Parent advocacy: The best marketing tool you have

“With so much noise, parents still rely heavily on referrals and positive word of mouth when making a decision about where to send their child to school”, says Andrew Elias, Partnerships Director, Virtual School Experience and School Management Plus. 

In his recent session at COBIS conference for Marketing and Admissions professionals on 4th November, Andrew spoke about why every school should consider using parent testimonials to drive admissions and more importantly, he shared a 5 step plan on how to go about creating an advocacy programme. 

Parent to parent

Parent testimonials are highly impactful. When choosing a school, many parents rely heavily on social proof from other parents to help with their decision making. This is because testimonials speak about the reality of your school from a trusted source - another parent. The Ambassador Platform talks about the ‘insight gap’, that is, the gap between the reality of student life and the perceptions of prospective families. This gap is only widening due to the implications of Covid and the digital world. Testimonials are a great way to bridge the divide because they share an authentic experience of the school from parent to parent. 

Delivering on your promise

Positive word of mouth derives from ‘best in class’ service. If parents are happy with the school, they’ll be keen to talk about it to their friends and family. Before embarking on a parent advocacy programme, schools need to ensure that their promise meets parent expectations. Lucy Barnwell, Director of Development and Marketing at Manchester High School for Girls, says "All parents really want is for organisations to deliver on their promises (synergy between product and initial pitch) and for staff to be helpful and proactive at all times. If you deliver to customers, you’ll get great word of mouth marketing in return." Making sure your school is keeping its current parents happy is an essential basis to work from when building a parent advocacy strategy.

5 steps to parent advocacy

1) Review your strengths and weaknesses

Start by taking an in-depth look at your school values, your strengths, and weaknesses. What things do you do well? What things do you think students and parents love about your school? Create a vision statement and check back with your school community to see if they agree. Talk to your parent community about their expectations and whether they are being met. You can do this through a school survey or focus groups.

2) Analysis and reflection. 

Review the feedback from your school community. Are there any positives that came to light? Perhaps there were some things you hadn’t considered as your strength before and aren’t shouting enough about in your marketing. What are some of the negative points that were raised? Consider addressing these before moving ahead to the next stage. Through this initial activity of speaking to your school community, you’ll already start to notice some advocates emerging and you’ll be able to get a sense of how engaged your customer base is. Use this as a benchmark to check the success of your advocacy programme later on. 

3) Create a shared vision with your parent community. 

Based on the feedback from current parents and your analysis work, you’ll be able to define a new vision statement that is more faithful to the reality of life at your school. You can get a lot of value from this feedback exercise by generating content off the back of it, such as, case studies or a white paper. Share your new vision with your school community - they'll be delighted that you have taken on their feedback.

4) Cultivating advocacy. 

Make sure your advocacy programme is inclusive and reflects your school community. Consider different demographics and keep an eye on the profile of your advocates; you don't want to narrow down your admissions pool by showing just a very small section of your school community. You can collect testimonials in many ways, for example, through a feedback form on your website, an email or social campaign, at a parents’ evening or on review sites. Think about how best to share your testimonials and which channels to use. You may want to offer something that looks more polished on the website, but for social, a video filmed with a smartphone will feel far more authentic.

5) The virtuous feedback loop.

Remember that this is a process and it takes time to build advocacy. Check back in with the initial benchmarks you set to see if you’re converting more leads into admissions thanks to positive testimonials or if you’re getting more parents coming forward to advocate for you. If you’re making it easy for parents to share their experience, more parents will be willing to do so. Consider running regular surveys with your school community to check you're still delivering on your promise and update your vision statement as necessary. 

4 real examples of parent advocacy

• Parents as lead generators. Anne Dickinson, Head of Admissions and Marketing at Jerdong International School, said that many parents are so proud of the school that they act as ambassadors by sharing contact details of prospective parents with her admissions team. Anne says, "I see my role as facilitating their enthusiasm".
• Reviews on social. Stefan Tuegar, Director of Marketing, Shrewsbury International School Hong Long, ensures it's easy for parents to share their experience. He encourages parents to review the school on Facebook and Google through a WhatsApp campaign. He also says, “We identify and contact happy parents directly and send them a list of questions. Around 50% will reply.” Giving parents a framework of questions to answer makes it quick and easy for them to send a testimonial.
• Parent meet up. Victoria McAllister, Director of Admissions and External Relations, Tettenhall College says "effective and sustained parent advocacy must be the 'Holy Grail' of all good admissions work in schools.” She hosted an international evening with tables of current and prospective parents where they were able to share their experiences and ask questions. She commented, “The current families did all the sales and marketing work needed.”
• Influencer marketing. Anastassiya Nevenchannaya, Marketing and PR Director at Haileybury Astana and Haileybury Almaty, Kazakhstan, has implemented influencer marketing with some key
  parents in her school community. She says, "These influential parents share the messages we want prospective families to know through their own social channels. It's so great that we can collaborate with committed parents who support the school and want to share their experience. It really helps to build our reputation."

And finally, treat advocacy as a barometer of current parents’ satisfaction with the school and use parent testimonials to help you drive quality enquiries.