The PEJE Challenge Award, and all the great school-generated content that followed (such as this great video from Lander~Grinspoon Academy), reminded us of the following: Do not underestimate the positive impact generated when a school is publically recognized for its excellence. 

For instance, the most instructive moment in this video, from the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, occurs at the 8:16 mark: Former teacher Eileen Samuels remembers back to the 1980s, when the TV show Chronicle featured SSDS in a piece about outstanding secondary schools. “And after that program, it was no longer a hunt for warm bodies for the school,” she adds. “The line was around the block!”

The idea that a television newsmagazine could transform a school’s admissions success is worth our consideration. Let’s call this The Chronicle Effect. The formula is fairly straightforward:

Academic Recognition + Publicity = Increased Admissions + Tuition Revenue

We should note that back in the 1980s, media was much less fragmented, and so a local show such as Boston’s Chronicle probably held much more sway than it does now. Still, there are significant lessons to be gleaned from The Chronicle Effect.

Totally Excellent

The connection between high-quality education and financial sustainability is undeniable; the trick is proving how excellent you truly are.

Get your school ranked as “excellent” by a reputable source, and you’ll be doing your admissions office a big favor. (Touting your academic rep on your own website is necessary nowadays… but such promotions ultimately lack objectivity. A web visitor will naturally think, Of course you think your school is excellent! Approval from without is what you seek here.) If you can snag a coveted educational Blue Ribbon—the Scheck Hillel Community Day School/Ben Lipson Hillel Community High School won this in 2011 and was written up in the JTA—or if you can take home a teaching prize from Good Magazine, it can be quite beneficial to your school.

So: When you have a great teacher or an innovative program at your school, it’s your job to actively seek some recognition. The key is identifying a program that the people in your world respect and admire.

It’s worth considering both generic excellence awards and Judaic ones (for instance, the Covenant Awards and the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Awards for Excellence in Jewish Education). If your school truly holds to a dual curriculum you should be worthy of both—though as we’ll later see, it may be that recognized excellence in general studies may give you greater exposure to untapped populations, and thus greater chances for increasing enrollment—and thus, tuition revenue.

Going Public

Sometimes, as in the case of the Chronicle profile, the recognition and the publicity happen simultaneously… but not always.

If an educator at your school snags, say, a Covenant Award, you can surely link to it from you Facebook and Twitter feeds and maybe even get the story into your local Jewish newspaper. Which is good … but not likely to get ‘em lined up around the block.

To reach a wider audience, you should investigate how your community reports about academic excellence. For instance, is there a “Best Schools” issue of your regional magazine? If so, contact the editors and give them good reason to include you in this list. Similarly, if your local TV news program has a regular feature on superlative schools, find the name of the producer in charge and make the case for your school. (Note: Watch the segments religiously—and take notes. After viewing five or six segments, you should be able to detect the common denominators of excellence and this should inform your pitch.)

One of the best contemporary versions of The Chronicle Effect was when American Hebrew Academy, of Greensboro, North Carolina, recently appeared on their public TV news show.

“The truth is, this segment was done by a parent who used to send her child to my daughter’s Jewish day school,” says Alina Spaulding, AHA’s Director of Communications. “She asked a few years back if she could see the Academy, and I have been inviting her ever since, not knowing she was in the media world. When she finally made it to campus, she told me what she did, and asked if we would be willing to do a story with her for our 10^th anniversary. We gladly agreed.” 

The moral: always be ready to sell your story. “I am a talker, so if I hear of anyone in the media biz, I am always on point about the work we do at AHA. These days, if there is a story that needs a Jewish bend, these folks will often call on me.” 

Persistence and Payoff

I should add that it’s not always easy, getting recognition and getting publicity. In fact, it can require a lot of work. For instance, Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School was recently selected by Chicago Magazine as a top school.

How did this happen?

Persistence.

Derek Gale, Director of Communications at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School (BZAEDS), knew that the magazine had run a piece about excellent private schools previously (about five years before), and didn’t mention his school. He, and his board of trustees, wanted to be included in the next iteration.

Gale, as a former journalist, had some contacts from his grad school days at Chicago. He got in touch with Chicago Magazine and asked if they were going to reprise the feature—and when he did, he made sure he knew the name and email of the editor in charge.

