditional public school. That basically meant that there was about twenty nine percent of kids someplace else, whether it was home, charter, private, what have you. So we decided that, well, we want to have more than seventy one percent. So I went to the superintendent and said, there are a couple of ways we can do this.
We can do like we did the year prior and just do an open enrollment campaign and just we'll pick up a few here and tell the good story about we're an A rated district and all that. Or we can do a traditional campaign that you might do in a political race, which is my background. And he said, Well, what does that look like? I said, Well, we have to compare.
We have to show the difference, but we not only have to show the difference, we have to show the difference keeping it simple. You can't show the difference that we have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and they have nothing, you know? So I said, We got to pick the top things. So we went with the top three ideas, two or three ideas, and then we made a variety of different spots kind of talking about those.
So we all know that we're losing kids at the middle school, so my decision was to try to gear this towards middle school families. So people leaving elementary headed away from middle school, and then they got to come back for high school, because there's really no alternative for high school. So I really want to show what the research shows us through, by the way, the Florida Department of Education, how far behind you are when you get back. So to do that in thirty seconds is tricky, but I seem to have a mastery of that through political campaigns and all kinds of stuff.
And what Greg's about to show you was- You ready for it?
Greg Turchetta: Let's fire it.
Craig Maniglia: Quite an unbelievable experience for our community.
Greg Turchetta: Here we go.
Video voiceover: Choices matter.
Students need academic opportunities. Families need community. Classrooms need accelerated pathways. In schools not managed by Sarasota County Schools, supports may be limited. Staffing and resources can differ from each charter and private school.
District managed public schools are built to respond with layered supports, certified teachers, and district accountability. When it matters most, the system matters. Say yes to SCS. I'm Terry Connor, and I approve this message.
Greg Turchetta: Your superintendent approved the message. Now be honest in the chat. How many of you watched that and went, woah. It's on the front edge. Right? I mean, Craig, you'd admit that was a political ad even with Terry saying, approve the message.
Craig Maniglia: Well, that was the whole point because, you know, when you're doing stuff like this, you really have to have unexpectedness to it, right? You have to shock people. You have to say, holy cow, what's going on? Now this was only one spot of five, but the other ones were quite edgy too.
There was two others that were quite edgy too, but the whole point was to wake up the community. Because what we found in research was even if you were at a parent that had your kids at a public charter school, you still think we're managing it. So it's like, no, we're not managing it. You don't have to have all these wraparound services and stuff.
So how do you tell that? So you just kind of wake people up. And the idea behind this was to get it out. We did broadcast.
We did streaming, but the big idea was get on social where we could have all these charter families start engaging, saying, oh, this is dirty. This is mudslinging. This is this. And it wakes up our school teachers and our people to say, hold it.
That's not, they're telling the truth. This is what we do. So we got a battle going on between the Sarasota County employee and the charter employee, and they just unravel all kinds of other things that we offer that they don't. And so in the end, the idea was to make awareness that it is not this apples for apples, it's basically grapes and tangerines.
I mean, you couldn't be farther a difference, but we both offer and kind of educate the people. And again, this was just the crazy thing here in Sarasota was we had, this is one of four campaigns I currently have to do right now, because we just launched four new K-8s converting K-5s. We have a brand new high school opening up. We have this choice window, and I got the magnet school that we just invented.
We basically shut down a middle school and made it a magnet, STEM magnet school. So it was really difficult time, but I'll tell you what, the numbers don't lie. We had a thirty four percent increase over last year, which in marketing terms, in this kind of a noisy market, a shrinking market is like, what?
Greg Turchetta: Incredible.
Craig Maniglia: And it really is.
Had, basically that could potentially mean four seventy eight students back to us, which is, you know, almost five million dollars worth of revenue.
And that's not just growth, that means you're gaining, and you're gaining in a noisy market that's shrinking, which is really hard to do.
What I can tell you is not every superintendent is gonna allow you to do that, but for all you comms people out there, if you're not at the table with the superintendent and you can't go in with research in your hand to show him or her what the possibilities are, you know, this campaign, now I got a grant for some money, but traditionally this campaign costs maybe twenty thousand dollars That's two students.
I got four seventy eight students coming in the door. So, you go cost per thousand, you kind of educate them on what this means. And I had a school board member talk to me about this because they were kind of upset because they may be on one side of the aisle of the other pro chart or whatever. And I said, let me explain it in layman's terms, ten students equals a teacher.
We lose ten students, we lose a teacher. And their response was, well, I never thought of it like that. I said, well, that's the only way I think of it because we need educators, we need to make a difference for our children, and we can't do that if we keep losing them. So that's kind of where we were with that, Greg.
Greg Turchetta: And the other part of this, obviously you guys can hear Craig's well versed in this, he spent a lot of time on the front line of this, but there's another lesson in this besides the math, and the math is everything. The other piece of this is you can hear from Craig. He has become more of a chief marketer slash chief enrollment marketing officer than a head of communications. Craig, is that fair?
Craig Maniglia: Yeah, I'd say that if you are a communications director, chief, if you're in charge of communications and you haven't made the switch to marketing, you're in big trouble. You really need to do that quickly because what's going to happen is over the course of the next three years, the market share is dwindling and you have to reach people on the level where they wanna be reached. So my motto has always been, fish where the fish are. We have all the fish, we have all the data, we have all the addresses, we have all the phone numbers.
We just gotta keep telling them, you know, and educating them. So yeah, marketing where maybe five years ago it was crisis communications and tell your good story and brag about yourself through your website and they'll come. Now it's like, you gotta go get them. You gotta bang them over the head, not in one direction, but like five, maybe six different directions.
I mean, social television, print, whatever it is, you just gotta keep telling your story. And the biggest thing you really have to address is the customer service at your buildings. So we're going through a thing with operational excellence here. We're retraining everybody how to be polite basically, because that first impression may be the last time you see that family, right?
And another way I teach our principals and our staff here, if you're at a grocery store and you hear someone bad mouthing a school, I'll branch it out and say, oh, I work for the school. What can I do for you? How can I help you get past this? You have to do that because now more than ever, each kid represents the possibility of losing a teacher if they go.
Yeah. Or even your job. We're cutting back here. We've cut ridiculous amounts of people out of Sarasota County.
