We’re ThinK-12. A software company that helps K-12 charter schools drive family enrollment, engagement and retention. It’s time to think of families as customers. It’s time to ThinK-12.
Some charter schools are doing a great job at marketing themselves to prospective students and families. But many are not.
Charter schools have an excellent opportunity to tell their story because they were created to provide families with a choice. For families who feel that traditional public schools are not the right fit for their child, charter schools could be a great option. But in some cases, this can be a harder “sell” to families because of location, support services, and other reasons. This means it’s more important than ever to tell your school’s story in a compelling way to future, and even current families.
Even before the “COVID Era”, many charter schools were already experiencing declining enrollment. Families who delayed kindergarten starts, homeschooled, or switched to virtual schools meant lost revenue for charter schools. Not to mention declining birth rates in many parts of the U.S. In the post-COVID world, experts predict a continued and increased enrollment decline for public schools and districts, private schools, and charter schools, which will create a devastating downward spiral impacting every part of education, including:
While there are many variables to improving education, it all starts with driving and protecting charter school student enrollment. School revenue impacts everything, and its connection to enrollment is the only constant. Today, Charter School Leaders have the power to stabilize and even grow their enrollment, leading to greater revenue and improved services for their students and families.
At ThinK-12, we believe schools must change the way they view themselves before they can change the way students and families view them. It’s time for a world where schools market themselves the way colleges and universities have done for a hundred years. Today, educational opportunities are global, not local. More and more families are realizing they now have other- and in some cases- better options.
Your role as a Charter School Leader is to acknowledge this new reality and change the way you run your business (yes, your BUSINESS).
And that’s where the team at ThinK-12 comes in. For more than 20 years, we have worked with thousands of colleges and universities to help them create and market their brand to students and families. And now we’re bringing that experience to K-12.
For both K-12 and Higher Ed, revenue drives success and enrollment drives revenue. It’s time K-12 schools used marketing strategies and tools to attract families to their brand. Yes. Their BRAND.
At ThinK-12, we use our decades of experience in marketing and technology along with our experts in family engagement and K-12 teacher education to create strong brands and incredible user experiences for K-12 Charter schools. This drives enrollment, which drives revenue, and that affects every facet of educational success for your school.
Every school has a great story to tell. If they don’t know what it is, we uncover it. Or create it. And then develop comprehensive plans to promote it with interactive tools to engage new and current families.
Because it’s more important than ever that Charter Schools take control of their future by taking control of their enrollment.
Enrollment Geographic Expectation (E.0.E: A school are districts expectation that families in its geographic ares will naturally attend their schools)
ThinK-12 Families is a revolutionary approach to driving enrollment, family engagement and retention for Charter Schools. It’s a web and mobile solution that supercharges school websites and communication with richer experiences for prospective and current families.
Attract and enroll prospective and current families with engaging, interactive features that get them excited, committed, and loyal to your school.
ThinK-12 Families is a set of exciting features that work together to elevate the future (or returning) family experience. Future and returning families are your customers, and your school is the service provider. Families have options. Your school must present your story in a compelling and professional way in order to enroll (and retain) families. Today you must work to attract, enroll and retain families, just like your competitors are doing.
ThinK-12 Families is a revolutionary product- but it’s also a team of marketing and technology experts who have delivered proven enrollment results in Higher Education for decades. Today, ThinK-12 Families drives enrollment and retention for Charter K-12 schools through rich, interactive features and functionality, including:
Our library of service-based content in ThinKTanK™ is constantly growing, offering parents everything they need to make the best educational decision for their family.
Custom Content
Deepening the content experience for your school, our team of writers creates CUSTOM CONTENT to tie our service-based content specific to your school. Custom content highlights YOUR offerings, YOUR successes, and YOUR points of differentiation. And if you’re not sure what those are, we create them for you. It’s the value of outside content experts who can see the best your school has to offer and then craft it into a compelling story.
Custom-content solidifies the connection of service-based content to YOUR school.
Don’t underestimate the “wow” factor and how it can influence families in the charter school sector. ThinK-12 Q&A Videos are an interactive, technical display of professionally produced videos of student, parent, staff, and alumni ambassadors from your school. Our expert video producers will spend a day at your school capturing video-based answers to your most common questions from future and current families. We’ll even work to develop answers to questions families may not think to ask.
