2027 Independent School Brand Summit

In Japan, omotenashi means genuine hospitality: anticipating someone's needs before they are spoken and caring for details they may never see but will always feel. Restaurateur Will Guidara built the world's top-ranked restaurant, wrote a best-selling book, and started a movement on a parallel idea. In a world full of competence, how you make people feel is the last great differentiator.

What happens when an advancement office adopts this philosophy? Through a reimagined donor journey and a fresh approach to stewardship and community care, this session shows how one team used anticipatory, unreasonable hospitality to build the trust that inspires lifelong engagement and legacy generosity. Leave with a hospitality audit for your own program, along with three practices you can implement as soon as you return to your team.

Every enrollment leader is already reading signals that predict yield: a family's tone on a tour, a placement director's tip, a "tell" picked up over years on the job. They just don't call it data.

This session shares what surfaced from in-depth conversations with five enrollment leaders across day and boarding schools of every size: the signals that actually drive enrollment decisions but live outside any data system and why "fair" means two different things to enrollment leaders with budget pressure forcing those two meanings to collide.

Attendees leave with a practical way to name what their team already notices and an optional framework for evaluating whether a predictive or AI tool would even be worth considering down the road.

Every private school believes it offers a transformative experience, but convincing prospective families of that before they ever step on campus is the real challenge. The landscape is shifting fast: fewer school-age children, heightened cost consciousness, and parents demanding evidence that your institution delivers measurable, distinctive value. Surviving isn't enough. The institutions that will flourish are the ones that learn to articulate what makes them irreplaceable.

This session dives into the strategies gaining traction right now: moving your narrative beyond where graduates attend college, turning your own data into a compelling story, and leveraging the authentic voices within your community as your strongest recruitment engine. Regardless of whether your enrollment is in the hundreds or the thousands, you'll walk away with an actionable playbook for refining how you communicate your worth without losing sight of your identity.

Independent schools invest heavily in attracting prospective families, but today's educators are evaluating schools in much the same way. Your website, careers page, social media, job postings, and candidate experience all shape your employer brand long before an interview is scheduled.

In this session, you'll learn how leading schools are applying marketing principles to faculty recruitment, creating stronger candidate experiences, and building employer brands that attract exceptional educators. Through real-world examples and practical strategies, we'll explore how marketing, communications, HR, and school leadership can work together to strengthen recruitment.

You'll leave with actionable ideas to improve your careers page, tell a more compelling employment story, and position your school as a destination for top talent.

What happens when marketing and advancement work as one team? In five years, Lipscomb Academy grew its Giving Day from approximately $85,000 to more than $1.1 million by combining compelling storytelling with intentional fundraising strategy.

This session will explore how video, social media, coordinated messaging, donor outreach, and strategically structured matching and challenge gifts helped create momentum and inspire participation. Presenters Eric Adams and Libby Alvarez will share practical lessons from both the advancement and marketing perspectives, including how they plan campaigns, identify stories, engage key donors, and build urgency throughout the day. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for strengthening collaboration between departments and developing a Giving Day campaign that connects with donors, expands participation, and increases results.

A capital campaign is one of the most complex communications challenges an independent school can face and one of the most consequential brand moments it will ever have. Done well, it deepens relationships with every constituency simultaneously. When done poorly, it fragments your message and makes your biggest institutional moment feel smaller than it should be.

This session delivers a replicable, field-tested playbook built from the largest capital campaign in Summit School's history— one that exceeded goal by over $2 million. Presenters walk through the full arc from pre-campaign awareness through grand opening, sharing the framework, sequencing decisions, and templates that drove cohesive storytelling across every constituency.

Attendees will leave with
-A comprehensive campaign communications framework.
-A channel-by-constituency matrix.
-Sequencing principles for managing multiple audiences without message fatigue.
-Editable templates for key campaign touchpoints.
-A planning checklist for aligning communications, philanthropy, and enrollment.

Artificial intelligence is changing how the smartest schools work, but AI is only as effective as the understanding and data behind it.

Too often, enrollment, marketing, communications, and advancement operate from different assumptions about the families they serve, resulting in disconnected messaging, inconsistent experiences, and missed opportunities throughout the school relationship. The schools seeing the greatest success are taking a different approach: combining AI with rich parent intelligence to understand not just who their families are, but why they make decisions.

