{"id":3436,"date":"2026-09-28T15:00:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/?p=3436"},"modified":"2026-09-28T12:26:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T16:26:55","slug":"meet-the-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/?p=3436","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s\u00a0&#8220;Marketing Matter&#8221; comes from a former Principal\u00a0of a school in Southwestern Pennsylvania:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In the morning, I go outside when weather permits and greet parents as they drop students off at school.\u00a0 I&#8217;m usually able to say a few words to them.\u00a0 I also go to the parking lot for car pick up (in the afternoon) and have a chance to talk to them.\u00a0 This seems to work better than trying to call all of them on the phone since most people have answering machines and I spend most of my day playing telephone tag.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Visibility\u00a0and\u00a0accessibility are vital to the success of a faith-based school today.\u00a0 Sales training guru Jeffrey Gitomer (author of &#8220;The Sales Bible.&#8221;\u00a0 Check out his Web site at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gitomer.com\/\">http:\/\/www.gitomer.com\/<\/a>) once stated, &#8220;It&#8217;s not who you know&#8230;it&#8217;s who knows you!&#8221;\u00a0 (If you&#8217;re wondering why I&#8217;ve included a reference to sales, if you&#8217;re leading a school which charges tuition, you&#8217;re in sales &#8211; you just call it &#8220;enrollment.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>In the spirit of my &#8220;Next Practices&#8221; insights and strategies, I like to take it one step further &#8211; &#8220;It&#8217;s who&#8217;s <em>going<\/em> to know you.&#8221;\u00a0 If you treat the parents and guardians of your school this way, it will create positive Word of Mouth marketing for your school since parents talk to parents.<\/p>\n<p>Most, if not all, of today&#8217;s parents and guardians with children in the PK-12 education experience are members of the Millennial Generation.\u00a0 The generation before them, Generation X &#8211; the &#8220;Me&#8221; Generation, wanted to be treated as individuals (which, in the greater scheme of things, has been the greatest threat to your school, but more about that later).\u00a0 They were concerned about &#8220;themselves&#8221; and &#8220;their kids.&#8221;\u00a0 They even spoke about their children as &#8220;my kids,&#8221; and your school as &#8220;my school.&#8221;\u00a0 Those parents have children who are not in college &#8211; and many are having a difficult time realizing that colleges cater to the students &#8211; not the parents.<\/p>\n<p>Millennials are more about &#8220;us&#8221; than &#8220;me,&#8221; but because they live on their mobile devices and are addicted to tapping the &#8220;like&#8221; button on Facebook, it&#8217;s not a far stretch to realize they associate not as &#8220;us,&#8221; but people &#8220;like us&#8221; &#8211; which may be helpful in understanding today&#8217;s societal concerns.\u00a0 Personalization is important to them.\u00a0 They&#8217;re more apt to respond to a note or email communication that starts with &#8220;Dear Roger and Grace,&#8221; rather than &#8220;Dear Parents.&#8221;\u00a0 \u00a0It&#8217;s important to remember that they, and not just their children, are part of your school community, since they the school &#8211; every time that tuition payment comes due.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 Michael V. Ziemski, SchoolAdvancement\/Archangel, 2006-2026 (Original Publication Date: 20060925)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s\u00a0&#8220;Marketing Matter&#8221; comes from a former Principal\u00a0of a school in Southwestern Pennsylvania: &#8220;In the morning, I go outside when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8119,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ggCS-Tq","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/MM-Purple.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3436"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8435,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3436\/revisions\/8435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archangeladvancement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}