Then he went on to contact the editor regularly, about once a month, each time supplying helpful information that showed the BZAEDS was worthy of inclusion. For instance, when the school won a big grant, he mentioned it; when their students had work shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, he mentioned that. At one point he told the editor, “Let me help you become an expert on independent schools,” which is an excellent thing to say to a journalist who has suddenly been handed a story about independent schools.

Getting the Message to the Media

Here are three strategies that you can apply when brining your school’s excellence to the attention of the media.

1. Have a compelling pitch. Every time Gale wrote to Chicago, he had something substantial to say (i.e., another bit of proof that showed that BZAEDS belonged in top independent schools article). Learn what the media outlet is looking for and provide that, and only that.
2. Stay on their case. Don’t be a pain, but don’t let them forget you. It is reasonable to send periodic follow-ups to a media person, if you do so a careful, respectful manner.
3. Help them out. At one point Gale told the Chicago Magazine editor, “Let me help you become an expert on independent schools,” which is an excellent thing to say to a journalist who has suddenly been handed a story about independent schools. AHA’s Spaulding similarly asked the TV people what their take was and “I just fed them everything they needed from written information on the geothermal wells, to quotes from teachers, parents, and alumni. I tried to ‘help’ them write the story.” 

The Power! The Reach!

There’s great power in The Chronicle Effect, and a smart day school professional will do what she can to tap it. And once you do start spreading word of your educational excellence, be sure to monitor, as closely as possible, what the effects of this are.

It would be most useful if you could point to a Chronicle-like profile and/or award and take note—not just how much of an increase in tuition you saw after that, but compared it to, say, a baseline taken a year or two before. (You would do well to pay attention to increased inquires, schools tours, even Facebook friendships that were caused by the public display of academic excellence.) Data matters here.

We believe The Chronicle Effect can make a substantial difference in the financial life of your school. As Eileen Samuels reminds us: in Schechter’s pots-Chronicle Era: “The funny thing is that these weren’t necessarily Jewish parents looking for a good Jewish education for their children … they were looking for simply a good education.”

The following is a guest post from Joelle Kaufman, President of the Board of Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City, CA. See her previous post on the PEJE Blog here.

It’s time for Jewish Day School leaders to use fresh language when we talk about the value of our schools. The “continuity” argument is legitimate; it’s just not enough to get new people to invest in Jewish education. Here’s one way we can transform our advocacy language: think “thrivalism.”

While the continuity argument expresses the legitimate value of day school in terms of continuing the Jewish people and tradition, the thrivalism argument emphasizes that, by choosing a day school education, your child has the very best chance to flourish and be a positive force in the world.

How does this work in practice? When I talk to families about my school, the Wornick Jewish Day School, I convey that Wornick is a parent’s best bet for ensuring their child’s future success.

Talking about success is important where I come from because parents here are nervous. Real estate is a fortune. The news is full of stories of college graduates without jobs. We want to give our children an edge that makes it easier for them to find their way to independence, prosperity, and happiness. When all is said and done, a parent’s core interest in choosing a school is straight forward: they want their children to thrive.

Rather than use old clichés and tropes, I advocate for Wornick with words that are unabashedly action-oriented, positive, and innovative—much like our audience, and much like our school. We talk about competitive advantage, about standing out. These words illuminate our school’s vibrancy and edge.

Here’s an example. In a recent blog post I wrote about why it’s so great that Wornick students learn Hebrew as a second language. Amid points about the impact of bilingualism on the brain, and the importance of Hebrew as a lens into Jewish values, I made the following argument:

“Our alumni report that their immersion in Hebrew makes it straightforward to learn additional languages in high school and college. There is plenty of time to learn Spanish or Chinese (or both) if that’s your interest. My husband followed 9 years of Hebrew in day school with fluency in Spanish, then Portuguese, and now Mandarin (not fluent in that last one, yet). One of our graduates, a Chinese-language major who became fluent in Italian in high school, credits his K-8 Wornick education as the foundation for his academic interests and successes.”

