Automated Communication Plans Best Practices

Overview

A communication plan is a strategic plan for communicating with families in a targeted & personalized way. They are used to help personalize the admissions process and save you time by automating common tasks. Make sure you review the related content below to learn how to setup automated communication plans and incorporate examples for both Admissions and Enrollment.

Identify your key communication messages

Informational messages help people through the process and answer common questions. Informational messages remove obstacles within the inquiry, admissions, and enrollment process.

Examples:

Answer procedural questions
Give checklist status updates
Address concerns (e.g. affordability)
Remind families of deadlines

Interest-based messages connect families with your school's story and are unique to your school.

Examples:

Small class size
Scholarship opportunities
Theater / arts program
Academic focus (e.g. STEM/STEAM)
Renowned athletic program

Interest-based messages center around what attracts families to your school. Effectively, communicating your school's story helps you standout and leads to higher conversion rates at every step of the funnel, particularly, in applicant-to-enrolled ratios and yield. Interest-based messages improve mission fit and increases re-enrollment retention.

Best Practices for Interest-Based Emails with a multi-select field:

Scenario: Let's say you have a multi-select field for athletic and/or academic interests and you want to setup some automated communications that target each of these interests. You don't want families to receive 3 emails if they said their child is interested in 3 different sports such as basketball, football and soccer. However, if you have ACP's set-up with additional criteria that are specific to each sport interest, that family will receive an individual email for each of those 3 interests.

Best Practice: The best way to handle this scenario is to work with SchoolAdmin Support to create one email template for all sport interests, that's dynamic according to the sport. The email could show/hide different content based on the interests that are selected. The result is that the family is only receiving one email communication, but it's still personalized to target that child's interests.

Identify the target audience

The key to personalized communications is deciding who each message is relevant to. Even common informational messages should contain personalization.

Map out touch points

A touch point is a single step in the communication plan.

For each touch point define:

What will we say?
When will we say it?
Who will say it?
How will we say it? (Email / phone / letter / text)

Note: It is possible to schedule the time of day you would like an email or reminder to go out. The default time is 8am in the client's site timezone, however you may want to consider choosing a different time when the recipient will be more likely to view it.

Examples

Inquiry

Applicant

To get started

Start with the basics

Pick 2-3 most important informational & interest-based messages
A couple of touch points per message
Start with broad categories (e.g. sports vs. soccer or tennis)
Build gradually over time

Talk with your families

Ask them about the process and where they had questions

Brainstorm as a team

Team collaboration creates a better result
Increases buy-in
Provides a consistent message to families

Automating Communication Plans within SchoolAdmin

Visit our setup guide to start creating your communication plans.
SchoolAdmin Blog: Communication Plans-The Key to Increasing Funnel Conversions
SchoolAdmin Blog: How to Build a Communication Plan
Additional Resource Links are at the top of this article.

Additional Resources

The links below will redirect to other websites.