In two years, we're looking at cutting last year and this year close to ninety million dollars in Sarasota County. Ninety million, that's like what? You know, but that's crazy.
Greg Turchetta: But those are the real effects of continuing to do business the way we've always done it. Not that you guys have but some districts are gonna feel that. Like there's the problem with educators has been we've been so used to getting beat up we just march with our head down and keep marching forward. Well unfortunately the rules have changed and we're marching into something that's gonna be a much bigger problem.
Like, we talk school choice. People talk about school choice and I mean, that's really what the enrollment conversation is, is parents have choice now. And are you a district of choice right now? Embrace that.
Embrace the choice. That's what Craig's doing, right? He's making the argument why they are the best choice and they're the number one choice no matter what's around them. So if there's three questions, you got to answer right away.
Do we showcase all the excellence happening in our schools every day? Enrollment marketing is really storytelling with a marketing branding twist to it. That's all. Are we marketing our schools as the parents first choice and students best choice?
Do we showcase our success on all platforms? Or unfortunately there's a lot of people you still work for who think kids are just going to show up. And we're starting to see that math is going the wrong way.
And here's the other piece of this. I asked Craig earlier when I was asking him about all these campaigns he's running, what did you take off your plate to do this? And his answer was nothing, Right? So, enrollment marketing has to find its way onto your plate.
Now, I would suggest the one place we do that is we move away from we spend way too much time telling parents how to do school. Right? All these messages on the screen. Baked sales, testing starts this.
National Teachers Awareness this. You know, every month we got recognitions we're doing. Not that they're not important, but nothing is more important than securing the financial base of the institution. So, we probably spend eighty percent of our time currently on process communications and we really got to spend more than the twenty percent left on brand and enrollment because we have to get parents why they should choose our schools alone.
I was doing a training earlier this morning for a district in Kansas and I had the principals in a room and I had this conversation with them. I said, tell me why I should choose your school. I work remotely. I have an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school student.
Tell me why I should choose your school. And what does every training from coast to coast that I've done this on starts with the same answer. We have a great family atmosphere. We have great teachers and staff.
All your schools do. That's not enough.
I need to know what makes you different.
So you also have to keep in mind parents want three things and Craig touched on many of these earlier. Safe schools. In middle school, those students are leaving because youth have a perceived bullying problem.
Middle school is a tough age. I had three kids go through middle school and I hate it every day of it.
But middle school, we have to talk about that we have safe schools, that we spent twenty million dollars hardening the building. We don't have to tell them what we did cause your safety guy is gonna go nuts, but we can talk about bullying. The average parent doesn't understand that bullying is a repetitive act. Once their kid's been harassed, once they want that other kid thrown out, right?
And if not, they pull their kids out. So we're gonna have to start being transparent about what we're doing to make these schools safe, including bullying. We're gonna have to be more transparent about why our academics are such a strong choice because on the front line of the enrollment battle is homeschooling. And if you really dig into that, you have parents who have come to the conclusion they can do the job better than your teachers.
Let that sink in for a second. How do you counter that argument? With all the supports and all the different programs that we have in a public K-twelve district, how do we get parents to see the full picture?
Craig Maniglia: Greg, I can tell you one way, you can do a commercial like we did and you can show them with a bar graph that if you are not in a traditional public school and you leave elementary, and then you come back at high school, if you are in a charter, private or homeschool atmosphere, you are going to start high school below grade point average.
And then the average student that comes from a public traditional school, or, you know, our core schools that you all work in and I work in, they start at or above grade point average. So what does that mean? That means you have a bar that goes like this as they come in. Three point zero is the beginning where you're supposed to start, and they're coming in at two point zero to two point five, and it grows like this because you can never catch up because the kids that came in high are gonna keep getting higher, the kids that came in low. So you show that and you say, it's your child's future.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah. Hey, Craig, Jessica asked the Florida Department of Education put that data together for you or you just pulled it from those sources?
Craig Maniglia: You have to go get it. You have to it's there. You have to find it. Now I have a pretty big, accountability, team here who we do our own record keeping, but all of it is validated through the Department of Education. And so that's why it's cited. Everything I put up is so important to cite because you have to have credibility, and it's really hard to argue when the Florida Department of Education, which does oversee charter schools, is cited.
Greg Turchetta: Jessica says she's in New York. Jessica, it's worth looking because listen, your district's putting together all these reports, right? There's accountability for everything. It's just a matter of finding who has that data and you might be the first person who's ever asked for it, which will be a red flag. Just know that going in.
Same thing when we get deeper into this presentation. If you're going to fix the enrollment problem, you need more data. And so data is at the crux of all of this. All right, I like to call this the enrollment marketing imperative.
To successfully reverse enrollment declines and compete with charter private and homeschool, we have to shift from that passive process communication to proactive data driven enrollment marketing. And I think Craig showed you an example of that. We must adopt a strategic approach that prioritizes your digital presence and authentic storytelling. What do I mean by that?
Your homepage cannot be designed for your current parents. It has to be designed for your future parents. And I'm gonna show you some great examples in a minute. And that authentic storytelling.
We have got to throw the classroom windows open and let all the excellence get out.
And so that starts with something called the unique value proposition. Anybody who's ever worked in business, every product has it, right? Every marketing plan centers on unique value proposition. Schools, we kind of haven't done that. And what is it like that example I used earlier when I asked the principals, what makes your school special? What makes your school different? Even the same nine elementary schools within your system have different talking points within them.
That could be specialized programs, could be K-eight offerings. Craig mentioned they're rolling out K-eight. Teacher excellence, diversity, superior facilities, extracurriculars. We have to craft emotionally powerful messaging.
That TV spot he showed you was powerful. It was emotional. It hinted at it and then it hit you over the head with it. But we can do student success stories the same way for free.
But infective enrollment marketing is authentic storytelling that showcases your unique value and solves for a family's deepest concerns about their children's education. And Craig just touched on that. I don't ever want my kid to be behind. If you're telling me if I make that choice my kid might be behind, that's really powerful core motivating value.
Okay, I want to show you a couple of examples, right? It's great to talk about it in theory but this is Socorro, Texas. Socorro, Texas is one of two districts in the country. Again, I work with districts across the I'm not Florida biased, I'm just watching Florida really closely because it's the front line but Texas is too and I just spent a week in Texas and I spent some time with Socorro.
