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How To Increase Student Enrollment -private School

Posted by Anonymous on 12/19/2008 at 6:12 PM ET 25 Points

I work for a private school that has been in the community for over a hundred years, but due to the economic situation of the country we are having students leave the school. Our tuition is not expensive, quite the contrary, it is affordable for middle class families.
I would like PR ideas to attract new students to the school. We are doing all sorts of improvements to the campus as well as improvements in our curriculum adding a Foreign Language program. We have also added a new Natural Sciences Museum and we are planning to inaugurate it at the end of January but would appreciate if we get ideas as to how to promote the New Museum as well as the school to the general public.
Thank-you very much for your help!

Posted by MonMark Group on 12/19/2008 at 10:38 PM Accepted

Do you mention PR because you have no marketing budget?

If you've sent releases to your local/regional papers, and they have not responded by writing a story about you, then you need to begin to set a creative marketing budget, and tell the public yourself.
Posted by Juliet on 12/20/2008 at 3:21 AM Accepted

Hi

Have a look at this posting from a while back:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=19821#130565

Some of the ideas might be relevant.

Best wishes

Juliet Robertson
Creative STAR Learning Company
Posted on 12/22/2008 at 4:23 PM Member

You need to reach students, and kids today are very internet savvy. There's lots of kids on youtube, facebook, myspace tc..

how about some sort of youtube contest- maybe scholarship based? you can set up a youtube account for free, and if you don't have a video camera, maybe someone in your office does and you can borrow it to create a little "commercial" for the school, which would also talk about the contest. Youtube has a special section for contests, so you'd get lots of exposure. You could not only utilize youtube for the contest, but you could also do a press release over the web, which means you would come up on web searches for colleges much easier/higher.

You could also set up a free myspace page and start reaching out that way.

I think you need to utilize online media, and so much of it is at no cost, or the only cost being the time you put into it.