(By Chris Stonick) A reader reached out asking about private schools and how to approach them regarding student recruitment. The most important thing to remember is that, ultimately, a school is still a business! So, I talk to them as a business.
Whenever I meet with a private school, like a Catholic School system, here’s what I ask them:
How many students do you currently have? Without adding any additional staff, how many students could you have?
I then subtract those two numbers; the potential minus the actual. Let’s say they have 250 students, but they could handle 350 students. There are 100 empty seats.
Next question: what is each child worth annually? Let’s just say it’s a nice, round $10,000.
I multiply the 100 empty seats times $10,000, which comes to $1,000,000 of missing revenue.
Final question: What could they do with an extra million dollars?
They now have a new vision… and that leads to the budgeting conversation.
Have your own question about recruitment advertising? Get in touch with me. I will be answering selections in a future article! If your radio group is looking to capture these dollars for 2025, we should talk.
For more than three decades, Chris Stonick has helped thousands of organizations across the country with recruiting and retention while generating well over $100,000,000 in billing for his client radio stations. Contact Chris at 863-397-5615 or by email. Read Chris’ Radio Ink archives here.
The decision journey for a parent to send their child to a private school is a process that occurs throughout the semester as the student struggles with their studies, not only at the schools enrollment time. Advertising schedules you propose should take this into consideration.
Radio listeners, who are typically lower-middle income, aren’t turning on their radio to drop 10k on education, when it’s a guaranteed right to be provided free of charge. This industry is down to multiplying 100 x 10,000 and pretending that problems are solved. Who’s falling for this?
Here’s one: A local burger shop makes $2 profit on every burger. They sell 100 burgers a day. But, they have enough product to sell 200 burgers a day. They went and met with the radio station. The station charged them $1750 a week for drive time commercials. After 2 weeks, the burger shop still sold 100 burgers but went out of business after factoring the price of the ads, which brought in 0 burger sales.
Next question: Why did radio out-price mom and pop business, especially after the results have significantly diminished?
Love the simple math of leading them to the opportunity.
Wow! Earth shattering…