Look across the bottom. This is just two boxes I pulled off their homepage. Dual Language Academy, free Pre K four ks, free college classes, advanced career and technical placement, award winning fine arts. Do you see how they are making an argument for every parent with a video box that you can click on and learn more, right?
This is in a highly competitive environment how you start marketing to people on your points of difference.
And here's why. You have to start with your story. We have to tell the story that are happening every day in our buildings but if we're not capturing and sharing them regularly, they may not as well exist. How many times have you taken somebody on a tour of a school and they went, Oh my God, I had no idea kindergarten kids could read.
I had no idea that high school kids are creating entrepreneurship businesses and entrepreneurship class. I didn't know that middle school kids are coding robots, right? That's on us. That's on us because we haven't put the system in place, the storytelling system to get all of that out because your vocal minority is gonna write your story for you and they've done a really good job for the last ten or twenty years especially as they started building charter schools.
But now we have to take that back.
So we have to meet families where they are. We also have this false assumption that well, parents Consumers act a certain way when they're buying a car, buying a house, booking travel, but then they act a completely different way when they deal with their schools. They shop the way they're gonna shop. And so what does that mean?
Online, social media, asking neighbors, visiting. Visiting in person is last. No one's gonna tour your school until they've somewhat made up their mind that it's viable or that it might even be preferable. Think about that.
And to Craig's point earlier with the customer service, the customer service becomes critical in this because they're gonna make their decisions based on who answered the phone or how fast somebody got back to them. What your website did or did not say, right? These decisions are made.
Your community retest to be proactive, not reactive. And data is a key part of that. Data transparency builds trust. Now we all produce a report when our school grades come out that we send to the media and we say nine out of sixteen schools tested above the state average which just says nine out of sixteen schools are above mediocre. Right? Those reports say nothing to parents.
Even in schools that are emerging, are transitioning from being a D on the come up to an A or you know, C, B, and A, They have amazing stories to tell about how their students are learning and how kids who came in in a fully remedial environment are now three grade levels higher on reading than they were at the start of the year. Tell that kid's story. That's what I want from my Yes.
Craig Maniglia: Let me tell you what I did here.
This was the second spot in this seven or eight spot trilogy we did, that same thing, except I showed them. I said A or B graded schools, Sarasota County Schools has ninety five percent, Other public schools in Sarasota County are seventy one percent. So it's like all of a sudden, now the numbers are a little different because we only had two schools that weren't A or B, but charters only had four because there's only fourteen charters here. But I thought the bigger number was seventy one percent because that's C, people think of it as C then.
And so that spot blew up too. And I was remiss to say this, know, seeing is believing, but you have to see it in different avenues. You see it on TV, you see it on social media, you see it in the newspaper because they run these in the Herald Tribune or whatever, but these spots on social media had two hundred and ninety five thousand impressions and garnered three fifty clicks to our enrollment page. Okay?
And that was with a two point one three frequency being seen in these households. That means every household saw the spot at least two times with a ninety nine point three percent completion rate. Those are numbers that I tell these people here all the time. I say, if I gave you a report and I was doing a political campaign, I'd be expecting like a two hundred thousand dollars bonus.
Because these numbers are, they're not, they don't compute in a school realm, but that just shows you how much people are paying attention to where they send their So what he's saying, tell your story, but tell your story in a comparative fashion, right? So you can still tell the good story, but you always compare to what you have and they don't.
Greg Turchetta: Exactly.
Craig Maniglia: And then you're killing two birds with one stone.
Greg Turchetta: Craig wants to know how long did you let one ad run before you started the next one?
Craig Maniglia: What I did is I did a rotating thing, so I bought blocks of time, and so I bought the whole month, and I had four different campaigns running, so I would just shuffle them in and out. And I did two types of ads. I did broadcast, and then I did streaming. So my streaming, I can actually put that down to a zip code.
So where I had my K-eight, I put these K-eight spots into the K-eight zip codes, and where I was trying to go after charter families, you know, the whole state, my whole county, I hit all of those. And I even hit counties across the border with some spots, know, to try to pull them because I can narrow down and I'm talking pennies per thousand, right? I'm not talking a lot of money. I'm talking when I can do for one campaign, dollars two thousand five hundred for one hundred and eighty thousand impressions is what they give you.
And I can zero in that zip code to only families with school age children. And I can go to my superintendent and say, for two pennies, would you not wanna reach every person that's out of charter school? Well, of course I would. Well, okay, then let me fly.
Greg Turchetta: Then Craig, he has another question. Did you use local media for streaming or a national vendor?
Craig Maniglia: I used a national vendor. Okay. So and they're local here, but they're nationals. Great media. They're they're pretty they're, like, one of top in the country, and and they're the you know, I've done them here. A lot of the people here in Florida have called me, so I've turned them on the same group here to Seminole, to Brevard, and they're all signing up because for two thousand five hundred dollars to do a one month campaign is nuts.
Greg Turchetta: Okay, so you just went into Kirsten's question, which was what was your budget for television marketing?
Craig Maniglia: Okay, so last year it was two thousand five hundred dollars this year I blew it up because I got a grant. I was able to go out and find a grant on how I could do this.
So it looks like it's gonna be about thirty four thousand dollars Well, for television marketing, it's gonna be about twenty four thousand, but for the entire campaign with the print, the mailers, everything else, it was about thirty four thousand dollars So we're basically talking to three and a half kids.
Greg Turchetta: Well, I'm sure somebody's gonna put this question to next. Where did you find the grant?
Craig Maniglia: Well, I got it on a webinar. I was speaking just like this and one of the co hosts said, well, there's, you know, she was from North Carolina. She goes, well, we're using this grant. And of course my ear perked up.
So I, Stronger Connections grant. So I wrote it down. As soon as that webinar call, I called our grant director and I said, I need to get into the Stronger Connection grant. Where is it?
And they said, well, we already have it.
Greg Turchetta: Oh wow.
Craig Maniglia: And I said, well, I need an addendum written because I know this works and they wrote it and they got approved and I got the balance of the money. So it's much more than that because they're not gonna spend it all in our school district. So now I have to spend it all. What that grant goes for, any kind of print, any kind of translations, any kind of, covers a lot. So I wrote this addendum really big so I could start moving some money that I had previously spent on things out of this grant and refunding some of my dollars that came out of the general fund.
