93. Understanding and Leveraging Data for Independent Schools with James Riley

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Tara: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing. I’m Tara Clase. 

Aubrey: And I’m Aubrey Bursch. Today we’re joined by James Riley. James taught high school math and statistics for 20 years at both public and private schools. He retired from teaching in 2017 and launched Forward Data Works to address the growing need for schools to make data driven decisions with the goal of helping decision makers evaluate the potential return on investment for programs, policies, and strategic plans.

Welcome, James. We’re so excited to have you here and to talk about data. 

James: Thanks. I’m excited to be here as well. I appreciate you all having me. 

Tara: Yeah. We love talking about data. And I especially love spreadsheets. Actually, data is often seen as a buzzword in many sectors. But how specifically can independent and private schools leverage data to inform decision making, particularly around admissions and also strategic planning?

James: Really good question. And that’s sort of how I got into this sector. Is having spent my whole adult life working in schools. I noticed that there was a lack of leveraging a lot of the data that’s available to administrators and stakeholders and boards and so on and so forth. So, you know, in terms of admissions, there’s.

There’s a couple of different sectors that I work with schools with admissions. One is just kind of boots on the ground with your constituents, people who are families who are applying to your school and doing post admission surveys and they can come in a couple of forms. One is a really a quick survey, like at an open house where you throw a QR code up on the screen.

Or some send out some quick link and it’s maybe five questions and you can just get some instantaneous feedback. And then there are bigger types of surveys that you can do after the admission season. And then there’s also a focus group type of surveys that I’ve done where I’m acting as a third party agent.

And that allows me to elicit feedback. more candid responses from the families who have applied to your school, some of whom have accepted admission, some of whom have not, and have actual conversations you know, via zoom like this and get really in depth feedback about what families are looking for, what worked well in the admissions process, what didn’t work well why they may have chosen your school or not.

We can always dig really deep and have candid conversations around financial aid. That sometimes families are not as forthcoming with the actual, you know, school administrators and leadership. And so that’s, that’s kind of one way. The other way is like, what, you know, what marketing are you doing?

Is it traditional print? Are you? Buying Facebook ads. Are you, you know, doing any kind of digital marketing and What is your the firm that you’ve hired unless you’re doing it in house which most schools are not most schools aren’t big enough to do It in house, you know, how are they tracking that? How are they looking at the tags and the pixels for remarketing and the conversion metrics and all those things, you know do you have a handle on what’s actually working or You know, is your firm just telling you to spend money on these ads that aren’t actually driving families, you know, into your door and then ultimately, you know, kids in seats, you know, so tracking all of that can be difficult, but once you kind of set it up and lay that groundwork you really can’t you, you have to know what’s working and what’s not.

The other, the other thing is doing like demographic analysis. I’ve done this for a number of schools. We’re looking at where the opportunities might exist in your market. You know, all independent schools are different, you know, sizes, communities. Are you in a big city? Are you in a rural area?

What, you know, what’s your competition like? And therefore, what, what demographics are supporting your actual community and what What sort of untapped demographics have you not explored? For example, where I live here in Augusta, Georgia when I look out my kitchen window, I can see the state of South Carolina.

We’re right on, on the border. And so that creates this weird, you know, there’s, there’s lots of, you know, and like in the DMV where, where, where you are, you know, there’s this weird, like, I don’t want to cross that bridge because I feel like I went into a different planet. Right. But you know, for my case, South Carolina is right there.

So maybe there’s some untapped opportunities to get people to just, you know, people are, people are driving 45 minutes, you know, potentially go to your school. What’s the difference whether they’re coming from a different state or not? And then the other thing is, is getting a handle on How do you want to shape your community?

You know, again, like I said, all schools are, are different. And do you want to grow your theater program? Do you want to grow your robotics program? You know, top of mind always comes, you know, sports, you know, lots of schools are known for their sports programs where they have a good football team or a good soccer team or girls volleyball and so on, but.

