Our regular April meeting was replaced by dinner and conversation with the faculty of the Pittsburgh New Church School about the continuing efforts to educate more of the Lord’s children in our school. We discussed current successes and lessons learned and shared our anxieties about the risks of growing too fast or not fast enough. This was very useful to help everyone understand where we were in terms of recruiting new families to our school.
The second part of our meeting included a conference call with Erik Synnestvedt, who is spending three years working full-time on marketing the Glenview New Church School. He’s currently in the second year of a three-year plan and, like the rest of us, has more questions than answers. But talking with Erik was very inspiring. The Glenview New Church School has grown in the last two years and Erik was able to explain their plans, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and what is impossible to measure but should be done anyway.
The goal of the conference was not to come away with a new and clearer plan for school marketing. Instead, we wanted to see how our plans are similar and dissimilar and ask all the questions we could think of about our goals and methods of marketing. We can then use the best of what has been working for Glenview and apply it to Pittsburgh (with a clear understanding of the differences).
From the conversation, we did collect a list of things we’d like to try but hadn’t thought of. Many of them are pretty clever, such as requiring school parents to select a certain number of volunteer hours. This not only helps the school in direct ways, but by mixing parents across classroom divides we encourage parents to keep their kids in the school for the higher grades.
One of the action items that we were excited about was what Erik calls the MAP (Mission Alignment Panel). The Glenview New Church School has formed a team to focus on developing some criteria for deciding what is essentially New Church education and implementing plans that stay focused on those criteria. The really exciting part, though, is that Erik is hoping to expand this panel beyond the boundaries of Glenview. He presented a vision of all New Church schools cooperating to answer some of the questions we all have and to assist each other in developing plans and processes that support the growth of New Church education. For example, while Glenview is developing marketing materials, Pittsburgh could be working on a good system for responding to families when they first contact the school, and Washington could be finding ways to encourage kindergarten students to move into first grade. And we share the products of our efforts with everyone else. In this way, we can move the marketing of New Church Education as a whole forward much, much faster. It is a hopeful prospect.