Mapping a Growth-Ready Enrolment Journey

MidCoast Christian College had grown fast in the four or five years before I started with them, and the systems hadn’t kept up. They’d been built for a smaller school, and “the way we’ve always done things” was straining under the size. Those ways carried real DNA, years of care from people who’d given decades to the place, which is part of why they were hard to change.

There was no defined enrolment journey. What existed was a loose sequence of steps, understood differently by different people and held together by memory. As the school grew, that stopped being manageable: no shared language, no clear pre-application pathway, the technology underused, and no visibility of early interest. Parents hit the inconsistencies, especially early on. The growth hadn’t broken anything; it had exposed what was never mapped in the first place.

Enrolment journeys are usually invisible. They live backstage, in the processes parents never see, and the backstage shapes the frontstage experience (Will Guidara’s point in Unreasonable Hospitality). When the steps aren’t mapped, the handovers between marketing, admissions, and leadership are where information and trust get lost.

So across two facilitated workshops we mapped the whole journey, from first awareness to the first day of school. We defined each stage, named the moments that matter, captured what parents need at each one, and worked out the processes behind them. Once the journey was up on a board it stopped being a set of individual opinions and became a shared system the team owned, and that visibility is what let them see the wasted effort on their side and the friction on the parents’.

It became the foundation for what followed: consistent tours, automated communications, better enquiry tracking. The burden of the experience moved from the staff to the system.