Fall inquiry surge: Answering every family while your team is running events

By Angela Brown, Head of Marketing

It’s September, which means the leaves are changing, the air is becoming crisp and…applications are open. As a result, your event calendar is packed with campus tours, shadow days and parent coffees, and if you’re lucky, inquiries are arriving faster than your team can turn them around.

The solution is follow-up, not more staff. Whether it comes from a person or technology, the follow up needs to be as effective as the initial response. That's how to ensure every family gets a personal answer, even while a two or three person office is also running the events that define fall admissions season.

The numbers behind this fall's inquiry surge

Fall is when independent schools collect the bulk of their admissions inquiries, and a lot of those inquiries never turn into an application. Among AISAP member schools tracked by NAIS, just 46.6% of admissions inquiries became a completed application last year. If a family's first question gets a slow or generic answer, they’ll move on to the next school on their list before your office circles back.

Staffing numbers explain why that happens. In AISAP's 2019-20 Pathways benchmarking survey, more than half of small independent school admission offices, those handling under 200 applications a year, reported running on the equivalent of one full-time staff member. One person can't staff an open house, lead campus tours and also answer a parent's 9 p.m. text about financial aid deadlines. Something has to give, and too often it's the family who doesn't hear back until Monday.

What families actually expect from your admissions office right now

Families researching schools this fall are doing it the way they do everything else: on their phones, between tasks, at whatever hour works for them. They want a specific answer. "Tuition starts around X for your grade" is more effective than a link to a PDF. And they want to reach a real person eventually, especially for financial aid or fit questions, even if the first response is automated.

Your admissions page carries more of this weight than most schools give it credit for. We broke down what parents search for on an admissions page earlier this fall, and the pattern holds here too. Families decide fast, and a page or a chat response that doesn't answer their actual question loses them before your office ever gets a chance to follow up.

A chat widget answers questions, but it doesn't answer for your team.

Chat windows are common on admissions pages now, and that's a real improvement over a static FAQ list. A well-built one can pull the tuition range, list open grade levels and point a parent to the open house sign-up page at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. Families notice when that works.

But answering a question is different from following up with a family. Ask what happens after the chat window closes. Does anyone text that family before Saturday's open house? Does your office know which visitors keep returning to the tuition page without ever filling out the inquiry form? A tool that only lives on your website ends its job the moment the browser tab closes, and fall admissions season runs on what happens after that.

We've written before about why chatbots can't do it alone, and the fall surge is exactly where that becomes obvious. A family who chats with your website Tuesday, gets a text reminder about Saturday's open house, then calls with a financial aid question needs something that remembers all three conversations belong to the same family. Website chat tools are typically built to answer on one page. They don't follow a family anywhere past it.

Building a response system that survives event season

Here's a plan your team can use every week this fall, even during a Saturday morning open house, without overhauling your technology infrastructure.

• Give every website conversation a same-day follow-up. If a family chats with your site during business hours, someone or something should text them before the day ends, tied to whatever they asked about.
• Separate warm interest from casual browsing. A family who chatted twice and registered for a tour needs a phone call. A family who reads one page once doesn't need the same urgency, and treating every visitor identically burns staff time on the wrong people.
• Keep your source material current. A chat tool is only as accurate as the content it's pulling from. If your grade-level availability or tuition figures change mid-fall, whatever's answering families needs to know before the next inquiry comes in.
• Protect one open channel for a real person. Financial aid questions, custody or family-structure questions and anything touching a child's specific needs should route to a human quickly, no matter how good the automated first response was.
• Reset the plan weekly. Your event calendar changes week to week this time of year. What your team commits to answering personally on a light week isn't realistic during open house weekend.

Our back-to-school communications checklist covers the week-by-week planning side of this in more detail if your team hasn't mapped out the fall calendar yet. And if this feels like it should have started over the summer, our summer planning guide is the piece we'd point you to for next year.

Will automating responses make your office feel less personal?

No, not if a real person stays part of the process. Protecting the personal, high-touch feel of your admissions process is the right instinct. Families choosing an independent school are choosing a community, and they can tell when a response is canned.

The solution is automated responses that sound like your school and hand off to a real person the moment a question needs one. A text that answers a tuition question in your school's voice, followed by a real staff member calling about the campus visit, feels more attentive than a family waiting three days for either.

Handling fall's inquiry surge without burning out a small office means choosing tools that remember a family as they move from your website to a text to a phone call. That's the idea behind Halda: one platform that connects a family’s behavior across your website chat, text messages and phone calls, so nobody on your team has to ask a parent to repeat themselves. And it's built so the personal parts of your admissions process stay personal while it handles the rest.

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As Halda’s Head of Marketing, Angela Brown brings more than 15 years of experience leading marketing and content teams in education and B2B SaaS. When she isn’t at her computer, you can find her reading, watching a true crime documentary, or driving her son to basketball practice.