Follow the Child: Increase in Traffic, Efficiency & Admissions

Client

Follow the Child Montessori School is a small, private, nonprofit school in Raleigh, NC, with a community of approximately 100 families. Dedicated to providing an excellent education for their children, the parents are extremely involved, tech-savvy and have high expectations for the level of communication from the school. With Follow the Child’s administrative staff of five, each team member must continuously juggle competing priorities. The school was vulnerable because it was heavily dependent upon parent volunteers with skills and unpaid work that could easily disappear when
their child was no longer a student.

Project

Follow the Child’s website was historically managed by volunteers with the skills to manage the site, but who were sometimes slow to respond due to their full-time jobs and families that necessarily came first. When the new role of Director of Communications was created in 2008, the Director and a volunteer pieced together a more manageable website, where information, on a limited basis, could be immediately updated by the Director, but the site was still unattractive, awkward, and difficult to update.

Needs

Website updates were limited to critical information such as weather delays, while bigger changes were just too time-consuming to conquer. The site was stale, unattractive and lacking in valuable information and tools. Searching the web was quickly becoming the most common method that prospective parents used to discover and research schools and Follow the Child could not afford to be left behind. It was imperative for the school to create its presence on the web with a powerful new site that would serve as the keystone of its marketing strategy.

Solution

Enter GreenIvory’s ContentLC™. GreenIvory proposed the creation of an eye-catching, dynamic website that was easy to update, would create highly efficient work flow, allowed for multiple contributors and would keep parents coming back to the site as a source of the most current information.

Within days of receiving the specifics about the school’s needs and hopes for its website, GreenIvory delivered a beautifully designed set of sites. As the school began to work through the exciting possibilities that a new site holds, its needs expanded. GreenIvory worked with Follow the Child to define their vision of the web and developed inspired solutions to the school’s complex challenges. GreenIvory’s automation tools and solutions allowed the school to populate the site with content, photos, and up-to-date news and blog posts with lightning-fast efficiency so critical for busy administrators.

The result was a website with a state-of-the-art design for both web and mobile use, with all the tools that this growing school needed to serve a sophisticated parent and prospective parent population. Equally important, the site was easy to manage and allowed the school to use its precious time most efficiently through automated content and distribution.

Note: With the school’s limited resources to devote to the implementation of a new site during the busy fall academic season, the site is still a work-in-progress.

Client Benefits

  • The school saw an increase of 19.03% in web traffic in the first month of operation, as compared to the same period of the previous year.
  • Admissions have exceeded targets, and prospects have better insight into the school, its pedagogy, and its processes.
  • Parents are up-to-date on school happenings and turn to the website as their primary source of school information.
  • Job efficiency has increased through the use of automated publishing to multiple sites.

Testimony

When it was time to create our website, GreenIvory was a formidable team to have on our side. They were knowledgeable, accessible, efficient and responsive, even when we realized that our needs for the web were different than we had originally anticipated. They rolled with our changes and created solutions faster than we could even add content. We were thrilled with the results and have been so pleased to be able to manage this robust and beautiful site so easily.

Liz Leone, Director of Admissions and Communications, Follow the Child Montessori School.

Find out more

Download the Success Story of Follow the Child Montessori School