And a Child Shall Lead Them…

…on a tour of your school!

Principals and other administrators usually provide the school tour to interested parents, since they want to be sure the parents receive a thorough exposure to the benefits of the school.

But what about student-conducted tours? If your school educates students through 8th grade, and definitely for high schools, consider training students to conduct parent tours. This action drives home the fact that the entire school community is responsible for marketing the school. After all, your school’s students will soon be alumni, and older children in the school must learn to accept responsibility.

Some elementary schools train their eighth-graders to be tour leaders, but consider allowing your sixth and seventh graders to be part of this contingent. Select them while they’re in fifth grade, and train them during the summer between sixth and seventh grade. As eighth graders, they’ll then have some experience in helping to train the new group of tour guides, while retaining their “senior” tour-guide status. They can be recognized as “School Ambassadors” at events in order to make them not only feel they are, but also function as, an integral part of your school’s success.

Be sure to let them know that they are going to make “the experience” of the school a memorable one.

How can they do that? One simple way is to have students walk with guests to the restroom, rather point down the hall and say, “It’s down there around the corner.”

And speaking of “retaining,” as an added bonus, using 6th, 7th and 8th graders as tour guides may aid in retaining your students at the junior high level, rather than having someone who has reaped the benefits of your school leave.

As for those schools that have a PK-5 configuration, and may not feel comfortable having a 5th grader lead parents on a tour, you need to have an enrollment/advancement/development person on your staff to handle parent tours, enrollment processes, marketing activities, and other activities that generate revenue for your school. If you don’t have a person like this on staff, it’s akin to a business that doesn’t have a sales professional working for it.

I’m sure you may respond to that by saying, “Well, it’s different today. You can go online and get what you need.”

That’s indeed true – and parents are doing precisely that. Visiting your school’s Website, taking the virtual tour, and reading profiles of students who have benefitting from their time at your school. They’re also doing that on their mobile device. My 88 year-old mother-in-law makes it a point to tell us all the things she’s doing on her iPad.

Therefore, what is the parent of a prospective student’s experience when they visit your school’s Website? Have your looked at your school’s Web site to see what it looks like and how it functions on a mobile device first, since that’s where most parents today are accessing the Web.

I know of a school that spent $50,000 on designing their school’s new Web site – and the “Important News” section at the top of the site was unreadable on mobile devices. Then the conversation was, “Oh, you want to change that text color? That’s an extra $300.”

Thanks to AI, that’s not the case today.

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