You know, schools are more than just sports. And so those other extracurricular activities often shape what a school is about. And where did those kids come from? Like what feeder schools are actually supporting your theater program that you would like to bolster. And then the other thing I was going to mention is, Other analyses that I do sort of outside of admissions, we often use those as marketing messages.

When you find a win at a school, you should market the heck out of it, whether that’s traditional print or, you know, more more currently social media, you know, getting stuff out on, on Twitter or your Facebook page about the wins that you saw in some analysis that we might have, may have done for your school.

And then in terms of strategic planning I would say the, the biggest pitfall for strategic planning is not putting things in place that are in fact measurable, you know, having an action item and, and coming up with the metrics either beforehand or at the same time that you make that strategic plan, you know, oftentimes you get to the end of that five year cycle and, and people on the boardroom are saying, well, did we accomplish this?

Did we accomplish that? And nobody thought, did How are we going to actually measure this? How are we going to figure out and determine if we were successful or not? And so it said like the cart before the horse type of thing, you know, you have to put things in place that you can actually measure at the end of that cycle of that strategic plan.

And that’s, that’s super important, but we can go into more depth of any of those things that you like. That’s 

Tara: kind of 

James: overview of how I approach those things with administrators. 

Tara: Yeah, I think that’s helpful. I mean, talking about how to make these strategic plans and the data that you’re giving for those plans actionable, you know, that’s, I wonder also what kind of reception you have, you know, sometimes the information is not what they expect or want to hear.

And so maybe talk a little bit about About that, like, well, how do you make them actionable based on maybe things that don’t meet the expectations of what the school is looking for? 

James: Sure. And you sort of have to be prepared for that. And again, I think that comes from laying the groundwork in the beginning when you’re making a strategic plan.

How are we going to feel, you know, as a, as a governing body, as a board, as an administrator, how are we going to feel if this doesn’t shake out the way we thought it would? And how are we going to pivot around that? So, for example, let’s say you want to do a curriculum overhaul and you want to look for certain signposts for, you know, how we’ve evolved this curriculum.

Well, how are we going to address that if we, if that curriculum should change? Didn’t actually affect positive change. You know, how are we just going to measure that with grades? Are we going to measure that with test scores? Are we going to measure that with standardized test scores, SATs and ERBs and MAP and and those types of things and that can be tricky because the the folks who are boots on the ground the teaching faculty is often you know carrying that that mantle and so if there’s any type of pushback You You have to be prepared for something not working and and sort of have an alternate plan for that.

But I think that going into it with with clear eyes and having good conversations with your faculty. I’m a bit biased because I was a classroom teacher for 20 years. And I, and I, you know, have a cynical tank of all the things that didn’t work out correctly. You know that that were foisted upon us as a faculty.

that we were resistant to. I think having candid conversations with your faculty about why we’re going to institute this change, why is this our goal, why is this our strategic plan, what do we hope to accomplish? And I think having those conversations really gets more folks on board and the more folks you can get on board, the smoother your, your path is, I think.

Aubrey: Yeah, that’s really interesting. You know, it is having those conversations and making sure people know the lie. We’re not just asking one more thing of you, or we’re not just that’s right. I’ve been a faculty too. I’m not faculty. I’ve been staffed. And I also feel that sometimes. So I’m curious, you know, when you were just mentioning strategic plans and implementation, you know, if you’re, can you think of, like, perhaps a school client where the data really helped them, like an example of how the data helped them and what the outcome was?

It’s sort of a case study. 

James: Yeah, and I actually used the one that I presented with your symposium. It’s a really good one, partially because it revolves around COVID, which schools are still struggling with the aftermath of those learning deficiencies. And that’s really what prompted. This particular project, which was creating a an entrance exam particularly around mathematics to see where kids were struggling.

This particular independent school actually draws a lot of kids from public school. And it’s a middle school, so it’s taking kids later on. You know, if you’re a pre k to 12, you know, sometimes heads will joke, you know, our, our admissions policy is potty trained, you know. That, that’s all we’ve got at, At pre k right, but if you’re a high school or even if you start fifth or sixth grade You have other evaluative measures and that doesn’t mean you necessarily use that as an admission strategy And this school was not really using it as an admission strategy.