Plus I also sell ads. I have a monthly magazine that goes out where I sell ads and I also, that's growing really big.
That's going to be over one hundred thousand dollars a year just in revenue that is mine only to do for marketing.
Greg Turchetta: Craig, I don't know if you know the answer to this one, but can you use Stronger Connections grant money for HR recruitment for teachers?
Craig Maniglia: You can do it if you are doing it as you're trying to improve student outcomes. So if you notice how I did these spots, they're all talking about engaging community, engaging student outcomes, you know, and then we need, we need to have certified teachers to do that. So you have to be a little creative. Don't know the, all the benefits I wrote it specifically to do my need here.
That grant ends at the end of this year and then I gotta go find another one. So I'll be looking.
Greg Turchetta: But if you wrote it in that direction, Kirsten, you'd probably, you'd find out if you get accepted or denied for sure.
Craig Maniglia: Have your grant people do it because they're professionals at it, you know.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, so if you don't have thirty four thousand dollars let's talk about how you do this for free.
Again, staying in Florida, think Socorro, Texas, Sarasota, what Craig's up to, and now Duval County, Florida has in my opinion the number one recruitment website in the country and they built it that way. And this is a whole webinar unto itself but I just want to highlight it real quick. If you go to Duval there's Matt. Thank you, Matt.
Matt, you chime in if I miss anything. If you go to Duval County's homepage and you scroll all the way down, this is a tour de force of reasons why you should choose Duval Schools. So, are just four boxes on their homepage I grabbed. The Duval Schools difference, right?
It's right there, here we come. They're an A rated school district. That happened very opportune as they were launching this. The A came and it was a great lift to go with it.
But Duval County Public Schools at a glance, here's most of you have something that looks like that. Here's what you don't have. A more reasons box. They got a more reasons to choose their schools box and they just keep pouring it on.
And as you scroll through this home page, you will see exactly what Matt and Tracy down in Duvall and their team have built, which is Craig was alluding to earlier about you need to be in enrollment marketing. Duvall has actually gone a step further. They've split their comms team and created an enrollment marketing team. And Matt, who's on here, I have a case study that I'm hoping to publish soon but Matt had a quote that I love which is, and correct me Matt if I get it wrong, you don't buy the district, you buy one of the one hundred and fifty schools.
Right? So each of their schools is getting a marketing campaign and that is how you have to drill down on this, right? But rebuilding your homepage, you already have a homepage. This doesn't take fifty grand to do.
It's a commitment to it and when they rolled it out, Tracy met with their PTOs and their school staff and said listen, this isn't for parents. This is for recruitment. We're We're gonna move things around and we're gonna have our parents and students find information in other places that they're not accustomed to because this is what we have to do. And they're still in the data collection process but there's certainly early signs that this is a win but I highly encourage you to go look at this because they are really on the front edge of what's going on because in Florida you have to be.
So here's the questions we ask too often: How can we get more students to enroll and how do we retain our current students?
When really there's five questions we really should be asking. What are we doing to make families aware of our schools? Yes, there are families that are not aware that public schools exist. They may know there's a community school but they do not know what makes it great.
What are we doing to make families interested in our schools? What are we doing to make it easy for families to decide we're the best choice? That's for recruiting. Question four and five is Retainment.
What are we doing to retain families once they enroll in our schools? And then probably even more important, how do we get them to turn into long term advocates that really when they're stopped in the grocery store or their new neighbor moves in and asks them about the local middle school, you get a positive reflection from that.
That's what the five phases of marketing are. So we're gonna go through this kind of quickly because like I said, you can go to the magazine and read all about it. But what this is, is what Fortune five hundred companies use every day. It's a sales funnel.
It's all it is.
Five steps: awareness, interest, decision, retention, and advocacy.
And each of these has to have a different piece of the marketing component put to it.
So awareness, you just got to get them aware. They're often not yet shopping around but they look to make a final decision. Get in front of prospective families' eyes through all their touch points and there's so many touch points.
There's examples of what it might look like, right? Nothing earth shattering there. The interest phase. They're now actively comparing schools to find the best fit. They still haven't reached out to your school. They're doing this through online social media.
This open house is showcasing student stories. Obviously peer to peer marketing is a huge piece of this and it can be done at the school level for free.
I want to show you one thing. Decision phase families are deciding to enroll their child in your district but haven't submitted their form even yet.
We need the enrollment experience to be seamless and easy as possible. Alright, so I have another presentation I'm going give you the top three highlights out of right now. It's brand new. One, we to stop defending and start defining who we are.
That's kind of what we've been talking about, right? Then we've got to put storytelling systems in place that prove that. It's one thing to make a brand statement. It's one thing to make a marketing claim.
It's another when you start putting hundreds of pieces of content on your social media and website that prove it.
And then the third piece is we have to create an enrollment experience.
Now not registration, there's a physical act to register for school, but throughout the year how do we create an enrollment experience to make sure that when somebody picks up the phone and calls the school they get a positive customer service response?
That's what we're talking about here.
Web pages. I can't tell you how many districts I meet with on any given week who do not have an enroll here or enroll today or enroll now button on their home page. This is a charter school that has two of them above the fold. This is also a charter school in Colorado that has a waiting list.
There's a direct correlation between when you make the argument and whether or not people can show up.
I want to show you one more example here. This one. I love this. This is cheap. It's absolutely free, but it's such a paradigm shift. The chess team never gets highlighted.
If you have chess teams and you have some version of it, you have a robotics team, you have all of these, look how cool this image is. We do this for the football team. Why don't we do it for the chess team? Because when it comes to the students you're trying to recruit and retain, it's the chess team you need too. These are the kids keeping your school grades up.
Right? Just so simple that this district did that.
Okay, advocacy phase. We want parents out there saying great things about us. Yes, we have people that jump on social media and argue for us but we want more people making the argument to choose us.
So let's get to the part where now with twenty five minutes left, this is the part where I think the rubber meets the road. Craig's already showed you some great examples of how to build a district of choice through enrollment marketing. I want to talk to you about if you're sitting back going, Yeah, Houston, I have a problem. Where do I start?
