Data from the National Association of Independent Schools found the average private K-12 school saw a 7.9-percent attrition rate over the 2022-23 academic year. Student turnover is a major source of concern as competition increases and families feel the impact of inflation – so how do schools increase their retention rate amid these uncertainties?
Every single touchpoint with every individual family contributes to their overall experience with your school. To understand what your families desire, periodic feedback helps quantify what your team does right and how it can communicate better.
We’ll go over the questions you can ask to best understand family attitudes and create actionable strategies.
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Set Communication Preferences
Families vary in how hands-on they are with their children’s education. To ensure your communication frequency hits the sweet spot, it’s necessary to first understand what too little and too much information looks like.
Send too few updates, and you will anger families who wish to understand the day-to-day impact of your school’s teaching. Very invested parents especially will want continuous updates on classroom performance, upcoming events, student behavior, and extracurricular opportunities.
On the other hand, overcommunicating can result in fatigue, where parents wish to tune out messages they believe are irrelevant. Consequently, they risk missing out on important messages that would enhance their experience with your school.
Find where the balance lies for each family with the following question.
How often would you like to receive updates about classroom activities, events, and your child’s development?
You can also give families an option in the email navigation bar to set their own preferences. Provide a range of options from minimal (e.g., emergency only) to the full suite of communications. The more specifically you can list each option, the more accurately you can meet family expectations.
Know When to Communicate
Families have varying schedules, often in conflict with each other. With most parents juggling work and the responsibilities or raising multiple kids, there leaves little time to properly attend to school alerts. Understand which platforms are most convenient and what times recipients will actually read your communications.
To gain the most engagement from families, understand where they spend the most time checking messages. Do they check email habitually, or do they prefer text and only check email once a day? Do they prefer an old-fashioned phone call? Know where to send your messages in the first place with a question like this:
How do you prefer to receive updates about your child’s progress (email, text, phone call, in-person meeting)?
You can note responses in your marketing database or the communication platform your school uses to later segment audiences based on their preferred channels.
Given everyone’s busy schedules, it should come as no surprise that your communications need to align to when families are available to respond or take the desired action. Get a sense of when those times are with the following question.
What time of day or days of the week are you most available for communication?
While emergency communications will always need to go out as soon as possible, having more minor messages reach families on channels and at times they desire will create a better impression for your school, contributing to reduced churn and increasing the retention rate.
Ensure Content Stays Relevant
To hold parents’ interest, provide updates relevant to their interests. But content should go beyond classroom performance to entice maximum family involvement.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) shows 93 percent of private schools use mass online communications addressed to all parents, while 69 percent send online notes based on each child. Notably, only 32 percent of private schools update parents via telephone, compared to 41 percent of public schools.
Sending mass emails, newsletters, and notices to families may convenience administrators and teachers, but personalizing communications reinforces the unique relationship your school has with each student. Especially when competing private schools often do not prioritize a 1:1 school-to-family relationship, personalization can play a key role in increasing the retention rate at your school.
Personalization and parental involvement also improve student performance. Research has found a positive correlation between the level of parental investment and student academic outcomes. When it comes to the academic side of retention (i.e., schools wanting to offer re-enrollment to successful students), having communications that promote parental involvement maximizes the number of students eligible for retention.
With that in mind, ask families questions in-line with the following, to understand what obstacles keep them from fully investing in their children’s education.
What would make it easier for you to attend parent-teacher meetings, parent events, or school functions?
Finally, personalization serves to foster community throughout the student body and extend across families. With insight into what activities families prefer, niche preferences to center organizations and events around, and roadblocks to involvement, schools can customize community events to encourage turnout and investment.
What would encourage you to become more involved in school life (volunteering, specific events, student assemblies, etc.)?
Ultimately, these efforts show your school is interested in the comfort of every family and the success of every individual student.
Seek Feedback on Current Strategies
Whether your school adopts many new strategies or sticks to what’s familiar, it’s important to track how well they work. In addition to traditional and deeper communication metrics, include in your family surveys questions that address how well messages resonate and contribute to a positive view of your school.
How clear and effective do you find the school’s current communication with you and your family?
Learn what roadblocks to address with questions that ask families ways to make communications, parent-teacher meetings, and events more accessible.
Are there any barriers or challenges that prevent you from staying informed about school performance and activities?
Finally, understand the gap between your current communications and expectations with questions that directly solicit missing information, straight from the horse’s mouth.
What types of school-related information do you wish were communicated better or more frequently?
Together, these efforts strengthen bonds between your school and its families, making your communication strategies more adaptable as needs change and serving to ultimately increase the retention rate at your school.
Connect Your Community with Ravenna Student Management
Knowing which questions to ask is an important step toward student retention, but refinement makes up only one part of a robust communication plan. Further strengthen your messaging strategies with the right student management platform.
With Ravenna Student Management, schools centralize real-time, school-branded communications under one system, allowing you to give families both a uniform and personal experience.
