According to data from the newly released NAIS 2024-205 Trendbook, sixty-three percent of boarding schools have seen positive enrollment growth since 2019, and private school enrollment overall has climbed five percent. As enrollment rates continue to grow, more boarding schools are optimizing their admissions and enrollment tasks with solutions built with schools in mind.
Keeping your boarding school’s admissions, enrollment, and tuition management systems well-managed and organized allows staff to focus on what’s important – student and parent experiences. Sometimes the administrative side of running a boarding school can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be.
The right boarding school software can streamline administrative tasks from admission, enrollment, and interviews to tuition, financial aid, and student management. In this article, we’ll cover the value of this software and provide strategies to make the business case to leadership.
Why You Need Boarding School Software
There are many reasons to invest in software for your boarding school front office, but the most vital reason is simplicity. Simplicity is an essential characteristic because it makes software:
- Easier to Use: Teachers and administrators should be able to log in quickly, easily perform tasks with intuitive software navigation, and improve task effectiveness where possible. Automation may include segmenting your applicants, flagging certain files, assigning applications to specific readers, or sending targeted email campaigns, saving valuable time on repeated tasks.
- More Reliable: Staff performance affects student outcomes, which is why they need reliable tools for the job. Admission software with new feature alerts, comprehensive functionality and 24/7 customer service support help your teams get the most out of their daily work.
- More Directed: With the ability to recruit students from expansive regions, boarding schools have the ability to wield the right technology to better serve diversity and expansion efforts through targeted zip code admissions.
Admissions
Front office software for boarding schools can help the admissions process for your school to run more smoothly. Families typically apply to multiple boarding schools for their child, which is why your school’s application process needs to be quick, easy, and personalized to your applicants. With custom forms, questions, events, and processes personalized with school colors and images, your application will shine as bright as your school.
Admissions management software also enables schools to automate various tasks, which ultimately saves staff time. Here are just a few tasks that automation can include:
- Flagging applications
- Assigning specific readers for applications
- Sending personalized email campaigns to parents
- Automatic reminders to keep the application process moving
A strong admissions solution should be able to store and process a high volume of applications, making it easier for administrators to review applications, rather than downloading or printing every document for manual review. Multiple users can have the benefit of accessing files simultaneously as well, which allows for collaborative reviewing of admissions material with ensured family data protection. Schools can reduce paperwork and protect prospective families’ information with the right boarding school software.
Interviews
Scheduling interviews with prospective families can often be a time-consuming process. With online scheduling tools, schools can easily share schedules with applicants and automate scheduling entirely.
With Ravenna Admit, private K-12 boarding schools can also create different interviewer roles, allowing your interviewers to change their schedules while saving you time during the interview process. This benefit enables transparent, accurate, and automated scheduling with insights into when interviewees are most often available. This gives families the ability to schedule interviews that fit with their busy schedules, and school staff will see a reduction in time spent managing everyone’s calendars.
Tuition and Financial Aid
Boarding school software can help increase your school’s yearly revenue. With more enrollments comes a higher and more complex budget. Higher enrollment can also increase work for your office staff as they manage more invoices, process more payments, and follow up on late tuition payments. Tuition management systems are a type of boarding school software that potentially makes these tasks easier for your staff.
This software can help reduce errors by automating workflows, customizing reminders, and applying credits or financial aid automatically. Having a solution with tuition management and billing included enables schools to meet families where they are by providing multiple payment options and flexible tuition agreements.
Boarding school staff can also access and use valuable data insights that inform various administrative and financial decisions, like creating financial aid packages and deciding on tuition levels.
3 Tips for Making the Business Case to Your School Board
Here are three key tips for helping you advocate to your school board for considering an admissions, enrollment, and tuition management solution.
1. Define Your Objectives
First, you need to make sure you understand why you need this software and what specific problems it will solve.
Identify the challenges your boarding school faces. Do your admissions decisions take too long? Is it difficult to schedule interviews? Are you having problems with students being where they say they are? Is saving and storing important documents a challenge?
Sometimes it’s not just about challenges but also advancing your team’s capabilities. Is all your data securely stored? Are you able to use data insights to make year-over-year budgetary and growth decisions for your school?
These talking points may be clear to you, but they may not be apparent to the school board. Helping your school board understand your team’s needs and the need for a software solution is essential in building a solid case for your presentation later.
2. Become an Expert Collaborator and Researcher
When you present any new technology to a group of decision-makers, you need to provide answers and details that will help your board understand the value of adopting a new solution. By ensuring you present a strong proposal to your board that includes anticipated answers to their questions, you’re less likely to be blindsided or derailed by a challenging question.
One of the best ways to help strengthen your research is to attend board meetings and understand more about what each of your board member values. Board members are intrinsically important to schools and are there to help guide school growth and school success. By attending board meetings, you can get a sense of what each board member values, how other departments pitch potential software purchases, and common questions to answer.
Additionally, highlight the product guide to the software, which will give a digestible overview perfect for a board audience. You might also see a benefit in downloading a one-pager that describes the product and how it works for schools and including that as part of your proposal.
In your research, you could also visit or communicate with other boarding schools that use specific software to understand how it has benefited them.
As you formulate arguments and anticipate challenges, note that the most common objections include the following.
- Cost: Enrollment software can be an additional cost to your budget, so be able to point to how it contributes to bringing in money for the school. For instance, the ability to automate tasks results in faster time-to-acceptance, which improves the application experience for parents and increases the likelihood of enrollment and retention.
- Integration: Software setup often adds to operational complexity, so ensure your solution is easy to implement and easily integrates with the current tools you use. Make sure you’re choosing a software solution that offers customer support, estimated timelines for implementation, and ease of integration.
- Prioritization: Drive home the potential for impact this software can create for your department and the organization as a whole to ensure the board understands the long-term value of your request.
3. Convince Your Board
Once you understand the challenges your school faces and have prepared to tell your board how software can address these problems, it’s time to express your ideas during a board meeting. Keep the focus of your presentation on the benefits of the software once implemented in your boarding school. Unless questioned, stay away from the particulars of how the software functions, as you may not be speaking to a tech-savvy crowd or the people who will use the software the most. All the research you’ve done will help you answer any questions the board might have.
Contact Ravenna for Boarding School Management Solutions
Ravenna student management and admissions software increases accessibility, efficiency, and quality. Schools that take advantage of our software spend 67% fewer hours doing manual tasks, see a 10% to 25% increase in applications during their first year, and can process applications five times faster.
We want you and your staff to be able to focus on what’s important when it comes to your school: your students! Want to know more about us? Visit us at the upcoming TABS Annual Conference October 30-November 2! We will be at Booth #31, so stop by to learn more about Ravenna and the entire VenturEd Solutions suite!
Won’t be attending, or just want a head start? Learn how Ravenna maximizes your admissions reach.
