“Our school is wonderful but no one seems to know it.”
“We know there are gaps between what’s on the website, what’s said on a phone call and what happens on a tour, but we don’t know where to start fixing them.”
“Marketing and admissions don’t work well together.”
These are things we hear often when schools first come to us. On the surface, they seem like separate problems… A branding issue here, a communication gap there, a team alignment challenge over there.
But here’s what we’ve learned: they’re usually symptoms of the same underlying issue. Your story isn’t doing the job it should be doing.
Most schools think of story as an external thing: the messaging on your website, the language in your prospectus, maybe a tagline or brand promise. And yes, story is those things. But that’s only half of what story actually does in a healthy enrolment journey.
Story works in two directions
The first direction is outward.
This is the one everyone focuses on: How do we tell families who we are? What do we put on the website? How do we explain what makes us different?
The second direction is inward.
Story shapes how your team understands their work, talks about the school, and makes decisions together. It’s what helps your admissions officer know how to guide a conversation with a confused parent. It’s what gives your marketing manager confidence about which social posts matter and which are just noise. It’s what helps a teacher on a tour explain why your approach to learning actually works.
When your story is clear, everyone on your team has shared language about who you are and who you serve.
- Marketing knows what to emphasise in social posts and how to produce strategic marketing that connects to the right families
- Admissions knows how to guide conversations and discover (and meet) the needs of families
- Teachers understand what they’re part of when they speak to prospective families on a tour
- Leadership can make confident strategic decisions aligned with identity rather than reacting to what competitor schools do
When your story is unclear or disconnected, people work harder but pull in different directions. The prospectus emphasises one thing, the website another, the tour guide a third. Marketing creates campaigns that admissions doesn’t know how to convert. Everyone’s trying, but the effort doesn’t compound because there’s no coherent centre.
Story is the thread that holds your enrolment journey together, both for the families experiencing it and the team delivering it.
Three ways story gets told
Stories don’t all carry the same weight. They get told and remembered in order of impact.
Written story
Written story is where most schools start. Website copy, prospectus messaging, email sequences. Words matter! They establish expectations and frame what families are looking for.
But written words are easily forgotten. They compete with dozens of other school websites families are reading. And if your written story sounds like everyone else’s, it barely registers at all.
Visual story
Visual story creates emotional connection in ways words can’t. Families see your spaces, your students, your culture. They start to imagine their child in your environment. A parent might forget your mission statement, but they’ll remember the image of students collaborating in your library or the feeling they got watching your welcome video.
Experienced story
Experienced story is what actually makes families choose you or go elsewhere. The phone call. The email exchange. The tour. The way your team responds when something goes wrong. This is where your story stops being something you control and becomes something families feel.
Here’s the thing: experienced story trumps everything else.
Why the gaps keep happening
Here’s the pattern we see constantly. Schools invest in new websites, refresh their brand, produce video content, all while the underlying experience remains unchanged.
So… Your messaging and materials look more polished. The photography is beautiful. The copy is compelling. But families still experience the same disconnects they always did.
They read thoughtful language about care and community on your website. Then they call and get put on hold, transferred twice, and reach someone who seems unsure how to help them.
Or they tour the school with a guide who recites program details but never asks what the family is actually trying to understand. The written story promised “we see every child.” The actual moment felt generic.
This is why the gaps persist between what’s on the website, what’s said on a phone call, and what happens on a tour. You’ve improved the written and visual story without examining what families actually experience.
And that gap – between what you promised and what they felt – is what quietly erodes trust.
When all three align
The schools that grow sustainably aren’t just the ones with the best messaging or the prettiest websites. They’re the ones where what families experience matches what they were told.
Think about it: when a family calls your school, does the person who answers sound like they work at the place your website describes? When they tour, do they see and feel what your brand materials promised? When they ask a complicated question, does your response reflect the care you say defines your approach?
When the answer is yes, that alignment is what builds trust. And trust is what transforms anxious, uncertain families into confident enrolments.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Your website describes how you approach parent partnership. When a parent calls with a question, the conversation reflects that philosophy. When they tour, the guide asks about their child’s needs before launching into school features. When they receive a follow-up email, it references what they specifically asked about. Every moment reinforces every other moment.
The message they read prepares them for the experience they’ll have. The experience they have proves the story you told. The story you told gives them language for what they felt.
What this creates over time
When story works in both directions – externally for families and internally for teams – the effects compound in ways that isolated improvements never do.
Better-fit families enrol because the experience helped them understand fit clearly. Those families stay because the school they experience matches what they were told. They tell others about you because that kind of alignment is rare and worth sharing.
Your team stops burning out because they’re not constantly managing the gap between promise and reality. They start taking pride in the work because they see how their piece contributes to something coherent.
Marketing and admissions stop feeling like separate departments with competing priorities. They become collaborators in delivering one integrated experience.
Your school’s reputation strengthens because what families experience increasingly aligns with what you said they’d experience.
Where to start
If you’re reading this and recognising your school, here’s what we’d suggest:
Before you refresh your website or update your prospectus, spend time examining what families actually experience. Call your own school and see what happens. Join a tour as an observer. Read the email sequences your CRM sends. Ask your team what feels misaligned.
The disconnects you find aren’t failures, they’re just places where the lived experience hasn’t caught up to the story you want to tell.
The real work isn’t writing better copy or taking better photos. It’s designing experiences that are worth telling stories about, then making sure your messaging and materials reflect what families will actually encounter.
That’s when story stops being something you manage and becomes something that holds your enrolment journey together naturally.
If your school is working through questions like these, we’d be glad to talk. We help schools clarify their story and design the enrolment journey that proves it, so what families experience matches what you told them, and your team can deliver it without burning out.
About the author
Jacob Shultz
Founder, Bolsta Education
Jacob is a specialist in experience strategy for schools. His focus is on improving the lived experience of schools — through story, systems and the small moments that shape how families feel.