They’re using as a Remediation strategy they wanted to get their arms around What these kids what deficits these kids were bringing with them? And, and then how do we adjust the curriculum to, to meet these kids where they are, whether that’s as an entire cohort, you know, the entire sixth grade class is coming in with these deficits or it’s individual kids that we really need to remediate.

Keep our eye on have frank conversations with parents, maybe get them help outside the school that the school’s not poised to, to offer. So those types of things I think are really good, you know, win messages. And that’s also what we were just talking about with, you know, getting the faculty on board.

That’s something that you have to get the faculty on board with. You know, why are we doing this? Why are we hiring, you know, this firm to recreate, you know, some kind of an entrance exam. And then what are we going to do with it? And how my, my business has evolved over time as technology has gotten better is a lot of what I do now is build dashboards and that actually really helps not only administrators, but it also helps present to faculty.

Because they can see in real time what we’re looking at. Why we’re looking at this data, what this data says, and the action items that we’re going to take. In this particular example with this school, again, if we have a cohort of 6th graders that are coming in that all have deficiencies in fractions or, or decimals, I mean, that’s really great to know.

If I’m, I’m a math teacher, that’s Fantastic information as I start the school year. Who wants to trip over that in October and realize, oh, well all my plans are now out the window because I didn’t realize we’re going to spend two to three weeks on fractions and decimals. I didn’t know that, you know, and now I have to, I’ve got to re pivot and, and, you know, it’s great to know that in August before, before you, before you go into it.

Another, another example is a school I work with had a lot of leadership change all at, all at kind of one time for various reasons. And one of the new assistant principals wanted to get their arms around some of the Test scores. Standardized test scores. That’s either ERB or map. And they wanted to use that as a launching point to examine the curriculum and then make some goals around that.

And what we did was we started really slowly. We started slowly. We got some buy in from the faculty. I went and presented to them what I do with other schools. And when we came around to the next school year, we used that as an opening the school year type of conversation where faculty were able to set goals around what they saw in previous years.

It worked out really well for this school, but this school was doing a lot of things right. And because I have lots of clients who also do this type of metric work, I was able to tell them, without mentioning anybody else’s name, y’all are doing very, very well on a national level. What you’re doing here in this school is actually working.

And so again, starting slowly, getting that faculty buy in, and then once they see those results, you know, then it’s, it’s all downhill from there.

Aubrey: That’s so intriguing. I’m, I’m really interested in how you’re presenting the data too. It’s like you’re presenting positives too. I think a lot of people think data is, you know, this negative thing and that’s, you know, we’re going to go into this and they’re going to give us some really unfortunate news, which sometimes you have to, but you know, I, I think, I think that’s really important to showcase that sometimes it’s surprisingly good.

And like, how amazing would that be for marketing to say you are like one of the top. You know, your test scores are up here. Like, that’s wonderful. I mean, we’re a marketing podcast. We’re like, yes, we’ll shout it from the roof. You know, that’s a great thing to be able to, to highlight and everything like that.

Tara, did you have a question? No. Okay. I was excited to shift, shift the conversation a little bit to admissions. A lot of our listeners are involved in the admissions process, you know? And. You know, now we’re seeing a fluctuations in admissions, depending on where you live, you know, what’s going on in your world.

And like, we had see some of the cobit bubble bursting and, you know, in a moment, I’m curious, like, when you’re thinking about, like, data points in admissions, like, let’s talk to a school who isn’t monitoring, like, any data. Points, like what are like the top five data points or something that you would say, look, this is the must have for, for a school.

You gotta just at the very least, if you can measure these from year to year, from season to season, like this isn’t going to set you up for success. I’d love to hear your perspective on this. 

James: Yeah. In broad strokes I would say look for the patterns that you think are affecting you negatively, you know, where it is.

And so I do that broadly because every school is going to have, you know, slightly different pain points of where they think their marketing strategy, you know, has some deficiencies. So. The first thing is just look for patterns. You know, for example what, what, what’s responsible for your attrition is does the 80, 20 rule reply apply?

