It’s Time to Start Thinking About Change…

…but not for the school year that’s less than a month away, or, for some areas of the country, that have already started! Plans for this year should have been formulated long ago, so that they are now in the implementation stage.

Now is the time to start thinking about changes you’d like to see for the 24-25 school year!!

Maybe it’s time to really examine the strengths of your school and find a way to market them to increase your enrollment. Maybe it’s time to find someone to help you do that.

Maybe it’s time to move beyond relying on fundraising, and begin to develop a mindset focused on institutional advancement. Maybe it’s time to find someone to help you do that.

Maybe it’s time to find ways alleviating the tons of paperwork that come with financial aid requests, tuition management, and enrollment processes. Maybe it’s time to find someone to help you do that.

Last week’s Marketing Matter talked about change…but change must be planned for in order to be implemented well.

When you read each of those above statements, I’ll bet you thought you had to hire someone. Sometimes, you do, and the best time to plan for hiring someone for the 24-25 school year is during the 23-24 school year.

But it might be a company who specializes in increasing tuition capture for your school, working with parents to alleviate calls to the office, helping a core development team of parents to strategize about major gift solicitation and grantwriting rather than selling more cookie dough and pizzas, or helping you to see the bigger picture of your school’s impact on the local community.

Change is important – but you must plan for change. I’ll be releasing a whole series of articles dealing with change management during the 24-25 school year. See what I did there? The decision has been made, the implementation will take place in 23-24, and will be released in 24-25.

The interesting thing is that as you are working through your change plan, there are sometimes things that happen that allow that plan to progress faster than expected, so that you can check and adjust along the way, and sometimes begin implementation while this school year is in progress.

And sure, sometimes things get in the way that impede the change. The thing to remember is that once you’ve committed to the change, don’t focus on the goal – focus on the change. As Jack Dixon was once quoted as saying, “If you focus on the goal, you will never change; but if you focus on the change, you will reach your goal.” Notice that this quote speaks to the “how” something gets done, and not to “what” gets done. This is especially important when dealing with daunting goals.

Remember that an implementation plan must also be created to put the planned change into effect. Some of the best ideas don’t become reality because the question of “How are we going to do this?” was never created to accompany the “change” plan.

Don’t want to change? We’ll talk about that next week.

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