Many parents in our area want their children to get a global education. The case for Hebrew as a second language which can be followed by Spanish or Mandarin immediately attracts parents seeking 21^st-century skills for their children. Talking about multilingual day school alumni—as opposed to simply “Hebrew”—provides living proof for globally savvy prospective parents who are focused on choosing the right academic setting for their children.

“Thrivalism” works for me in my community. What works for you? I invite every advocate of Jewish education to think before you speak. Are your words spreading a fresh, compelling and positive message about the value of Jewish education? Are you addressing the unique needs of your audience? Don’t let the same old terminology limit you. Get creative! Think about the people you want to target. What are their interests? What words would excite them? Who knows, they might be the same declarations that excite you.

There I was, on January 15th, at the North American Jewish Day School Conference, conducting an intense, face-to-face social-media consultation with Oakland Hebrew Day School’s Rabbi Yehudah Potok.

R.Y.P., as his Board President fondly calls him, was deeply focused, asking good questions, making all kinds of notes. Yet as we yammered away, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Could a Head of School really be that interested in social media?”

The answer I later learned was this: R.Y.P. is totally serious and smart about Facebook.

Y’see, our man at OHDS had asked me about how to increase the size of his school’s FB fan base. I casually suggested that he:

1. Figure out how many Fans his school had at that moment.
2. Pick a reachable Fan goal.
3. Select a date to reach that goal.
4. Appeal strongly to his community—on Facebook but also in an email blast—to do the work and make it happen.

His response? On January 18, just two days after the conference ended, he took this modest idea into the stratosphere. He wrote to his people:

Help be an Ambassador for OHDS! Having entered the world of social media just over a year ago, OHDS already has 160 fans on our OHDS Facebook page. Over the next two weeks (by February 3rd), we would like to challenge our community to recruit as many fans as possible. For every fan we add, $1 will be given to our scholarship fund. Please share the following link with your Facebook friends and ask them to become a fan of OHDS: http://www.facebook.com/pages/OHDS/165708280116807. You’ll be increasing our fan base and raising money for scholarships at the same time.

In one stroke he transformed the act of asking people to Like a page—a simple and easy-to-accomplish task—into a powerful fundraising activity. Think about it: he created a way for his community to directly contribute to OHDS’ financial sustainability, and engage in a conversation about the community, by merely clicking a button. Brilliant.

I can see many schools using the incremental-but-real incentive of tying together social engagement and fundraising. This social shidduch makes a ton of sense—and OHDS’ particular manifestation seems just the very first step here. I imagine particular conversations being “sponsored” by different JDS programs. For instance:

Create a video about how much you love the Land of Milk and Honey, post it on FB, and we’ll donate $20 to defraying the costs of the eighth grade trip to Israel!

But back to the present: the data from the OHDS experiment was very impressive.

In less than 24 hours, OHDS grew from 160 to 194 Fans.

As I type this, their page has 250 Fans.

Will they add 100 new Fans—260 Fans—by their deadline?

Don’t know.

But let’s do what we can to help those folks reach 260. Now.  Go Like ‘em!

The following is a guest blog post by Joelle Kaufman, President of the Board of Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City, CA.

My day job is to create and manage marketing organizations for Silicon Valley start-ups, and in all cases, my strategy must be based on messages that are both true and emotionally compelling. Likewise, as President of the Board of Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City, CA, I advocate for the school in my community and think about what messages will work best here.

While I know what it is about day school that resonates most deeply with me, my marketing experience tells me that there is no one-size-fits-all message that demonstrates the value of our school to everyone in my community. So, when I think about crafting my messages about Wornick, I segment my message to appeal to different audiences.

Here are five messages that I find to resonate with different people in my community:

“Thrivalism”: Many prospective parents want their children to thrive as adults and resonate with the idea that day school will give their child that edge that will better ensure their lifetime prosperity and happiness. To these parents we can emphasize the competitive edge of Wornick’s bi-lingual Hebrew-English curriculum: in a “flat world” connected by technology and trade, multi-culturalism, and multi-linguism are key competitive advantages. And I spread this message through my blogging and ambassadorship (e.g. this post on the success of our students in high school).

