A fractional partnership for schools that want sustained alignment across enrolment, brand, and communications.
One-off projects create momentum. But momentum fades without continuity.
Advisory is a sustained thinking partnership that keeps your school's enrolment ecosystem aligned through the year. Regular sessions, in-person visits, and access to Bolsta's tools and frameworks — designed so each conversation picks up where the last one left off.
Input spans all three streams: clarity and alignment, story and experience, and creative and infrastructure.
$1,500 per month. 12-month engagement.
Schools don’t stand still, and neither should the support around them.
Marketing priorities shift term to term. Staff change. New challenges surface. A one-off project can set direction, but without sustained input, teams drift back to old patterns or lose the thread of what was started.
Advisory provides the continuity to keep enrolment, brand, and communications work aligned — without adding another role to the payroll or another project to the calendar.
Advisory is a thinking partnership built around sessions, visits, and guided conversations.
3 advisory sessions (60 minutes, online) plus email follow-up between sessions. Sessions cover whatever is most useful — strategy, alignment, planning, or working through a specific challenge.
4 in-person visits for workshops, facilitation, or stakeholder conversations. Additional visits beyond the included four are billed for travel. Plus one full Enrolment Ecosystem Pulse to track progress and surface new patterns.
Strategy or alignment facilitation during calls or visits. Input across the three streams (clarity, story, creative). Guided access to Bolsta’s tools and frameworks — journey maps, experience cards, story scaffolds, archetype work, and the marketing flywheel. Priority access on additional work commissioned during the engagement.
Advisory is a thinking partnership, not a delivery retainer. It does not include significant background work, asset preparation, or independent project delivery (scoped separately), day-to-day operational responsibilities (CRM setup, content creation, admissions admin), or internal project management and logistics.
Sustained input across enrolment, brand, and communications — so your team stays aligned and your work compounds.
Three sessions per term (60 minutes, online) to maintain momentum and keep work on track
Four visits per year for workshops, facilitation, or stakeholder conversations
One full Pulse per year to track progress and surface new patterns
Guided access to journey maps, experience cards, story scaffolds, archetype work, and the marketing flywheel
Frequently Asked Questions
Advisory runs as a 12-month engagement. It’s built as a sustained partnership rather than a short-term retainer, because steady input across the year produces better outcomes than occasional check-ins. The shape reflects how the work actually pays off, not a desire to tie anyone down.
If your situation changes, we talk about it openly. This is built on mutual value, not a lock-in contract, so the conversation is always a real one. The 12-month shape is there because sustained input works better than stop-start, not to trap anyone who genuinely needs to step back.
Each term you get three 60-minute advisory sessions with email follow-up in between, and you can reach Jacob by email any time. Across the year that also includes four in-person visits for Australian schools, a full Enrolment Ecosystem Pulse, guided access to our tools and frameworks, and coaching and strategic support shaped to your situation. That support flexes to whatever you’re facing. Recently it’s meant managing the communications of a brand rollout, helping a school shape a new vision, mission and values, rebuilding a marketing and admissions team’s processes and roles, and guiding a school through how it uses student images online, along with the policy, creative and communications changes that came with it.
Continuity, without the overhead of a retainer or the cost of a full-time hire. Over time we become part of the furniture: we already know your context, your team and your history, so each session picks up where the last left off rather than starting cold. Schools are dynamic places, and the real value is being able to roll with that, with no re-scoping or fresh quotes for every small thing. We’re simply available, so rather than mucking around with approvals, we get on with the work.
We rewrote CEN’s entire services canon and re-architected their website from the school’s point of view, without rebuilding it, turning eleven ungrouped services into five clear categories and the generic pages into role-based guides.
As part of the brand relaunch we wrote a manifesto, a poetic call to arms that ties the school’s story, purpose, and values into one flag-in-the-ground moment. Then we made it the script for a film, with students, staff, and community members each reading a line.
Most school marketing plans die on a shelf. Build an operating rhythm instead: five areas, three tiers, one flywheel, so your marketing actually runs all year.
What makes a good school website? Organise it around the family’s decision, not the org chart. Structure, story, the enrolment path, and when to rebuild.
The way your school communicates, and the experiences it designs, aren’t a bolt-on to the real work. They sit alongside your other important strategic initiatives as a pillar in their own right.
A locked brand gets checked against; a living one gets written from. On orienting principles, worlds with a centre, and why strategy is a starting point, not a conclusion.
