SchoolAdvancement.com was launched in 2004 as a help for faith-based and private schools with marketing insights and ideas, as well as development actions necessary to move schools toward sustainability rather than relying on more and more fundraisers as families struggled to fulfill their tuition obligations.

While the economy and shifting demographics were proffered as the biggest reasons for the difficulties, other factors were involved:
– Declining enrollment created increases in tuition to fund the operation of the school as costs increased;
– A focus on retaining families and their students was always considered a “given,” and therefore, little attention was paid to the current parent community, and enrollment efforts focused on enrolling new students at all grade levels; and
– The mindset of an entire generation of parents was not considered, as members of Generation X were treated as Baby Boomers were. Boomers followed the rules after testing the rules in their youth. Generation X changed the rules, since the security of their family had disappeared due to single-parent households. They became known as “The ME Generation,” which required different marketing strategies to attract them to faith-based schools.

As time progressed, SchoolAdvancement.com offered articles on Advancement, Systems Thinking and Next Practice Insights, as well as tools to help bring additional students into schools. An enrollment estimator was developed based on researched principles so budgets could be set according to a predictive enrollment rather than hope, and a feature was added to assist school leaders grow their enrollments by setting a targeted first-year cohort.

These articles and tools were offered free of charge for the past 22 years as a “value-added” service to my working with schools. Now that I’ve retired, SchoolAdvancement.com has been changed to ArchangelAdvancement.com to focus on assisting Christ-centered schools, since I feel called to help Catholic and Christian schools at this point in history.

In order to protect the content, a free membership is required to access the articles, and a paid membership with a nominal fee will be put in place to access the tools. The Basic Membership will provide access to the BASICCS (Bringing Additional Students Into Christ-Centered Schools) framework with the Enrollment Estimator, and a Premium Membership will be created to access the Enrollment Projector for a school’s strategic planning process when it comes to enrollment projections five years into the future.