Videos bring stories to life. It’s the foundation for media engagement across every generation. And for parents, Q&A Videos show the character, emotion, and passion for your school, something that can be difficult to convey purely through the written word.
But it’s the technical delivery of the videos that gives parents an engaging experience like no other. In an intuitive Q & A format, parents can scroll through questions they have and then see the corresponding videos that answer those questions. The connection delivered through the Q & A interface drives a deep engagement for parents that lets them control the flow of what they are viewing.
Another outstanding benefit of the Q & A Videos is the authenticity captured by our video experts. Getting at the essence of a question’s answer is an art, and how that answer is conveyed to parents can make or break their commitment to your school.
Following our Q&A Videos Success Guide™, your school will select five or more people to answer questions on video. These can be students, parents, staff, alumni, or any combination. Our experts set up, direct, and capture the video on location at your school. Then the videos get further customized by our video production team, who post-produce and load the videos into our proprietary Q&A Videos engine. The result is an outstanding, professionally produced experience for families that answers their most pressing questions and gets them excited about your school. There’s simply nothing like it.
Some families will attend a school because they know other families there. Some families stay at a school for the very same reason. One thing is for certain; schools are for families, not just kids. And giving families the ability to connect and network with each other is a service your school should provide because connected families drive enrollment and retention. Schools already know this as a fact- they’ve been using PTAs, parent conferences, and family events for years to drive deeper family connections to their school.
Today, the family experience can be taken to the next level through technology, meeting families in the digital world. The ThinK-12 Family Network is a private community that allows your families to connect and engage, strengthening their bond with your school. Simple things like enabling parent connections can deepen confidence in and support of your school. “Customer Communities” are everywhere… except in schools. It’s time that changed.
Future families can see limited information in the ThinK-12 Family Network, while current families have full access. Families can set their preferences for how much information they want to share. Future families will see the Family Network as an incredible networking tool, enabling connections from child play dates to adult professional collaboration.
One of the biggest questions future and current families have is about Outcomes. Even more so for charter schools because your outcomes are a huge selling point. What can they expect for their child from your school? And not just immediate outcomes, but their full educational and career journey. What unique opportunities can your charter school provide in terms of student achievement and student outcomes? Where do students go after your school? What colleges do they attend? What career paths do they forge? How do they positively shape the community and impact society? While no one can predict a student’s path with certainty, historical performance DOES give families confidence and DOES influence their enrollment decisions (whether they are considering elementary schools, middle schools, or secondary schools). Outcome highlights in your ThinK-12 program will showcase what’s possible at your school in an interactive, engaging way, driving your enrollment and re-enrollment rates.
We all know there’s so much more for students to discover and experience at a school besides academics. Schools have clubs and organizations that are designed to spark curiosity and quench students’ thirst for passions and interests. This goes far beyond organized sports or marching band.
With Clubhub, schools can showcase and promote their clubs to students and families, increasing the likelihood students will get involved. And just like in Higher Ed, student engagement in clubs and activities directly affects retention rates and social experiences at school.
Chances are, your school has more clubs and organizations than most students (and nearly ALL parents) are aware of. Clubhub changes that by improving club visibility and appeal, and including calls-to-action that encourage involvement. Clubs are selling points of your school. Obscuring them limits the effect they can have on engaging your students and attracting new families.
Clubs are rarely if ever, promoted to future or current parents. Driving club awareness to parents equips them to encourage their child to engage in and explore everything your school has to offer.
With Clubhub, your clubs and organizations are points of pride and play an important role in engaging future and current families.
Traditional staff directories can be difficult to navigate, boring for families to view, and often provide little to no information about the staff. That’s changed with ThinK-12 Staff Directory.
At ThinK-12, we re-imagined what a school staff directory should be and built it. Parents want to know more about their child’s teachers. They also want to be able to easily connect with teachers. Our approach is to “humanize” the staff, sharing their interests and passions, their commitment to children and families, and of course, making it easier to connect with them.
Education is a three-way partnership: Teacher—Child—Parent. It’s critical to facilitate the connection between charter school staff and parents in order for this partnership equation to be successful.
The ThinK-12 Staff Directory makes communication easier and shows staff as real people, making the directory more inviting. Staff, like parents, have families, pets, passions, and dreams. Connections around any one of those between staff and parent promote compassion, empathy, and alliance. These are the factors that allow staff to provide the best education to students.