You start with a plan and trust, right? You're sitting in your chairs because your superintendent trusts you. But do they trust you enough to take money from the classroom and spend it on enrollment marketing? Now it doesn't have to come from the classroom, but that's going to be the first objection.
Oh, Oh, we can't spend money on marketing, people are gonna think it came from the classroom. No, not necessarily, but we have to make a more educated argument. And that argument starts with research, whether it's research in the grants, but really in my last district, had this exact scenario happen.
The CFO was sitting, it was June, just a random June cabinet meeting, and the CFO just kind of under his breath said to the meeting, we're projecting to be down four thousand students for the upcoming academic year. And the superintendent's neck snapped like whiplash and said, that's like thirty million dollars and he said, you're correct ma'am. And then she looked at me and said, I need a marketing campaign in the next eight weeks to get these kids back. Now that's worst case scenario because we know that ain't gonna happen.
But that's the reality when it hits the ground. You have to understand why are students leaving. So the first thing I wanted was data. I could assume certain schools were probably bleeding off students but when I got the data, it was across the board and the highest performing schools were losing some of their highest performing kids.
It had nothing to do with the quality of the school. It just hadn't been for some reason they went somewhere else. So you need to do that research. You need to become best friends with whoever sees enrollment now.
Again, they're probably registrars or registration people and you're gonna come in and be like, hey, I'm gonna do some more marketing and try to help turn our enrollment problem around. I need your help. You're really gonna take it over but you're gonna ask him for help in getting the data first because like Craig doesn't do what Craig does without taking this thing over. Right, Craig?
Craig Maniglia: That's right. You have to take it over and you really have to have buy in from your leadership. And once you have that and you can run, and then the way I look at our communication staff here is I tell my people almost every Monday, we are an outside vendor to the district. That's the way you have to look at us.
We are the marketing arm. They hired us to do this. We're not here to please the elementary school principal, all that. We're here to change, make change agents.
So we come across, our client is the superintendent and the school board really, but the superintendent. And we look at ourselves as if they're paying us. And if we mess up, they're gonna let us go. Yeah.
So let's make sure we do this right.
Greg Turchetta: Craig, how large is your comms team?
Craig Maniglia: It's kinda weird because I also run government affairs. So I really only have about four people working in comms. I have two producers, you know, editors and producers, and I have marketing manager myself, and I have one graphics person who works district wide, another one that works our college that we have. And then I have government affairs people in AA, and I have a PIO who deals directly with media. And then I have a broadcast engineer who runs our school board meetings and So while it's an eleven person team, it really only has like four people that really thrive in this area. The website has its own group of people, one guy really, who runs our website, and that's about it.
Greg Turchetta: Look, a couple of people have chimed in department of one. Let me give you advice here.
If you take anything from this webinar today, hopefully you'd go back and say enrollment marketing is the number one issue facing every school district. Because even if you're currently flat in enrollment, the problem's coming.
And so the first thing is getting your superintendent to see the issue and the math is the issue. So then I ask you as a Department of One, what are you doing that's more important than keeping the organization afloat? Because that's really what we're talking about. If three hundred kids leave your thousand student or two thousand student district, you have a major problem and the rest of social media and newsletters and annual reports don't matter.
So you have to get your leadership team to see there's a red light going off right now. Craig and I are standing here like firefighters telling you the red lights going off. You have to get everybody in your organization to realize it's the only thing you should be focused on right now. If there's time to do other things, we'll do them.
But getting people to understand and then getting your army of people around you to help tell these stories is the path forward. So you have to be the coach that's kind of leading this effort. Your principal is gonna have to help you at the building level because they're gonna have to get more content out and they're gonna have to have their schools backing this up.
And that's the challenge.
So here's the other thing, departments are going have to get involved with this. You're going to need help from other departments that are currently over it and there's already enrollment marketing being done outside your department. Somebody in student services in the registration area is spending money on postcards. They're spending money on events to do enrollment.
That needs to come back to you as the expert. You as the comms expert can pull all that together, create a little cadre of a budget and then get the superintendent to empower you. So this is part of having to have a seat at the table as Craig said earlier, but then you've got to go up and say, listen, I want to lead this because I realize it's the most important thing we have going on and I'm uniquely qualified to do it because this is a comms campaign, that's what this is. And then I need to be deputized to bring in a task force.
Right? That was one thing Duval did. They used a task force. I think it's a great term because now everybody understands it's a district priority. Once it becomes—
Craig Maniglia: Greg, even more than that, I hate to cut you off, but even more than that, you do need to reach out to other departments because that's where a lot of the information lays as part of your research.
So here in our planning, not only do I have the address of every charter school family, I have their email address, I have their phone number, I have I have every homeschool kid. I have wherever they are because they it's part of planning. We have to have that information. They have to report.
So then when I did my six thousand six hundred mailers, I could mail brochure, a beautiful glossy magazine style brochure of the school they're districted to saying, have you been here lately? And from the superintendent, I invite you to take a tour with our principal here, call him, he's ready to act. And we sent that out. You wouldn't believe the response when you get a letter from the superintendent to your house, addressing you to call this school that is down the street from you and see what's different with this glossy thing of all the programs they offer.
Greg Turchetta: People are like, oh, I It's a private school mentality.
Craig Maniglia: They say, didn't know I could do that. And that private school will able to get really angry. How dare you? It's like, what do you mean how dare you? You've been doing this for years. We just didn't care.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah. And Jessica, I love what you said. They've had luck tying it to their strategic plan and having teachers posting the thrill share. There was a rotation to classrooms, big hit on social, everyone sees the value.
Strategic plan's a great point of this. You know, I, as a former comm chief, I feel you. If it's in the plan, people will do it. But if the superintendent gets up and says, we're going to be cutting millions of dollars in positions if we don't fix this problem, should get everybody's attention too.
All Alright, let's keep rolling. Time to build your plan. If you need a plan like Craig has, can call and ask him to send it to you, but it's gonna be a little bigger and you might want to start locally and then ask for help. But we have top eight enrollment strategies for twenty twenty five. They're the same for twenty twenty six. Nothing's changed.
But here's the list, you know, meet people where they are, take advantage of social media, go all in on email marketing. All these things are free. It's just staff time, right? Run targeted ads online, there's an expense to that. Take advantage of video marketing, video, video, video.
The most powerful video you can produce right now is talking to families that have left your system but came back and letting them say in their own words why.
