“By the time you notice something slipping, you're three years behind.”
Principal
A large K to 12 school in Adelaide’s south, over 1,500 students, with the opposite of an enrolment crisis. Classes are full.
From the first conversations with the marketing team, the question underneath was about the experience of the journey itself: how to align on it, and design it to feel delightful. The processes ran quite well. But is a well-run process good enough? What would it look like if it was delightful? And what would it take for it to stay that way for years, by design rather than by effort? Senior leadership held an ambition you don’t often hear said out loud: could this school become known for the best enrolment experience in its city?
The audit ran across the three layers of the enrolment ecosystem. The Enrolment Ecosystem Pulse, a behaviour-led assessment completed by nine staff across leadership, admissions, and marketing, set the baseline.
Then came listening sessions on site with everyone involved in the enrolment journey, and a review of the systems underneath. The first thing the report does is confirm what’s working, because plenty is: a team that cares deeply about its families, a journey that runs well, strong operational bones.
What the audit gave them was the direction of the next step. There’s warmth and care all through this school’s enrolment journey. The opportunity is to make it even more intentional: a shared answer to the question, what’s the enrolment experience we want to be known for?
When that answer exists, the experience stops depending on who happens to be in front of a family, and it holds its quality as people and years change. That’s the move from functional to delightful, and it’s a move you design rather than hope into being.
As for why a school in this position would do the work now, a senior leader put it best: things are going well, but by the time you notice something slipping, you’re three years behind. Strength is exactly the moment to invest in the experience. Waiting for a problem means designing from behind.
A full ecosystem audit: a Pulse baseline across nine staff, on-site listening sessions, and a systems review.
CEN had a long list of marketing goals and little capacity to deliver them, so we built a roadmap sequenced around impact, not size, starting with the levers that unblock everything else.
A small Sydney school with its first-ever marketing budget and nobody whose job was marketing. We started with a one-day workshop, because I’d never recommend a plan without a deep conversation first, and what came out was a positioning the school already believed but had never put into words.