Do 20 percent of your feeder schools, are they responsible for 80 percent of your attrition? Well, then maybe you stop marketing so much to those feeder schools because those kids just don’t last for whatever reason. And maybe you want to solve that problem with, with, you know, school leadership and deans and department chairs.

Maybe that there, there is. to that. But in admissions, you want to look for those patterns. The other thing you want to look for is, I mentioned this earlier, where the opportunities exist for you to grow whatever part of the school you think you want to grow. For example, If you want to grow, you know, if you think a good strategy is let’s grow the pre k program Let’s grow the let’s go to grow the pre k threes, you know, because then we have these, you know kids for a lifetime you know, it’s certainly less costly to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one, right marketing 101 and so Where are those families?

Where are the families that have two year olds who are then, you know, in a year’s time going to be looking for that pre k experience? Where, where are they? Where, you know, do they exist? It’s really easy for us to, you know, as citizens, we, We have these heuristics and we just think that because I saw something on the street Then x must be true like I drive by elementary schools all the time There must be lots of kids in the city.

Is there how do you know? Well, we have census data for that, right? So we can use census data and look at all the way down to the zip code basically Where the demographics are in your area and then the next the follow up question is okay We want to grow a specific constituency in our school Do you need full pay families or are you trying to diversify your school?

And you know, I, I would love if I had all the free time, I would love to do a research study on you know, the Supreme court ruling about admissions in colleges. So they can’t use race. My first thought was, okay, use something else. That’s not the only thing that makes schools diverse, right? And particularly, especially in independent schools, it’s often socioeconomic.

That is really the underlying factor. And so if you want to grow diversely, Where are your full pay families? Where are your partial pay families? Where are your full need families? And what, you know, what monies do you have for scholarships? And are you marketing those scholarships? Do the people in your community know that these scholarships exist?

Often independent schools get a bad rap about elitism and You know, I would imagine that lots of lower income families think, Oh, well, I can never go to that school. I drive by at car pickup every day and I see 80, 000 cars there. Now, I couldn’t go. I couldn’t send my kids there, but maybe you can.

There are lots of schools with lots of budgetary earmarks for scholarships. And so have you marketed to those families? So those are, those are the major ones. The other ones I mentioned earlier are, are doing, doing surveys. And they can be very, very quick. Again, doing like a quick five question survey after an open house.

When you have a captive audience, that is like, that is, that’s the gold standard right there. Captive audience. Because if you just send out a A survey via email, you’re gonna get like, sometimes within independent schools, we see upwards of 10 percent response rate, you know, which is really good you know, in the marketing world but in an open house, you’re gonna get, if, you know, you have these families sitting in the bleachers of your gym, or they’re in your, your auditorium, or your black box theater, you’re gonna get 80 percent response rate.

There’s gonna be a few people, I I don’t feel like opening my phone and doing this, you know, survey, but you’re going to get a lot of good responses or after when you do individual tours, you know, have an iPad ready that already has the survey ready to go. There’s there’s no barrier to entry. You don’t need to know anything about electronics.

Everybody’s touched the screen at this point in their life. And just hand folks an iPad and say, hey, we’ve got, you know, 5 questions for you have a seat on the sofa over here in the lounge and do us a favor and answer these questions. And then, like I said, we do. With with schools, we do do actual email surveys and we, you know, again, we get about a 10 percent response, right?

And it does give us it does give us good information about how the admission process is working and then I mentioned doing those kind of focus group types of things where I would actually interview parents, you know one on one and get really in depth look because we find that the majority of the decision making thing After application comes down to money a lot of times it is financial aid because once a once a family has already Come to your school.

They’ve toured they come to the open house and they’ve applied they’ve gone through all that work They want to come there, you know, most likely they do want to come there So when you when you’re asking families, why didn’t you come, you know, a lot of times it comes down to money and that’s That’s data.

That’s a message that you need to take back to your board. You know, we, we feel like we lost a lot of quality families. We feel like we lost a lot of diverse families. We want to grow our theater program. Just as an example, we want to grow our robotics program and we want to bring these kids in. What can we do as a five year plan?

