You’re a team of a few doing the work of many.
Bolsta is the senior partner behind your work, helping you shape the story your school tells and the experience families have.
How we work with you
You know the real work isn’t another flyer. But “marketing” gets read as ads and posters, so the story and experience work struggles for a budget or a green light, and the decisions that shape it sometimes get made in rooms you’re not in.
We don’t turn up with a brief and leave with a deliverable. We do the journey with you, embedded in the school for the length of a project. The work starts by listening: we draw the story out of your community, then design the experience around it and build the visible things on top.
A lot of the real work sits in the middle, where leadership, your team and families all want slightly different things. We join those up, and help you get leadership on the same page, since an outside voice often changes how the thing you’ve been saying lands in the room.
Does any of this sound familiar?
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“I’m writing generic, vague edu-jargon that doesn’t feel connected to who our school really is.”
We build a story and messaging guardrails your whole team can draw from.
Story and experience -
“Everything we put out is a bit different, and none of it quite looks or sounds like us.”
One story and one look across every channel, so the school reads as one place.
Creative and infrastructure -
“Families are slipping away between enquiry and enrolment, and I can’t see where.”
We map the whole journey and design the moments that matter.
Clarity and alignment -
“There’s so much to fix, and I don’t know what to tackle first.”
We diagnose first, then hand you a sequence matched to your goals and capacity.
The Enrolment Ecosystem™ Audit -
“We need to get more enquiries coming in.”
We find the moves that bring more of the right families, and the staff to grow with them.
All services -
“We’ve got a new direction, and I have to carry it into everything we say.”
We build the language and materials that carry the new chapter.
Story Strategy
A partnership all the way.
“We could suddenly see the direction we needed to go, and the changes we needed to make to clean up our strategies and processes.”
Allie Smith MidCoast Christian College Communications Manager “The shift from ‘marketing’ to ‘experience’ was a real turning point for our team. Focusing on the journey has made our communication feel much more authentic.”
Katy Devers Kairos Community College Marketing, Communications and Community Engagement Manager “There has been a dramatic shift in the way we approach both our teams’ work and tours in general.”
Nick Lawrence Torrens Valley Christian School Head of Marketing and Enrolments “Jacob worked some magic in his respectful approach to our team and running a workshop that had us all pulling in the same direction.”
“The work has helped me to look at the organisation as a whole and to take a step back from the day to day.”
I have sat where you sit.
In the early days of Bolsta I worked a marketing role inside a school, on site for a few years. So I know how it feels to care this much and still feel like the work is misread.
You carry enrolment targets, and at the same time you carry families through one of the more anxious decisions they will make. It is your words that parents are actually meeting. That is a real responsibility, and much of the work that goes into it is never seen.
I have watched what happens when someone in your seat stops thinking in marketing and starts thinking in experience. The job stops being a treadmill of outputs and becomes about the moments that decide how a family feels. The work gets more honest, and, oddly, easier to do, because you finally have something true to point at.
Your school is worth experiencing, and your real job, the one under the title, is to help families feel that. Mine is to make that job possible, give it coherence, and make it a little less lonely.
Jacob Shultz Founder and director
Questions we’re often asked.
I can’t get leadership to back the deeper work. Can you help with that?
Often, yes. You usually already know what needs to change; what’s missing is the structure that makes leadership act on it. An outside voice changes how the same point lands in a leadership meeting, and we build it with you, so it’s your name on the thinking, not just ours.
We’re a small team with a lot on. Will this add to our workload?
The opposite is the goal. We’re the senior partner behind your work, so we carry the load rather than hand you more, and we build the capability and systems that make the everyday lighter. We scope to the capacity you actually have, not a fixed package that assumes a bigger team.
How do you work with our team and board?
Alongside them. We carry the strategic and creative weight of the project and work closely with the people who’ll own the outcome, building their capability as we go. Where we can, we also ask for a direct line to your wider team and board, so every layer of your school feels invested in the work and we can advocate for the right outcomes alongside you. The principles and frameworks stay with your team, so they can keep extending the work after we finish.
Where do we start?
Start with a conversation. If you’d like a head start, the six questions on our homepage suggest a first step for your situation. Some schools begin with a single workshop; others start with the Enrolment Ecosystem™ Audit to get a clear picture first. Either way, we’d rather understand your school before you commit to anything significant.
How do you price your work?
The right scope depends on your unique situation. We have accessible offers like workshops starting from around $3,000 AUD, through to larger multi-stage investments, and we’re always happy to talk them through on a call. We won’t string you along; it just helps to understand a little context first.