That's it. That's the ballgame. Let them make the argument that you're better, not you don't have to do it yourself.
Magnify your in person events on social media. I can't get to all these in person events but what was the point that you were trying to portray in person? Can you portray that on social?
Social has to be student and staff success stories, right? That's what we've got to push because that's what will move the needle more than National Bus Driver Appreciation Week. I get it's important but it's not as important as getting students in the building.
And then realize the power of events. People still want to come in touch it, taste it, feel it.
Okay, now you got a picture plan, right? Craig didn't just run out and do this.
You got to demonstrate your research. You are the marketing expert. Your superintendent is not and you're gonna have to show your work. What do I mean by that?
Remind leadership, it's not about what we like or what they like, it's what's gonna resonate with the parents in the community. So that's why your research is vital. You have to have all the evidence to demonstrate why your plan will work. Much like Craig said earlier, if I get four hundred students back at nine thousand dollars a student, there's the math.
There's the ballgame folks and it is about money. Ensure you explain how your marketing, whether it's investment or free. I would make the argument you could start this for absolute free, you just need to have a complete priority shift and help from other departments to bring together a group of people to do this. So don't let money hold you back.
Either way we got to do it. And then once we get it going and it starts to work, that proof of concept then could be funded.
You need to know how much acquisition costs to get an application or get a student enrolled at one of your schools. How many students does it take to hit your budget goal? What's your current budget shortfall and how many students do we need to gain back to hit that number? That's where you start the conversation and that should get everybody at cabinet level's attention.
And where are these students going come from? I think you heard Craig allude to it earlier that he's been very intentional about figuring out where these kids are going to come from. This isn't throwing fifty thousand dollars into the internet. This is being strategic and going after certain pockets and populations where you think you can move the needle. That should all be in your plan.
Now, here's something again you can do for free. Your homepage has to be aimed at recruitment. If I look at your homepage and by the time I get to the bottom of it, I'm not talking about it the way I'm talking about Duval County's page, it's not making an argument.
It should get me to want to sign up. It should get me to want to enroll on its own. I don't need to know about the next board meeting. Yes, all that stuff's important but the school board has their own page.
This takes a district perspective view that we are going to use this homepage as a recruitment tool because visitors spend fifty percent of their time above the fold and you get one and a half clicks.
I can't tell you how many websites I've critiqued going through people before they become clients, then in one and a half clicks I can't even find the enrollment button. That's a fail.
Here's six more that we haven't talked about, some I've talked about, but if you want to admire and inquire how to do enrollment marketing, look at any one of these districts.
I spent a lot of time doing case studies with all of them. I spent a lot of time working with them. My goal is to take their best practices and all and infuse them into what we're doing and hopefully you feel that today. But these are the origin stories of this.
Like this one right here, Klein ISD. Reason fifty one, sixty three, thirty two why I should choose in the student's own voice. This is on their home page. It's powerful.
Here's a stupid little fun fact I didn't learn until a couple weeks ago when I co presented with their executive director which is they don't have sixty three reasons. They only had six but their goal was to make it feel like there was FOMO like, oh my god, what was reason sixty two? I've got to know and it really worked. Parents started looking across social media to find more of the reasons.
They want to hear kids talk about why it's great.
Here's another one, Humble ISD in Texas. This is what an open enrollment marketing message should look like. Look at the check marks. Safe and secure, right there.
Immersive play because we've got parents in elementary school that are more concerned about play than academics in kindergarten and they may not be right or wrong. I don't know. Innovative programs. Top ten best school districts in America according to Niche, right?
We're bragging. They're gonna ignite, inspire and grow. Limited open enrollment. They're creating urgency. This is free.
This is actually a postcard they ended up sending out. It was also an email but powerful. This is how we do it.
Alright, think like your audience. I mean, I can't tell you how many times when you filled out a job application, I mean our districts are notorious for this. It's just a wall of a form and it's so hard to get through and if you don't get it right, you have all this red you gotta go back and fix. And I speak English as a native speaker. I can't imagine some of our families that are coming in with English as a second language trying to navigate how to register their children. It's too hard. It's got to be H and R Block simple.
Fill this out, green box, next box, right? That's all we want.
Make information easy to find and understand. Optimizing your forms is what I'm talking about. You need to keep connecting with interested families. Recruitment a twelve month process.
Think about this. Somebody explained this to me a couple weeks ago and I was like, this is so true. Even if a family wants to be in your district, from the time they apply for school choice till the time the decision is made can be months. What are we dripping message wise, content wise to them to keep them excited about their choice and let them know we're still in the middle of that decision.
That's how you hold the funnel the whole way through.
So we've got that. I want to take you to Denver real quick because I think my buddy Bill Good out there is doing some amazing work when it comes to this. Denver Public Schools is one hundred percent school choice.
A ninety thousand student district, one hundred percent school choice. Doesn't that already give it some prestige when I say that? They didn't stop there. They're actually running an enrollment marketing campaign that says, see how it says Denver prestigious schools?
They took the public out and they keep replacing it with P words. Prestigious. I'm blanking on the rest of them. But that's part of their brand campaign.
But then below this, each of these boxes on their homepage has a video story attached to it.
Redefining prestige. How Alan and Mitch Empower CEC Students to Explore Storytelling Through Film. I'm going to click on this just because I want to know what Prestige and what's going on. This has been hugely effective for Denver.
In their first year they're already seeing much like Craig was talking about his school choice numbers. They're going school by school like Duvall and they're seeing early results on this because same thing but they spent a quarter million dollars on a campaign. Now again, what I'm showing you right here is free. You can do this on your homepage.
But they and their superintendent went all in and said we have got to fix this enrollment problem. So this is what the aggressive districts are doing to try to get ahead of the problem and they're finding results.
Here's the other one, passionate, right? Passionate teaching powerful results inside Cheryl Cordova's classroom. You could go tell that story today and put it on your homepage. Passionate teaching, powerful results is a great brand statement. It's a great enrollment marketing statement but man, aren't you gonna click on this to see what Cheryl's up to?
I mean, that's the point, right?
How great question, Kirsten. What if you're not in a top performing school district? Okay, I left a district like this that was the exact same problem. I went to my superintendent and I said, what can I brag about? Because all the testing data was going the wrong way. All the things that you're talking about, Kirsten. There is always something to brag about, right?