Now we’re, everything’s starting to dovetail, right? Now Venn diagram of strategic planning. and admissions and all of this kind of falls together. We go to the board and say, we need, we need more money for scholarships. We need to be able to support the families in our community because we want a diverse group here.

We don’t want just people who can full pay, you know, if, if that’s, if that’s what your, your mission is, right. But that’s the, that’s a way to go find. Those people look for those Market opportunities, where do they exist? What zip codes what zip codes haven’t you tapped yet? You know what zip codes do you feel like your competitors?

Are sort of gobbling up and again, I mentioned this to begin this changes, you know in every market They’re all different if you’re in a big city, you know, there could be 40 independent schools of high caliber. They’re really competing for, you know, a finite number of families or you know, here in Augusta where I live, you know, there’s about 200, 000 people here.

And after that, there’s farmland. Like, once you get outside of the city, you better drive to Atlanta if you won’t see another person, you know, so every, every market’s very, very different. You really have to understand, I think, the geography and the demographics of that market. Just throwing out this net, like, Oh, we’re going to send out a mailer.

Well, who are you going to send that to? You know, what zip codes? Are you just going to keep sending it to the zip codes where you have an influx of families already? Well, why? You know, is that a pattern? It might be, but it also might not be. Maybe you’re missing out on some other opportunities. 

Tara: What I love about all of this is that I think data can be very intimidating and you make it sound, you know, very relatable.

So, and it just feels a lot, it feels a lot less intimidating. So I appreciate you’re going over all these different ideas. I’m going to flip a little bit to talk about mindfulness. Because I guess when you think about things being intimidating, sometimes it’s because you’re maybe not, you know, Feeling calm.

So not that that’s what mindfulness is, but I’m going to ask you that. What, what, how do you define mindfulness and how would you apply it to to what you’re doing with data for schools and, and working with data? 

James: Yeah, I think mindfulness, you know, at its core is just being present. So you don’t need to be sitting on a mat with your, with your legs folded and your eyes closed necessarily.

It’s just about being present. And I think that translates into schools and how they work with data. And I’ll bring this back to you know, the faculty, because, you know, I am biased because I was a teacher, but I think The faculty really is the lifeblood and the engine of the school. And when you have, and at the same time, you know, an independent school, while it has its uniqueness, it is also an employer.

And it’s a workplace. And so I think using your data to drive what is making your faculty happy, making them content. Most teachers are lifelong learners, and to the extent that you’re supporting that or not supporting that, I think is is something you all schools should soul search. And so the mindfulness part is Being present without getting caught up in too far out on the horizon.

We were talking about strategic planning and sometimes that, I think, clouds the focus of the day to day. We want to build this new building for, you know, 10 million and put a robotics lab in it. Okay, but are your employees leaving en masse? You know, are you, you have a great attrition, right? We think about, we think about attrition in inbound schools with families and kids, but what about, what about your employees?

And so I think mindfulness is like getting back to the basics and thinking about, hey, what do kids need to be successful? You know, is that, is that changing in a modern world? I think you get debate. Yes and no. Like Maslow’s hierarchies like still gonna be there. But when we look at, say, public schools, for example, you know, most public schools now give kids breakfast.

And when did it become incumbent upon a school to feed a child, but at the same time, how do you not feed a child? There’s no way that you want a third grader sitting in your class you know, in public school who hasn’t eaten in 16 hours. There’s just no way you want that. And so schools have had to pick up that slack.

That’s a societal question, you know, but that’s an example of, you know, what do kids need? And do, does your, does your faculty have the tools there to give kids? And in terms of kind of bring this back to like some of the data collection stuff when we’re talking about, you know, how do you sell this to your constituency in your in your community?

Don’t make things hard for your faculty. So a lot of what I do when I work with schools is Working with like doing some intake forms. Like we need to collect data. Let’s make a really simple intake form that faculty can do in 30 seconds. That’s really simple to use. You never want to burden faculty with more or what they perceive to be more work because they’re already perceived to be overworked.

