Portfolio: Mosaica Education

BWPR, Inc. was retained to help launch this national charter school company’s second foray into the Phoenix marketplace, a market already crowded with private and semi-private primary educational opportunities. Mosaica acquired a struggling school near South Mountain where the demographics supported the growth of a charter school for elementary grade children. While the national organization enjoyed a great reputation in excelling schools, it failed to differentiate its brand in the Phoenix metropolitan marketplace.

We teamed up with the Michael Harris Group (MHG), our long-time marketing partner, and together worked with the school’s principal to launch a strategic marketing plan, based on research led by MHG. We helped decision-makers understand their differentiation and align messages with this for those who had a less-than-stellar experience in competitive offerings. We immediately renamed the school Ahwatukee Foothills Prep, piggybacking on the success of the community nearby. We also matched core benefits to the needs of nearby families seeking an alternative to cost-prohibitive private school offerings, and built an incredible list of prime student candidates from which the recruitment became highly successful for years to come.

In seven short months, we rebranded the school and targeted candidate families, whose children had identified one of several unaddressed issues in other institutions, citing a better school where teaching and learning are paramount, but where safety and academic prowess go hand-in-hand. We were asked to bring in an additional 100 students for the upcoming fall grand opening, and we brought in close to 400 by the start of the new fall academic year.  Total recruitment exceeded results by 275 percent. The rebranding effort established the school as the kind of quality usually reserved for an elite private elementary school education. Community outreach spread the message of a new academic offering, precisely as open enrollment and community fairs found families shopping for the right school environment for their children. Our development of a new list of candidates, in conjunction with a prominent local news story, reinvigorated the recruitment process with qualified attendees.