The Key to Addressing Enrollment Stress

The beauty of clarity and alignment between admissions and marcomm

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Today, we have the People Talking interview with Angela Brown - Manager, Content Marketing and Brand Strategy at Niche. She’s one of the best follows on LinkedIn - smart, clear, funny, mission-driven and passionate about kids and families finding the right fit at independent schools. Before Niche, Angela was the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Flint Hill School in Oakton, VA so she gets us from the inside and also has a very valuable outsider perspective. I am so pleased she agreed to this interview and I think you’ll agree - this is packed with very direct and useable advice - from encouragement for marcomm folks to manage up to looking critically at your funnel if you’re not happy with enrollment to defining the characteristics of strong, useful brand messaging. And if you take nothing else away, remember that good brand messaging creates clarity and alignment. (I think I hear angels singing…)

Julie Faulstich

Angela, welcome to the People Talking interview. I’m so happy to have you here because I know how much we enjoy talking about how some simple changes or ways of looking at things can help move schools forward. 

And what I’d love you to talk about is, if you were queen of the marcomm world, what would you be telling people to do? I know I would do whatever you advised!

Angela Brown

I love the question because I think about it all the time.

Between our research and many things that I see and questions that come through from our partnerships managers there's so many different directions that we can go.

People get into a rhythm with any job and in a school, with the events of the year coming one after the other, you almost lose your ability to be strategic. It can be like a strategy vacuum in schools. And the biggest thing that helped me when I was a new marcomm director was the fact that I hadn't come from a previous school. The way that I worked in other jobs was that I was used to strategy. I was used to having to plan. I was used to being accountable for numbers and data. And that's not the way that schools work, at least not for marcomm.