So you, I think you really want to be mindful about that, about how your faculty is. is engaged and, and what, you know, what tools they need for your kids, your students to be successful. And I think, I think in my experience working in the schools, that gets lost a lot of times. And I think that’s where there’s a cultural breakdown.

I think schools would be a lot better off, you know, focusing on what kids need and how do we give the tools to faculty to make that happen.

Aubrey: That’s so good. Thank you so much for sharing that. I’m going to switch this a little bit to one of my favorite parts of our episodes. The rapid fire question. Are you kind of ready to dive into rapid fire? 

James: I am. Yes, ma’am. 

Aubrey: You sound very confident. Awesome. If you could put one book as mandatory reading in the high school curriculum, what would it be?

James: I’ve got two because I’ve got one for kids and one for faculty for kids. It’s the Gifts of Imperfections by Brené Brown. It’s written for adults, but it’s written on a level that I think most kids, definitely high school kids could, could consume. And I think it’s so important in this day and age of social media where kids, I think, have a warped sense of really what reality is and how imperfect it is.

In, in a world that’s varnished with perfection to them. I think it’s so important for them to know themselves at, at that, that very important age when they’re making decisions about where to go to college. And whether to pad their transcript or not, you know, and sort of kill themselves in the process.

And that’s, that’s for kids. And the one for, for faculty, really more for administrators, is a book called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Godara. And it’s sort of gained a small amount of fame because it’s featured in the show The Bear. For, for fans of the bear, it’s, I think it’s in season one and it’s the book that Richie is reading at the kitchen table.

And it just very much describes a restaurant where he stodges. So but it, it’s about creating a, a culture in a workplace that, that supports your employees. 

Tara: I love the bear. It’s a great show. What is one app you could not live without? 

James: My favorite app, I’m still a teacher at heart, and it’s an app called Desmos, which is a graphing calculator.

I just think it is the greatest. I don’t want to, like, bash any particular company by name, but, you know, companies that make physical handheld calculators P. S., they’re the same calculator that I used in high school. So the technology can’t, obviously did not evolve. And Desmos is just so super user friendly and it is so powerful without having getting caught up in where’s everything in a menu, like digging deep in these menus to find out what I need to do.

Need to accomplish what I’m trying to calculate. It’s just a wonderful, it’s just wonderfully designed. And it’s free. It’s unbelievable that it’s free because I would pay lots of money for it. 

Aubrey: Don’t tell them that. Well, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone share about that on our podcast.

So you are informing our listeners as we speak. So fantastic. What are you reading right now? 

James: I’m actually rereading some fiction right now. I’m reading Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe. I read it when I was in my 20s and I’m, I’m rereading it now. I just, I love Thomas Wolfe. And I’m gonna reread all his, all his books, I think, throughout this, this winter, so.

Tara: Great. Thank you. We’ve really gotten a lot of information from you today, and I’m so grateful. Thank you for joining us. Our last rapid fire question is, what is one great piece of advice you can leave us with? 

James: I think it is always define your metrics, figure out what Your metrics are it’ll not just help you with running a school, you know, necessarily.

I think it helps you have good conversations with people, particularly in the polarized country that we live in. Now you know, Somebody says, you know, is the economy doing well? And one person says, no, my brother in law just got laid off. That’s not data. That’s an anecdote. Or someone else says, the economy’s doing great, the stock market is up.

Okay, well the stock market is not the economy. Or what percentage of people are actually in the stock market, you know, have investments in the stock market? It’s actually very, very low. You know, in our country. And so you kind of defining your metrics. I think you can have much better conversations with people and say, let’s decide on what metric we would use to debate this.

And I think doing that brings people much closer to the center where most people really, really are. They’re not as polarized as, as we’re led to believe. And so defining your metrics, I think is one of the most important things most people can do. 

Tara: That is great. I love that. Not anecdotes. Yes. Where, where can people find you online?

James: So my website is fwdataworks. com and my company is Forward Dataworks. 

Tara: Great. Thank you so much for joining us, James. We really enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. This is great. Have a great day. Have a great one. You too. 

James: Thanks.