Dive Brief:
- While charter schools have long used marketing techniques to fill their classes, a couple public schools in Los Angeles have jumped on board, boosting enrollment numbers with active recruitment.
- The Los Angeles Times reports the Haddon Avenue STEAM Academy in Pacoima has placed ads on district delivery trucks as well as a billboard, and principals are printing fliers and curating social media accounts to tout their offerings.
- The Los Angeles Unified School District is stepping into the game, and it now has a marketing director on staff with plans to make templates available to principals for brochures, posters, fliers and postcards, and already the STEAM Academy has seen an enrollment spike following its efforts.
Dive Insight:
Public schools in Grand Rapids, MI, launched a marketing campaign in 2012 to stem declining enrollment due to charter school and “school of choice” competition. We Are GR is still active today, posting news updates about the city and photos of “proud parents” whose children attend the public schools. Schools across the state were focusing on recruitment as far back as 1999, when the Mackinac Center for Public Policy covered the trend.
In Indiana public schools responded to the nation’s largest voucher program with marketing efforts that included buying billboard space, placing radio ads and even walking door-to-door to retain families in the district. Given that state educational funding follows students, administrators can track exactly how much money their marketing efforts returns to or keep in their schools.