Marketing Wins: SPARC Member Schools Share 2025 Success Stories

Auxiliary leaders are eager to learn how to effectively market their programs for many reasons: to increase program enrollment, to create better pipelines for school admissions, to maximize non-tuition revenue potential, and to build better communication channels with the families they serve. This eagerness was evidenced by the nearly 100 auxiliary professionals who signed up for SPARC's recent webinar, "Real-World Marketing Wins," in which several member schools shared the successful marketing strategies they used in 2025. 

Each school presented a unique take on how they leverage their particular strengths to create the most intentional strategies possible, leading to measurable increases in engagement and program success. 

Social Media Strategies

Sidwell Friends School: Adair Walton and Karen McCann McClelland

When Adair Walton took over the Facebook and Instagram accounts last year, she decided to create a year-round auxiliary page to both promote their summer programs and to highlight school-year programs. She also designed it to be a destination for families seeking program information. Engagement grew on both sites in almost every category. 

For a successful social media strategy, Adair recommends: 

• A social media content calendar: Adair uses a Google sheet template that she says works really well to manage and track posts.
• Photos: On Facebook, photos are what people engage with the most--both single photos and multiple photos in one post.
• Program information: While photos are popular, their most viewed content on Facebook are posts that inform families about programs and events, especially FAQ videos and virtual open houses.
• Collaborations: on Instagram, Adair found success partnering with vendors who would highlight their programs on their own accounts, reaching a new audience who then seeks them out.
• Instagram Stories: Any time staff can be highlighted, Adair turns it into a post which leads to greater engagment,
• Meta Business Suite: This tool collects posting and engagement data from different platforms so you can see what are the optimal times to post and what types of posts get the most engagement. 

Collaborating with a Marketing Team

Brooks School: Jake Andress

Director of Auxiliary Programs Jake Andress runs a small team of three people at a 100 percent boarding school, which means they have to find all of their summer program enrollment from the outside community. Wanting to bring in professionals, he hired Truth Tree, a marketing firm that specializes in school marketing, to work in tandem with Brooks' internal marketing team. "They have the skill set and the ability ability to do the things we just don't have," he says.

Jake's team meets with Truth Tree every other week to plan marketing strategies based on their seasonal approach:

• Summer: Promote camp with real-time content
• Fall: Foster awareness for families of upcoming programs
• Winter: Spotlight content around enrollment and registration 
• Spring: Connect with families enrolled for camp and build excitement

Their internal team handles photography--including a full-time camp photograper--social media, content review and posting, and general organization. Truth Tree manages a host of other marketing tools, including:

• Meta Business Suite
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to keep Brooks' programs at the top of search results
• Reviews
• Blog post creation about subjects provided by Jake's team with optimized search features and backlinks
• All ads on Facebook and Instagram
• Mailchimp newsletters tailored to each season 

This partnership has resulted in notable successes, including doubling their Instagram views and increasing interactions with their content from about 20% to about 90%. Jake says that working with Truth Tree ensures consistent branding across all of their content and that the right marketing campaigns are reaching the right families.

Email, Television, and Info Sessions

Miss Porter's School: Sophie Paris and Emma Thurgood

DIrector of Auxiliary Programs Sophie Paris reached out to social media strategist Emma Thurgood, who works for the school's communications team, hoping to build a partnership that would create more impactful marketing strategies for auxiliary. "We experiment a lot," Sophie Says, "and we have formed a dynamic team really blending our entrepreneurial and creative thinking. It's been instrumental in reaching a broader audience and enhancing all of our school's initiatives." 

This year, Sophie and Emma focused on three key marketing strategies:

Email: "Emails are one of the most central and impactful marketing channels we utilize," Emma says, emphasizing its broad reach and low cost. She says it is essential to use a dedicated platform like Mailchimp, Clavio, or Constant Contact to have access to features like audience/database management and analytics.

Sophie and Emma use tagging and audience segmentation to ensure the right messaging is getting to the right families--this keeps open and click rates high. Design tools help them create dynamic, polished, action-oriented messaging.

Customized forms filled out by users on their WordPress site automatically send new sign-ups to their database. The information from these forms allows each user to be fed to the appropriate Mailchimp audience category, ensuring that each user is receiving the content that aligns with their interests.

Television: As part of their experimental approach, the Miss Porter's team tried television for the first time. Sophie says, 'It broadened our reach significantly and helped us connect with a much larger audience that perhaps wasn't familiar with Miss Porter's School, let alone our summer programs and camps."

Sophie and Emma appeared on a sponsored slot on WFSB's "Good Day Connecticut" to promote Daisy Days, their summer camp for young girls. They chose a partnership with the station that included paid advertising and video spots, then repurposed the video by posting it on their social media sites, including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Although they didn't see a direct correlation between the advertising and enrollment rates, they are considering trying it again next year because of the broad audience reach and how well it spread the word about their camps. 

Info Sessions:  For years, they've been hosting 45 to 60-minute virtual face-to-face informational sessions on Zoom. Prospective campers and families have responded well to these sessions, which allow for a deeper engagement and connection as well as a chance to ask questions and gain a sense of what the community is like.

Knowing they can sign up for an info session motivates families to fill out the camp inquiry form, which automatically sends their e-mail to the proper audience category. And in the session, Sophie says they can go deeper into day-to-day camp life and discuss details and answer questions in a way that is much harder to do in other forms of marketing.

Designing a Summer Brand from Scratch

Episcopal High School: Dan O'Neil

After 20 years of running the auxiliary program at Congressional School, Dan O'Neil couldn't resist the opportunity to create a summer program from the ground up at Episcopal High School. "It was an incredibly fun project but one of the more challenging ones to get everybody on board," Dan says.

The challenge came from the Episcopal community's loyalty to their 200 year-old, deeply held traditions, including their school colors--maroon and black--and their lack of a school mascot. Dan wanted to create a summer brand for 6-12 year-olds campers that respected Episcopal traditions while carving it's own niche in the community. To do this, he made a Brand Wish List to keep everyone focused on the goal. His list included:

• Capture the Values: Ensure the summer brand communicates values aligned with Episcopal's values, including safety, fun, community, adventure, courage, and leadership.
• Brand Adjacency to EHS: Create a brand that doesn't look or feel entirely separate from the school's, but is still recognizable as something new. 
• Trusting for Parents but Exciting for Campers: Visually blend the school's long stability and earned loyalty with novelty and intrigue for potential campers.
• Attract 16-22 year-olds to Work There: With no existing program to draw from, the team would have to focus on staff recruitment from scratch.
• Stand Out from Other Summer Options: Design a brand that doesn't look or feel like anyone else's.

One of the toughest challenges came when trying to convince the school to use other colors than maroon and white for summer branding. Dan's team researched colors and presented options for a lighter palette more suitable for summer. This, and showing the logos and branding used by other summer programs, helped school leadership understand how important it was for their new program to have its own identity.

Staying focused on the Wish List and sharing a lot of their competition's strategy with leadership help get their buy-in for Dan's vision. In the end, they compromised with a practical but effective name, "The Summer Camp at Episcopal," with a bright color palette, including cyan, bright pink, and white.

Despite explaining the impact, fun, and marketing potential of a mascot, Dan found that school leadership would not budge. "I'm hoping in a couple of years I can revision that."

Professional development webinars like this one are only a part of what SPARC offers its member schools. Gain access to discounted event rates, essential tools, surveys and benchmarking data, collaborations, a supportive peer community, and so much more. Join us today!