In this highly interactive 90-minute workshop, participants will discover how behavioral audience intelligence and responsible AI can create a shared understanding of families across the entire school lifecycle: from first inquiry and enrollment through retention, alumni engagement, and philanthropy.

Through real independent-school examples, live demonstrations, and interactive hands-on exercises, attendees will learn how parent intelligence uncovers motivations, decision-making styles, communication preferences, and philanthropic tendencies that traditional demographic data misses. They will then see how AI can transform those insights into personalized messaging, enrollment strategies, advancement campaigns, communication plans, and cross-functional workflows that strengthen every stage of the parent experience.

This presentation is designed to equip school leaders with practical tools that allow them to spend less time guessing and more time engaging families in ways that are relevant, authentic, and meaningful.

Participants will work through a realistic school scenario, collaborate with peers, practice using AI on their own devices, and leave with their own custom parent persona, actionable prompts, frameworks, and strategies they can begin applying immediately.

The session is led by Andrew Esparza, founder of Kingdom Analytics, and Dr. Andrew T. Weller, dean of admissions at Birch Wathen Lenox School and chair of the Admissions Directors Institute. Together, they bring both the strategic and practitioner perspectives, combining nationally recognized expertise in parent intelligence, behavioral segmentation, and AI with the day-to-day realities of leading enrollment at one of the country’s premier independent schools. Their work has been featured at national independent-school conferences, where they have delivered standing-room-only keynotes and repeat presentations focused on helping schools make smarter, data-informed decisions that strengthen enrollment, communication, and long-term family engagement.

Participants will leave with

• A custom AI-ready parent persona tailored to their school’s market.
• A library of proven AI prompts for enrollment, marketing, communications, and advancement.
• A practical framework for aligning departments around a shared understanding of families.
• Ready-to-use messaging and campaign ideas they can adapt immediately.
• A roadmap for implementing AI responsibly while protecting privacy and preserving their school’s unique voice.
• A 90-day action plan to begin transforming how their school recruits, engages, retains, and inspires families.

Independent school marketing & communications professionals are constantly reacting to the immediate needs of the day, leaving little room for proactive strategy or an honest assessment of what’s actually working. Whether you are a team of one or a department of 10, this fast-paced, practical session cuts through the noise to help you audit your current baseline and build a repeatable framework you can implement immediately.

Co-presented by a school-based MarCom director navigating a live strategic overhaul and a veteran independent school consultant, this session bridges the gap between high-level strategy and Monday morning reality.

Attendees will work through three critical steps that can move a team from big ideas to execution: 

• Define a focused annual mission that your entire team can align behind.
• Conduct an audit of where your MarCom actually stands, including current channels, messaging, and capacity.
• Translate findings into action steps that are realistically calibrated to your school's unique size, staff, and resources.

You'll leave this session with a simple MarCom audit tool you can put to work the following week.

Parent engagement is not a series of disconnected events; it is a relationship journey that begins in admission, deepens through development and volunteer partnership, and continues through senior year and beyond.

This interactive session will examine how schools can intentionally welcome new families, strengthen belonging, activate parent volunteers, and cultivate parents as advocates, ambassadors, and philanthropic partners. Dennis Ring and Phil Higginson will offer practical strategies for aligning admission, development, communications, school leadership, and parent volunteer structures around a coherent family-engagement experience.

Participants will explore ways to move parents from attendance to participation, from participation to leadership, and from leadership to lifelong institutional connection. The session will also include a “best of” idea exchange, allowing attendees to share successful parent engagement practices and leave with immediately usable strategies for strengthening parent community and school advocacy.

Today’s donors expect personalized experiences that reflect their relationship with your institution. But how can independent schools create meaningful, individualized engagement without adding hours to an already full workload?
In this session, Nathan Watts, assistant head of school for institutional advancement at Houston Academy, and Jed Shireman-Jones, senior solutions engineer at Varsity Consulting, will share Houston Academy’s two-year journey using constituent data, AI, and digital giving tools to transform annual giving campaigns.

Attendees will discover how personalized messaging, segmented outreach, customized giving forms, and empowered parent advocates helped increase annual fund revenue over a three year period from $72,000 to $210,000 while growing parent participation from 23% to 83%. Participants will leave with practical strategies they can immediately implement to create more meaningful donor experiences.