Advancement Counsel
Boston, MA

Well, I just completed my first transitory step towards my new position next year in Hoban's Admission's Department by participating in the Advancement Counsel's conference on Catholic school marketing and recruiting...my head is still spinning from all the different presentations throughout the conference...everything from general marketing, target marketing, recruitment, enrollment, and retention. It's truly fascinating to see how schools tackle these issues in a way to custom their own markets. The contacts that I made should prove to be invaluable, but most importantly- the whole weekend really provided a springboard for me to jump into this new position with a ton of enthusiasm and fresh ideas. I can't wait to start the work for my first recruitment class of 2008-2009.

As I said, I had the opportunity to engage in great conversations with not only other Admission Directors, but principals, presidents, and Alumni Directors- all of whom were in attendance and all of whom had "their story" to share with the group. Some of the schools appeared to have an unlimited marketing budget- mostly the New England prep schools, while others struggled to promote their schools on a much smaller budget. My favorite "marketing tactic" came from one of our presenters when she suggested sending $10.00 to all your local churches w/ a request to have a mass said in honor of your school's students and faculty...with your school's name prominently read from the pulpit prior to communion time to a captivated audience of 500 or so...very shrewd!

It was painfully obvious that every school conducts traditional open houses, shadow programs, neighborhood coffee socials, and other events to promote their institutions. But, the message was that each school needs to promote their mission (branding was the key word thrown out to us) in absolutely every component of the marketing strategy...from published materials, formal programming, web sites, and personal contacts. Hoban has a fairly lengthy (and wordy) mission statement, but I'm going to advocate to our administration that we use as our "brand" a condensed version of our mission statement. Hoban: an education of mind and heart. Hey, it's short enough to fit on a t-shirts and baby bibs- which evidently is the #1 way to market your school. Yes, the counsel's contention is that it's a wasted effort to try to target the 7th and 8th graders...that's too late. Go for the younger grade school kids, the pre-school, and even the toddler crowd. Unbelievable! I wonder how much it would cost to slap an add on the back of Enfimil formula cans and Pamper diapers packages?

Each evening, the participants of the conference were treated with an excursion in Boston. Night #1 included a yacht tour of Boston (pronounced Baah...ston) harbor and the 2nd night we were truly entertained by a trolley tour of the downtown area. The story here was that our guide- Rodney- had just gotten this gig about a week ago and we were his first trolley audience. The poor guy was trying to drive this vehicle through the streets of downtown Boston (no easy task, mind you) while at the same time read his script from his lap. Unfortunately he struggled a bit. He almost hit a bicyclist! He'd be describing the U.S. Constitution battleship to us all the while we were staring at the old North Church. (we had passed the ship three blocks ago) Towards the end of our excursion, he profusely apologized to all of us and pronounced that he actually suffered from ADD...and that was the primary reason for his ineptness. At that point, we simply encouraged him to just put the script aside and solely concentrate on the driving aspect so that we could all make it safely to the Quincy Market area....lots of laughs that evening.