Finance and Marketing: Overlooked Alliance for Success [Podcast]

Mike Connor

Mike Connor

Mike Connor is President of Connor Associates Strategic Services and co-author of the NAIS book, Marketing Independent Schools in the 21st Century.  His latest e-Book, Pulling in the Same Direction, emphasizes everyone’s role in recruitment, retention, and fundraising.

Earlier in his 30+ year career, Mike worked in nearly every position at independent K-12 schools.

Connor Associates stakes its value on its experience with providing comprehensive services, including ensuring proof of ROI through Image Audits, Enrollment Feasibility Studies, Five-year enrollment Forecasts, Business Office Evaluations and Plans, and Strategic Marketing Plans.

Connor Associates’ newest offering, administrative search, uses a unique approach to finding, training, and keeping the best people on your leadership team.

Thom Greenlaw

Thom Greenlaw

After serving not-for-profit organizations for over 40 years Thom Greenlaw founded Creative Independents (CI) in 2012. CI serves not-for-profit schools, colleges, and other education-focused institutions finding creative solutions to strategic issues facing these organizations. Thom joined Connor Associates as a Strategic Partner for Executive Searches, Finance, and Operations in 2018. In addition to coordinating Leadership searches, he specializes in Tuition Elasticity and Financial Sustainability. 

For over twenty years Thom served in varying senior operational and finance roles in independent schools including thirteen years as Assistant Head for Operations/ CFO at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, MA. Before his employment at BB&N, Thom served as Business Manager at the Dana Hall School. A former Board member for NBOA and AISAP, he currently serves on the Board of Summit Montessori School and is a volunteer mentor, specializing in not-for-profits for SCORE.  

Mike and Thom Quoted

Mike:

“It’s unusual for business managers, CFOs, and marcom people and admissions directors to sit down together to talk about price and value and their interplay with one another.”

 “It’s important to link products with the price.”

“The 6 Ws for brand identity are: who we are, who we’re not, what we stand for, what we won’t stand for, why we matter, and where we’re headed.”

“We worked with a school that was perceived as not charging enough.”

“The four categories of the value of tuition are ROI (outcomes); transformational teaching and learning; constituent orientation; cost-consciousness; and stewardship.”

The combination of value and price is intertwined.

“You can no longer say, ‘I don’t care what parents think.’”

 Thom:

“Cost is having an understanding of what the actual cost is per student you seek to serve. Many schools skip this step. Then you can have a conversation about price.”

 “Schools are afraid of the message it sends to the community if they shrink.”

“The intersection of pricing and marketing is simple. Once you understand why it costs so much to provide the services you do and then the uniqueness of your school in your market, the discussion about price is simple.”

“We’re going to guarantee to you [parents] that we’ll increase pricing by only by the amount of inflation each year.’”   

“A school says, ‘Five years ago we had 100 students more than we do. We need to get those 100 students back.” I ask, ‘Why?’”

 “Discounting tuition is a recipe for disaster.”

What You’ll Learn

• Setting tuition with marketing in mind.

• How to serve the student population by figuring out a more economical way to do it.

• How to prove ROI.

• Perceptions of existing families vs prospective families and how to align the two.

• Most schools try to appeal to all people, but they should take a stand on what we don’t stand for.

• Who should be interviewed externally to assess your school’s value proposition?

• What to do with perceptions about your school, positive and negative.

• How to determine the right size of enrollment at your school.

• Hospitals as an example of right-sizing.

• Why schools are reticent to right-size down.

• No margin no mission.

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