If you want to make it real easy, do what I call a principal walk. Call the principals at one of your lowest performing schools that has the greatest challenges in that urban environment say, I'm coming over Wednesday at nine am, I want to walk to school with you. And the principal will say, Why? You say, I just want to walk through and see what amazing things you have going on. And when you walk the hall with the principal and you'll start hearing the things no one calls you about and says, Oh my God, Kirsten, got to come tell this story. Right? That doesn't work that way.
But then you just take a quick picture of it and you post it and you show the school leaders how easy it is to do that because they see everything but it all becomes normal to them. They don't know it's extraordinary.
And that's where you have start doing that because then you're doing two things. One, you're showing them what's brand enrollment marketing storytelling looks like. But two, by you making the time to go to do that, you're showing the importance of this. That I took an hour out of my day just to come do this at your school and I'm going to the next school over and the next school over next week. Right? So part of this is demonstrating how it should look.
But this is where it comes back to, it has to be an overall district thing. You need your superintendent to stand in front of a staff meeting of principals, even in the principal meeting, start there. I told one of my former superintendents, I've done this at many districts where I've come in and done this and the first thing I have to do is have the superintendent stand up and bless it. And what do I mean by that? The superintendent has to stand up and say, we are going to be bold in telling our story. We are no longer going to let the vocal minority tell our story for us. We are going to correct misinformation and we're going to let this Community know the value that we bring and why their kids should be here.
I need your help. I need your help to do that. Sure the comms team's gonna do it but it's comms teams of one. So now the principals know, oh man, the superintendent said this is priority number two behind academics which is what it needs to be.
Okay, now we're all gonna have to do it. And now the machine gets moving and now you just have to teach them how to do it. In my current role at Apptegy, spend a lot of time on this. We sell people tools but then I come behind them and go, okay, now what does that look like from a strategy point of view?
How do we actually go get the content and bring it back and put it in place and start making these campaigns or just this storytelling push work? And that's the point. So that was a great question, Kirsten.
Okay, we're wrapping up. If anybody else has any other questions, if you want any more information on the customer journey enrollment marketing or how to build a school enrollment page, you can either take these QR codes or my buddy, Barrett, will send it out.
You'll send out the whole presentation. He's great at putting links into many of the things I just referenced that's going on in there. But listen, I'm here if you need a resource. Craig's here if you need a resource.
My email is greg.turchetta@apptegy.com. Like I said, I work with districts. I worked with three different districts already this week on here's what we do to start turning this corner because a lot of this is psychological.
A lot of this is it has to be a superintendent priority, it has to be your priority and then everybody else has to see, oh this is an immovable object because it's now basically in the strategic plan without being in it. And then the school board is gonna get behind it because the school board is the one that are gonna have to do the following and I'll leave you with this.
Today we're losing a student. Tomorrow we're gonna lose a teacher and next month we're gonna close a school. And if you haven't had to close a school, I've been watching this happening all around where I live. This district I live in just closed seven elementary schools, seven.
And the messaging was horrible. They did a great job.
Awesome. Kirsten, call me. We'll help you with that. But you don't want to get to the point that you're closing schools, right? What Craig's doing, and Craig, I'll give you the final word, proactive versus reactive.
Craig Maniglia: Absolutely, if you are sitting back, you're lost the race, so you have to go out and be in the front. You have to lead, but I'll remind you of one thing. This is probably the most powerful thing your client has, your customers, your parents. So every time you're messaging, you're putting something out, you really want to go to a QR code to drive them back to what you're talking about.
So like all of our ads, a QR code on TV, nobody watching TV is ever more than three feet away from their phone. If they see something they like, they snap it and then bam, right on their phone, they've got it and they start looking. And I learned that in a ABC seminar, a gray advertiser, I was like, oh my God, how simple is that? Just throw the QR code and drive them back.
So it's not easy, I will tell you that, but if you have multiple, if you have one person, you have five people, you have ten people, the more you can co mix the messages. So everything should always be enrollment, but it doesn't mean you have to stop communicating your good stories, just tie them to enrollment. Let the kid tell the story, have a parent tell the story, but it's all about enrollment. And you're coming back, say yes, like a catchy tagline, say yes to SES, you know?
And that's what you just keep drilling people. I was at a FADS conference last year with the superintendent, he was getting an award that I got for him for ridiculous. I'm sitting there and I'm writing in a commercial that we're getting ready to do. And he's sitting next to me, and I go, What do you think of this?
He reads it, he goes, Say yes to SES, that's genius. And I was just sitting there on my lap and he said, Well, that's our new tagline. I'm getting ready to put this spot out. He looked at it, he's like, okay, let's go.
So it's just going with your gut, getting your superintendent to believe in you. And once you do a few things, then they give you the keys to the castle and they just stay out of your way. I promise you that because they don't know how to do it. They just don't.
Greg Turchetta: They need it done.
Craig Maniglia: Just' don't know how to do it.
Greg Turchetta: You've already cut ninety million dollars and you're turning the corner, but there could still be more cuts to come if this doesn't work.
Craig Maniglia: Well, and whether or not our fallacies weren't necessarily, ours were past reasons for spending dollars that shouldn't have been spent. So you're using non reoccurring funding that may have come from ESSER on reoccurring expenditures. So eventually you have to hit that ESSER cliff and get rid of those things. So a lot of our things had to do with that.
At any rate, regardless, we had to right the ship. We're not in any kind of financial trouble here. We just had that much fat, believe it or not, you know? So it was like, wow, you had that much money and you know.
Greg Turchetta: But the districts around you in a couple of years won't be optional.
Craig Maniglia: No. Won't be a choice. Remember your tagline choice. We believe in choice. We're just the best choice.
Greg Turchetta: Amen to that. Here's the other thing. You mentioned choose SES. I'm a big fan of putting success after anything. Know, hashtags are kind of a passe thing now, but my districts, if it ends in an S and you can say blah, blah, blah S success, and you just tag every social media post with that success, you're just continuing to hammer that we're successful.
Craig Maniglia: Right, and again, just make sure when you're putting your stuff out there that it is limited. Don't try to sell them the whole kitchen sink, the whole everything.
Be deliberate in what you're trying to do with two, three points and then multitell it across all kinds of platforms.
