Prospect Management for Schools – Part One

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This article is part 1 of a four-part series.

Written by Martin Spriggs

One important but often neglected function of any school office is “prospect management.” It wasn’t always that way. In the early days of our church-connected schools, we relied on filling our desks with the children of members and the only “managing” that we needed of those prospects was generating a list of all the kids in our congregation. We then simply made sure we had enough space, textbooks, and teachers to meet the need. Those days are over.

Yes, we still have a percentage of our church-going families sending their kids, just not as high a percentage. Increasingly our schools take a wider view of their potential student body, and many school mission statements include outreach as an objective. This focus suggests a new recruiting dynamic needs to be considered. Tracking prospects and turning leads into students is imperative. That is where a school prospect management system can help.

Our churches have maintained prospect databases for years, and the school administrator would be wise to review those practices and tools, as there are some similarities. Of course, there are differences too. Prospects, for a church, are those whom the ministry team would like to nurture with the intent of sharing the gospel. Perhaps another objective would be to bring them into the church family through some kind of membership process. For the school, a prospect is a parent with a school-aged or soon to be school-aged child that could potentially enroll . . . and hear the gospel daily in the classroom.

We could cover many dimensions of prospect management. Here are just a few:

  1. Desired outcome: What would you like to happen as a result of your prospect management activities?
  2. Collection techniques: How are you going to acquire names and other important information about your prospects?
  3. Data uses: What will you do with the data once you have it?
  4. Social networks: How do you use social networks to complement your prospect management?

All of those we’ll save for another day. Let’s talk about the simple maintenance of your prospect database – what tools you need and how to track activity. It really doesn’t matter what tool you choose as long as it can do three things: 1) provide simple data organization-type functions, 2) export data in a format that can be used for mailings/emails, and 3) be viewed and edited on the web and/or mobile devices.

In order to maintain a list of prospects, a digital tool needs to capture basic information (name, address, phone, email, etc.) AND allow for the recording of “touches.” Touches are any contact you might have with the prospect. These touches are critical to record, and they could represent a newsletter or email that was sent, a visit to your campus, or a phone call taken/made. It is essential that you record each touch, noting the type of contact, date, who/what made the contact, and finally any result from the encounter. Ask any salesperson in the corporate world who maintains a prospect list and they will reinforce the value of tracking these touches. The goal is to have an accurate history of your relationship. It allows you to build on previous conversations and leads finally to a conversion from prospect to school parent.

Many, many tools can do this. If your school is connected to a church, you may want to explore using whatever they use for prospect management. It is often easy to repurpose those kinds of tools, as our requirements are fairly simple. A number of churches use Shepherd’s Staff, which would work. However, a web-based version called Church360 Members might be a better choice since it is accessible online by anybody with appropriate permissions. There are many others. They all work about the same and will do a fine job. Here are a few to consider:

Just remember to keep it simple, or you won’t want to use it. ANY barrier between you and keeping up the data will result in failure.

If you don’t use the same prospect management system your church uses, or one of those listed above, you can build your own with simple tools like Google Docs and Sheets. Simply create a spreadsheet with columns for all the data types you want (First Name, Last Name, etc.) and include a “touch” column. In that column you can record contacts or, better yet, include a link to a separate Google Doc in which you can record more information for each touch. The spreadsheet then becomes a place to keep address and contact information up to date and a launch pad to get to a document where you can record those interactions. You can also use the spreadsheet to export data for mail merge activities for newsletters, mailings, and emails. Here are templates you can use for this kind of setup. If you want to get really fancy, you could use Google Forms for quick data entry.

You can see that your management system doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be accurate. Keep it up to date by using a process that’s easy so that anybody who comes into contact with a prospect can easily add the appropriate data – thus the requirement for being web-based. Make sure everybody plays by the rules and records every touch. Finally, review your data regularly for accuracy. The next article in the series will work through the process of acquiring prospects and getting them into your system.

Martin Spriggs is currently serving as chief technology officer for WELS.  He also produces a weekly podcast called the WELSTech Podcast with his co-host, Sallie Draper. They discuss all things technology especially as they relate to their usefulness for ministry.

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