Critical Thinking and Discourse: As a senior executive for multiple companies, I have interviewed well over 500 candidates over the last 10 years—and the ones I recommend and hire can articulate a point of view, demonstrate leadership and flexibility and have outstanding communication skills. Experts argue that critical thinking skills represent the biggest gap in the American education system; but Jewish education shines in this regard since it is based on the principles of Talmudic discourse. In every subject, students are expected to ask good questions, give thoughtful answers based on facts in text, engage in debate, defend their position and respect other perspectives. These are the skills I seek in every individual I hire.

Jewish Community & Connection to Israel: Many of the Israeli parents at Wornick resonate with the community, Hebrew language, and connection to Israel that are essential components of our school.

Continuity: It’s also important at times to emphasize continuity, since grandparent and community donors often connect with this message.

STEM: Finally, the news is full of alarms regarding the U.S. competitive advantage in STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.  Jewish education ties closely with Israel, one of the world leaders in STEM education and innovation. At Wornick, our students are collaborating on STEM projects with their peers at our twin school, the Reali School of Haifa.

What messages do you use to promote the value of your school? Which audiences are you reaching with these messages? Is there an audience you’d like to approach but aren’t sure what messages will resonate with them? Send us your comments, and let’s start a conversation!

Sooner or later, every day school professional has to deliver the Elevator Pitch.

You know, the efficient, brief story designed to enchant a prospective donor (or parent or Board member) into saying YES to your JDS.

The problem with pitching: It’s impossible to see yourself in action. JDS pitches are usually private affairs, just between you and, say, the would-be donor. There is no footage to be reviewed in the after-game analysis. Who can remember exactly what was said, let alone how you looked or if you delivered a compelling pitch.

Until now.

We are offering you, at the 2012 North American Jewish Day School Conference, the rare opportunity to get a good look at your pitching style and some informed feedback from your own personal pitching coach. That is, a seasoned day school professional with enough experience to say what is and isn’t a persuasive verbal proposal. We call it the PEJE Pitch Slam. (Turns out, some joker went and made an animation about said Pitch Slam!)

Here’s how it will work…

You’ll sign up at the PEJE booth for a slot.

At the allotted time, you’ll meet with our videographer and the two of your will adjoin to—where else?—the elevator. Then you will record your pitch. Afterwards, a PEJE pitching coach will assess your skills.

Now, for those of you who are interested but aren’t sure what goes into a good presentation, think of the following as you prepare your pitch:

1. Be concise. Shouldn’t take more than a minute. Time yourself.
2. Be honest. There’s no room in the elevator for phoniness. Stick to the facts. 
3. Be excited. You’re trying to drum up interest here. Now is the time to showcase your enthusiasm.
4. Be targeted. If you’re talking to, say, an Israeli who believes in the centrality of Hebrew language skills, perhaps deliver your pitch in Ivrit. Don’t sell someone on your school’s social action work if they’re really focused on instilling a sense of Jewish history in kids.
5. Be proud. You’re pitching for a great cause: Jewish education!

If you’d like to throw your hat into Pitch Slam ring, send us an email to reserve your place in the elevator!

The following is a guest post by Jon Mitzmacher, Head of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, in Jacksonville, Florida.

It all started a few weeks ago, when I was digging up material for a “Parent University” course I teach with some parents in our day school. I somehow unearthed this piece, from The Jewish Week, about the creation of Yeshivat He’Atid, a school that, according to its website, “aims to be a leader in re-envisioning the classroom to incorporate 21st century educational approaches.” The article sparked off some great conversations about the connection between affordability and 21^st century technology, something this new model of JDS seems to represent. It even carried over to a meeting with our school’s 21st century learning team, which then evolved into a hearty debate on the educational merits of devoting some portion of the curriculum to distance learning experiences. This idea, different from the “flipped classroom” (I like this blog post’s definition best) may reduce contact time between teachers and students and thus runs counter to how our school understands 21st century learning.

A few weeks later, with these ideas still lodged in my head, I attended the Day School Leadership Training Institute’s (DSLTI) Alumni Retreat. This wonderful program brings together alumni and current fellows from all the cohorts—there are now seven—who have attended the 18-month program that prepares people to run a Jewish day school. It represents a cross-section of relatively new or soon-to-be Heads of every flavor, size, and model who have the chance to learn from various mentors and thought leaders.