It works. If you can get kids to tell the story, you're way ahead of the curve. Yeah. Parents watch kids.
Greg Turchetta: Alright. We got four minutes left before we check out here. Anybody have any other questions? It's this is the lightning round. Throw them in the chat.
Pick Craig's brain while you got them. Thank you, Craig, for taking the hour out of your day to do this. Craig didn't know until late last week when he and I were having a conversation about how well his campaign was working, and I said, I need you on Tuesday to come spread this word. Well So thank you for doing it.
Craig Maniglia: Glad to do it.
Greg Turchetta: All right, my last word to everybody will be, he's talked a lot about websites and driving people back to websites and homepages and all this. If you don't have an AI chat box on your homepage, you are lost because right now we're seeing ridiculous numbers with people coming in there because people don't want to navigate. They don't want to find, they want to ask. If you go to the Google page, you don't start navigating through Google.
You ask it a question. You go to ChatGPT, ask it a question. So you really need to start thinking how you're gonna move, because it is not a great thing for Apptegy, but I've been talking with their CEO and a lot of their developers over the last two years. I don't think there's gonna be a big website presence coming forward in two to three years.
I think it's gonna be Google. You're gonna get a sheet that says Sarasota County Schools, boom, what's your question?
Craig Maniglia: And you have to have a backend website that's nice and pretty that drives them to it, but you really gotta embrace that AI chat on your website.
Greg Turchetta: Right, lightning questions. Here we go. You ready? How often should we post to social? Every day, every other day? I say content quality over quantity.
Craig Maniglia: Yep. You gotta do at least three posts a day.
Greg Turchetta: Awesome. Eric wants to know if we're gonna share the video. Yep. We're gonna share all the links when Barrett sends out the presentation. We'll get the other links from Craig that we didn't show you so you can see all of the spots.
Craig Maniglia: Well, if you just go to my website, he's not on my website, if you just go to follow us on social media and just look at it, all of them are right there in a row. There's like five of them, you know?
Greg Turchetta: Wants to know thoughts on targeted videos for school choice, whether it be targeted at parents, students, teachers.
Craig Maniglia: We went after parents because they're the heartstrings, they're the ones making the decision. So you have to tie it to children, but your focus is the parent.
Greg Turchetta: So you're tying to their success, the child's success, and you don't want the parent to be the reason for the failure.
Aren't you really saying moms?
Craig Maniglia: Not necessarily, not anymore. At one point you were, not anymore. I think the dads are the most vocal because they're the most competitive.
And when you hit this competitive nature of your kids behind, it strikes a nerve.
I have five daughters and I'm not saying that the women aren't competitive because they'll rip my head off in any sport or anything I do. However, men just tend to get a little more angry at facts and they want to challenge them. And that's what you want. You want them to challenge the facts that they can't prove wrong and then you win.
Greg Turchetta: Game over.
Greg had another couple, lots of schools, small comms teams, how should we proceed?
You've got to deputize your schools to help tell the story too, right?
Craig Maniglia: Yeah, and Collier County, my counterpart down there, he's basically given the ability for every teacher to put stuff out on social media every day. And whether that's good or bad, I don't really like that. I can't control it here, but I don't really throw that out, but in a very small district, you really got to empower those people and get yourself some student ambassadors and get yourself some teacher ambassadors, people you can trust that they're not going to, you know, say the wrong thing because here in Sarasota, you say the wrong thing. You're on this transparency page. You're on every page in the world. You know, it's crazy. So, empower your students if you can.
Greg Turchetta: Here's the thing, Greg, too. The product you're using, right? Not to talk a lot about product, but at Apptegy, have an approval function built into our alert tool. You can give people permission to create content, but it comes through an approval process. The the story Craig's telling in Collier, I'm the guy that created that back in twenty fourteen.
I built that because a tool like that didn't exist back then and we had to have something. But now as a Department of One, if you're not using the tool with an approval function, and let me give you two districts to check out on that. One is Saginaw ISD in Michigan and the other is Anne Arundel in Maryland. Saginaw is a smaller district.
Anne Arundel is a huge district. They're both doing this thing called Our Story. Saginaw has seven hundred employees a month posting into their live feed and social media, giving them content that their comms chief can then say yes, no, hold, right? That's now you're in the curation business and now you're up.
Craig Maniglia: There's an statement in broadcast, content is king. If you have content, you win the battle. That was National Geographic and Discovery Channels we were launching that we needed content.
Greg Turchetta: Isn't that the same thing though for politics?
Craig Maniglia: It's the same thing. Content is well, compare the facts.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah. No, Kirsten, take the curation idea. I'm telling you, go to our website. It's called collective authorship or shared storytelling if you want to learn more about it.
I will be happy to walk you through that.
The other one was Anne Arundel, Maryland. They're a hundred thousand student district. They've been doing this for about nine months and they're really rolling with it.
There's other districts that are doing it, but Saginaw trademarked the Our Story and then Anne Arundel is doing the same trademarked Our Story. But we as a company call it shared storytelling. Just putting the power of storytelling in the hands of the people closest to the classroom to tell it.
Craig Maniglia: One thing, I'll go back to your social media ideas too, is when you are putting out a social media post, if you're in two way com columns, which is imperative, you have to have two way columns here, but if you're putting out social media, you have to have someone dedicated to answer the questions. And if you're not updating three posts a day, you know, minimum six, seven posts a week, it's old data. So then all of a sudden people think you're not updating, they don't follow you anymore, they don't care, you lose them. So that's why you refresh all the time and someone will put in, well, is this like the seventy one percent, is that the whole nation or is that just Sarasota?
And that gives you another opportunity to say, no, and here's the link to the data. It's like, Oh my God. So you strike them over the head again, and then all your teachers go, Oh my God, that's incredible. We had no idea we were that good.
So you're winning with other people battling your argument just by throwing the net out there.
Greg Turchetta: And that's why you gotta be in the game.
Craig Maniglia: Yeah.
Greg Turchetta: Alright. Awesome. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for those of us who still hung with us.
Like I said, if you need any follow-up, you have questions, email us. Love to keep the conversation going. Thank you for your time today. Thank you, Craig.
Craig Maniglia: Thank you, Barrett. Everybody, have a great day.
Greg Turcehtta: Bye bye.