Get ready to drastically improve customer service for future and current families (yes, your families are your customers). ThinK-12 Chat is an AI-based (artificial intelligence) chat interface that answers most enrollment-based questions from families. The custom-built AI information engine powers ThinK-12 Chat for your school, simplifying parent inquiries and providing them with quick answers to their most commonly asked questions. It even provides links to your enrollment forms and can output important dates for upcoming events.
ThinK-12 Chat can drastically reduce your office staff’s time spent answering commonly-asked questions, freeing them up for other tasks.
Think of it as an extension of your team, reducing the burden on your school office personnel.
The amazing thing about ThinK-12 Chat is that with artificial intelligence, the program gets smarter over time, creating even greater economic efficiencies for your office. But creating efficiency for parents can be even more impactful. It not only answers their questions faster, it gives parents confidence in your school. It demonstrates to them that you use modern tools to simplify processes and experiences, and this affects the entire customer (family) perception of your school. Even little things like AI-based Chat can give parents confidence that the overall school experience is also being smartly managed.
Chances are, you’ve experienced this first-hand in other areas of your life. Take a moment to think about how smart and efficient customer service increases your confidence in a brand. That’s precisely what you can offer parents with AI-based Chat. In fact, NOT having AI-based chat for your customers (parents) shines a spotlight on how antiquated and inefficient many schools really are. You now have the power to change that.
One of the biggest challenges for Charter schools is managing a robust, behavioral email campaign with future and current families. The importance of this cannot be understated, yet for most K-12 schools, there is no concerted email campaign dedicated to continued enrollment, engagement, and retention efforts.
There are many reasons for this…
ThinK-12 Connect is not only a robust email campaign for your future and current families, it’s also a team of experts who build, deploy, and optimize the campaign for you. And then tie campaign performance to enrollment and retention outcomes to demonstrate a Return on Investment (ROI).
ThinK-12 Connect was purposefully built to engage K-12 families with the goal of driving enrollment, engagement, and retention. It uses the incredible program features in ThinK-12 Families to leverage increased parent engagement. It’s also the only program of its kind created and supported by education market experts.
In addition to ThinK-12 Families driving student enrollment and retention for charter schools, it can also generate sponsorship revenue. Local service providers can reach your current and prospective families through ThinK-12 Families, giving them more reach and more meaningful connections.
Our ThinK-12 Sponsorship Guide for charter schools is filled with ideas and strategies to attract sponsors to charter school programs. To learn more about how to bring sponsors to your ThinK-12 program, click here.
One reason parents choose to send their children to charter schools is because charter schools provide their children with a high-quality, customized education similar to a private school that is free of charge. Additionally, charter schools tend to have smaller class sizes and therefore, a smaller student-to-teacher ratio.
But in order to continue to grow enrollment, it’s up to you to tell your school’s story and get the message to families of everything your school has to offer. That’s where ThinK-12 Families can help. By utilizing a variety of thoughtful marketing tactics, we create a compelling story about your charter school that actively engages future families, as well as current ones.
Family engagement involves traditional ways to include families at school, such as open houses and parent-teacher conferences. It also includes greater opportunities for collaboration and support, like volunteers, parent leaders, and family education initiatives.
Family engagement is the key to increasing student enrollment at a charter school and driving retention. When families are engaged with your charter school, they are more loyal to the school. ThinK-12’s variety of interactive tools make it easier than ever to connect with families and staff, including using a chat feature, humanized staff directory, custom content, Q&A videos, and a specialized family network. Each of these helps families become excited about everything your charter school has to offer for their child, which results in long-term commitment.
When families are actively and consistently engaged with your charter school and its offerings, they are committed and loyal, and therefore your school will see an increased number of charter school students.
One of the best, most effective ways to promote your charter school and get more students enrolled is to tell its story. After all, your charter school is a brand, and it’s competing with public schools, school districts/zones, and private/independent schools.
At ThinK-12, we use our decades of experience in marketing and technology along with our experts in family engagement and K-12 teacher education to create strong brands and incredible user experiences for K-12 Charter schools. This drives enrollment, which drives revenue, and that affects every facet of educational success for your school.
Every school has a great story to tell. If they don’t know what it is, we uncover it. Or create it. And then develop comprehensive plans to promote it with interactive tools to engage new and current families.