During the retreat, we were blessed to spend some quality time with Rabbi Joshua Elkin. Rabbi Elkin, who recently stepped down as PEJE’s Executive Director, presented to us some fascinating ideas—one of which was the theory of “entrepreneurial leadership” and how it might apply to leading Jewish day schools. For definitional purposes, Rabbi Elkin pointed us to a classic Harvard Business Review article, in which authors Stevenson and Gumpert state that general entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources one currently controls. He also cited a 2011 article, “Entrepreneurial Leadership: What is It and How Should It Be Taught?”, which suggests that entrepreneurial leadership “should be about developing appropriate abilities with which to combine, exploit, and maintain the particular capabilities of entrepreneurial teams, especially balancing creativity, influence, a particular attitude to risk, and an ability to access scarce resources strategically.”

All of which—the critical thinking, reflective practice, and collaboration—sounds pretty 21st century, no?

Yes.

Rabbi Elkin encouraged us to employ the theory of entrepreneurial leadership as leaders of Jewish day schools because it frees us from a false choice. Sometimes it feels like we can either bemoan our lack of resources or we spend our time trying to acquire resources. But what would it mean to pursue “opportunity” beyond the resources one currently controls?

Yeshivat He’Atid is striving to build a model that moves “beyond resources”: by employing technology and innovative classroom design, this “yeshiva of the future” aims to reduce costs (presumably in teacher salaries) to make JDS more affordable. It refuses to accept that Jewish day schools must be either expensive or inferior and it is easy to see why it has attracted so much hope and attention.

But Yeshivat He’Atid is not alone.

Margolin Hebrew Academy/Feinstone Yeshiva of the South, another Orthodox Jewish day school, is walking a similar entrepreneurial path. They employ technology to connect students throughout all its programs, but especially through its JcoonecT program, which bridges middle and high school students from small Jewish communities in meaningful academic ways.

In my school, the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, we eased on down yet another road. MJGDS has recently undergone a three-year process in which we redefined job descriptions of non-classroom teachers to include 21st century learning profiles. Our “Technology Teacher” has become a “21st Century Learning Consultant.”  Our “Librarian” is now a “21st Century Media & Literacy Specialist.” We call the “Academic Resource Teacher” a “21st Century Pedagogy Consultant.”  In this way, we maintain the core elements of each person’s job—we still have books to catalogue in the library, keyboarding skills to teach, and remediation to perform—while stretching each into coaching and collaborating relationships with faculty in their areas of expertise. This has allowed us to transform teaching and learning in our school without adjusting the budget at all.

In addition, having been bit by the prosumerism bug, we are currently exploring research grants and for-profit partnerships that would allow our teachers and students to create apps and games. As we have bumped up against the edge of the possible, we are eager to teach our teachers and students how to create apps that do not yet exist that would allow us to take our teaching and learning to the next level (that’s how we incorporate STEM). We are also beginning to explore with a new thought partner, Rabbi Owen Gottlieb, opportunities to pilot applications of gaming theory to Jewish day school curriculum. Both of these ventures bring with them commercial possibilities that could help the school grow its resources. It takes Alan November’s “digital learning farm” out of the metaphor and into reality. Not only would students be making meaningful contributions to society through their work; they might be making financial contributions to their school as entrepreneurial student-leaders.

To conclude, here are some questions for you:

• What are some examples from your schools? What would it mean for you day school’s leadership team or board to adopt an entrepreneurial leadership stance? What might this mean for the field?
• Tell us, in the Comments section, about how your school’s current (or future) adventures in entrepreneurial education.

One of the things PEJE learned from poring over 141 Challenge Award applications—Yes: 141!—is that there’s a considerable amount of innovation in the Jewish day school world. Schools are pushing themselves like never before to rethink their approach to development, admissions, and advocacy, with a clear eye on long-term financial sustainability.

Reading all the great work you’ve done, we thought, “Why aren’t schools doing more to make this public?” And then we realized: We can help publicize your efforts!

