1. Tell prospects who are visiting your site for the first time why your school is the best option for their children to attend. Don't just share features of your school (e.g. we have great technology.) Use persuasive details to show how the advancing technology or growth in faith formation the school offers will be beneficial to their children.
2. Today's prospects are concerned about how they will "fit" into your Catholic school. This is especially true if you are a Catholic school that is attempting to recruit 8th graders who are visiting your site. What is the student to teacher ratio? How academically demanding your school is? What initiative does your school take in faith formation of students? How diverse is your school? Is there diversity within your student body and faculty? What communities or neighborhoods do families come from that enroll at your school?
3. Make sure prospects know where your school is located. It is very important that you convey to prospects types of transportation to and from your school. Let them know how your school handles early drop offs as well as students who need to stay after school. Yes, not only elementary but high schools should consider whether or not to offer before and after school programs.
4. Make sure your website showcases how your school measures success of academics and faith formation. If raw numbers placed into easy to read bar graphs don't adequately portray your situation, figure out other ways to demonstrate student success. One proven example is to have graduates (with permission) tell success stories of your elementary or high school students/families.
5. Analyze your website traffic. This can be done free using Google Analytics. If wanting more in-depth analysis on website traffic, consider purchasing (for one time or more) an audit by Alexa.com. Along with the analysis, recommendations will be made on how to increase traffic to your school's website. This one time audit can be purchased for less than $200.
6. Most importantly let your prospects know how you make financing tuition affordable. List out all the possible options for help with tuition. Break tuition cost down to the year, month, week, day and hour. Offer a couple of financial aid case studies that help the visitor to better understand the help that is available. Let the visitor know the average and total amount awarded last year. A range of what tuition grants have been in the past can also be shown. Include parent testimonials on how tuition is challenging, but a true investment in a child's future.
7. Warm-up your site with student testimonials. Go into different grade levels and ask for responses to the following age appropriate questions;
- Pre-school Question: What do you like best about St. Example School?
- Kindergarten Question: What makes St. Example School a fun place to learn?
- 1st Grade Question: What is your favorite part of the day at St. Example School?
- 2nd Grade Question: What do lunch menu item do you like best at St. Example School?
- 3rd Grade Question: What is your favorite subject to study at St. Example School?
- 4th Grade Question: Can you tell what you like best about your teachers at St. Example School?
- 5th Grade Question: What makes St. Example School a Catholic/Christian place to be?
- 6th Grade Question: Why do you think your parents chose to send you to St. Example School?
- 7th Grade Question: What makes junior high so cool at St. Example School?
- 8th Grade Question: What would you have missed if you hadn't been a student at St. Example School?
- On the high school level use questions that prospects commonly have regarding your school. Ask current students and parents to address the questions in text or through video.
8. It is not effective to assume that a prospective visitor, to your school's site, knows what the protocol is when it comes to the enrollment process. Hopefully, your school has done a good job with marketing and reaching a broader audience that doesn't know a whole lot about your school. I like to title this page, Admissions Next Steps.
9. Create a section of your website's homepage that is dedicated to highlighting your schools official Facebook fan page, Twitter, blog and other social networking sites.
10. In the end, a good website comes down to navigation. You have meaningful content and opportunities for interaction, but your site's visitors must be able to easily find what they are looking for. Think like a prospective, first-time visitor when you are laying out your site. Better yet, invite your school parents and students to give you feedback on how easy or difficult your site is to navigate. Almost every school today offers a computer course. Ask your technology teacher to give the students an assignment to be completed with their parents in relation to your school site's ease of navigation. Make it a website scavenger hunt for things that espeically a new visitor would be intertested in and have them time how long it takes to find everything you listed.
A website is one of the greatest marketing tools for a Catholic school. Invest a great deal of time and creative thinking to illustrate your mission and vision for the future of your Catholic school.