The #1 Goal of Your School’s Website
Why it is not about Current Families or Alumni
The lifeline of every educational institution is filling their pipeline with prospective families. Yet as a sector, we do little to monitor or capture future enquiry data. We are great at managing the current student body and immediate incoming cohort, but when it comes to the longitudinal forecast, not so much. Ironically, this is the very data that Boards, Principals, Business Managers and other key decision makers need at their fingertip.
They want to know what the big picture looks like 2, 5 or even 10 years out. They want to understand how the metrics are performing compared to prior years, how diverse the school will look compared to its goals. You have to know about the ‘prospects in the pipeline’.
A website is a powerful asset for any school, yet many confuse its primary purpose. With families now accessing information via portals, the website can focus solely on one area – engaging future families. Naturally, an attractive site that is regularly updated with information can grab the interest of a family, but actually its serves as the perfect opportunity to capture critical information to build your pipeline.
Therefore, the primary goal of your website is to capture leads.
Be sure to focus on capturing leads versus other agenda items, such as alumni or current families – they will know where to go by selecting relevant menu items and accessing their dedicated portals.
The best way to achieve this goal is to place custom forms on your website that capture specific data efficiently and consistently while dealing with the query in a professional manner.
In fact, this is the core of Enquiry Tracker: it allows any school to pop up an instant web form on its website and capture data quickly and simply, and to get insights to the data.
Always drive traffic to your landing pages, where visitors enter in an email address. Whether it’s registering for an event, requesting an information pack or something else where they can learn more – just make it interesting and informative.
Stay true to this model and focus on capturing the leads on your website as they are the ones that fill your pipeline.
So, the question is – what is the goal of your website?