We want to work with you to create an online celebration of your innovation. This is a chance not just to get the word out to your online kehillah, but to step out in front of the entire field and show what great work you’ve done. To get you started, here are several ideas:

1. Shoot a quick video, with your smartphone, of the happy person/people who drove your innovation project. Then email it to PEJE (ken@peje.org) and we’ll share it with the entire field, via social media. (BTW: When we do post your stuff on the PEJE FB page, please encourage your community to visit and comment and in general show a lot of love.)
2. And/Or … shoot a video of your school community lighting the menorah. Your innovations have brightened the Jewish day school field—let the light shine out!
3. Write a blog post telling your Board, parents, and donors what you’ve been up to—and why. This will be a chance for you to go into the details of what made your project so great.  You’ve already put so much work into writing those award applications. Why not refashion them into a blog post! Psst: If we like what you’ve written, we may cross-post it on the PEJE Blog.
4. Transform your post into an email blast. Not everyone in your world will be checking Facebook, so it’s a very good idea to, say, repurpose your blog post and send it off to the many in-boxes in your JDS community.
5. For the Twitter-users out there: Post a series of celebratory tweets using the hashtag #jdsinnovation. I can see this leading to some interesting conversations! We see this as a way for all you innovators to meet each other: we’d love for you folks to compare notes and see what else we can learn.
6. Innovation Celebration at NAJDS. Quite a few Challenge Award applicants will be attending the North American Jewish Day School conference, in Atlanta, next month. Please RSVP at Facebook page.  We can’t wait to make our first offline Challenge Award introductions.

Wait: Do you have an innovative idea about getting the word out? If so, what are you waiting for? Let’s hear about it in the Comments section!

Are you a collaborator?

I’m talking about collaboration between day schools—something smart and vital to the fiscal health of Jewish day schools in 2011, and beyond.

Well, perhaps you are a collaborator. After all, Jewish day schools all over North America are starting to understand how to maximize the power of community collaboration. Still, there are many communities out there that have yet to fully embrace this model. But it works: schools that collaborate are able to access many more communal resources—and different types of community resources—than any one school can on its own.

But don’t take our word for it.

Look at the Baltimore Jewish Day School Consortium, a collaboration of four Baltimore area schools (The Shoshana S. Cardin School, Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School, Krieger Schechter Day School, and The Day School at Baltimore Hebrew), facilitated by Baltimore’s Center for Jewish Education (CJE). Their collaboration has enabled these schools to pursue broader and more sophisticated marketing strategies with THE ASSOCIATED as a result of the CJE connection.

Joan Feldman, Communications Director at Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School, told me that, on its own, her school has previously been able to get an hour of THE ASSOCIATED staff’s time for a marketing consultation. “But,” she says, “collaboration has been a game changer for us.” It all began in 2009 when these schools came together to jointly develop a website and advertise in local media. The schools had begun this work on their own but turned to THE ASSSOCIATED for help in improving their website and growing their social media presence. Maayan Jaffe, Marketing & Communications Manager at THE ASSOCIATED, has been working closely with the Consortium during the past year and has leveraged many of THE ASSOCIATED’s resources to help the schools access a larger market. She has been able to provide these resources in large part because, as she puts it, “It’s not one school versus another.”

With Maayan’s help, the Consortium has created a multi-touch marketing campaign that incorporates both online and brick-and-mortar messaging for these schools as a collective. Their website now boasts a brand created with the help of THE ASSOCIATED’s marketing department. Not only that: they’ve been able to move beyond merely having a static website to having a blog that features rotating stories from all four schools, a Facebook page, displays at local JCCs, and emails that market the schools to THE ASSOCIATED’s lists of thousands of young families and community members dedicated to Jewish learning. These four schools, which otherwise might have had difficulty getting the word out about open houses or their value propositions, are now able to spread their message to literally thousands of families within their potential market. They even get THE ASSOCIATED’s favorable ad rate when marketing at the JCCs or the Baltimore Jewish Times.

As Joan Feldman explained, “We all realize that having a common front is to the benefit of each of our schools.” The community might say no to a single day school asking for this or that, but saying no to the Jewish Day School Consortium is like “saying no to motherhood and apple pie.” The key here:  only through collaborating with each other, the CJE, and THE ASSOCIATED have the schools in the Consortium been able to access these resources.

Let us know if you are a collaborator, of if you’d like to become one.  And if the schools in your community are collaborating, don’t be shy about it! Tell us, here in the friendly Comments section below, how collaborating has changed the way you approach the business of Jewish day school.