Schools are not like other products or services on which families spend money: an ad on a popular website or in a local newspaper will rarely engender the trust a family needs to feel to send their student to our schools. In an EMA study, almost one-third of prospective families surveyed listed current independent-school parents as their primary means of researching the schools they considered. Meeting like-minded parents and guardians and hearing their stories can often be the first step in prospective families building a relationship with an independent school. In this workshop, we will talk about the mechanisms we used to give structure to our school’s word-of-mouth by creating Hackley’s Parent Ambassador Network (PAN). We will also describe the ways in which we have adapted the PAN to address specific market targets at our school.

Meghan O'Callaghan, Hackley School (NY)