Across the country, schools and districts face a frightening prospect: thousands of schools are at risk of closing due to dramatic enrollment losses. Some have seen up to 20% of student bodies disappear in recent years. Educational institutions cannot trust their reputations or business as usual to carry them through this challenge. To remain relevant — and solvent — leaders must deliver a vision of campus life that resonates deeply with students and their families.
At IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., we confronted the challenge of student satisfaction head-on by asking ourselves, what if we treated our students and families as learners and valued customers? This shift of perspective sparked a full-scale campus transformation that led to measurable gains in satisfaction for both students and employees. Our re-enrollment rate reached 78% last year and is projected to rise to over 80% this year — a reflection of this customer experience initiative’s impact.
Here’s a guide to how we did it, and how other schools can adopt simple, creative and effective strategies to produce more meaningful student experiences.
1. Go all in: Make experience the mission
In 2022, IMG Academy undertook a sweeping initiative to align our organization around one goal: boosting student satisfaction. We called this initiative Mission UCX (Unrivaled Campus Experience), and it wasn’t a side project — it became a central part of our culture and strategy.
To set the tone, school leadership made formal commitments to the project, created a dedicated team to manage it and began addressing our new priorities in visible ways, such as shadowing staff to get a sense of their daily routines and obstacles. If you’re a school leader, remember that culture starts at the top. When your team sees leadership treat the student experience as an important big picture aspect, they’re more likely to follow suit.
2. Listen first, then act
You can’t improve what you don’t understand. That’s why the engine of our transformation was a robust listening program that gathers more than 12,500 survey responses annually from students, parents and staff. We layered in student focus groups, one-on-one interviews, a digital suggestion box and real-time Happy or Not machines across campus.
We have used this data to inform all key decisions in the project. For example, student feedback led to the redesign of the campus center to encourage social events and collaboration. We also revamped our food offerings based on student voting, making after-hours access to training facilities easier for student-athletes.
Once you have data, communicate what you’ve heard, and what you’ve done or will do about it — it shows you’re listening, builds trust and credibility and encourages further feedback.
3. Integrate the student and employee experience
We quickly realized that our student experience was linked to our employee experience. Happy, empowered educators deliver better service and better care to students. So, we tackled both in tandem.
Our Ways of Winning program provided clear behaviors that the staff could model to improve student interactions. We created development plans for over 1,500 students and held around 1,300 meetings with parents to align on student growth goals. We also established a “High Fives” employee recognition program, which garnered more than 2,000 submissions in the first year alone.
Balancing staff and student experiences has led to notable improvements in Net Promoter Scores across all our target audiences: 11 points for students, 7 for parents and 13 for staff.
4. Personalize, personalize, personalize
Modern students expect an academic career tailored to their needs. We mapped over 48 unique customer journeys that showed us the typical tracks that IMG Academy students follow, where friction occurred within those tracks, and how we could begin to adapt our processes to students’ unique goals. From academic services to campus events, every touchpoint was examined and refined.
For example, we revamped our academic advising to include college recruiting resource guides, grade-specific checklists and integrated communication templates. We also introduced financial literacy and NIL (name, image, likeness) curriculum to reflect the questions and priorities today’s students often have.
Personalization doesn’t always require high-tech systems or massive budgets. It starts with understanding what is important to students and bending services accordingly.
5. Measure what matters
Anecdotal improvement is better than nothing, but to be confident that your strategy aligns with reality on campus, you’ll want to find a way to quantify results. We continue to track satisfaction through Net Promoter Scores and use data to adjust our initiative. Schools of all sizes can replicate this model by identifying key metrics reflecting student and parent satisfaction and regularly making the numbers available to leadership.
Leading the future of education
At IMG Academy, we often tell our students that small, intentional actions — done consistently — can yield transformative results. The same is true for schools. In an era where enrollment is no longer guaranteed, enhancing the student experience should be a focus for leaders. What I’ve seen over the past few years tells me that student satisfaction can be a major lever for growth, retention, and long-term impact.
If we want our schools to survive, we must make students always feel seen, heard and valued.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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