How a Corporate Goal-Setting Framework Helped Increase Enrollment by 15%

At Perelman Jewish Day School, a pre-K to fifth grade school in Greater Philadelphia, one key pillar of our strategic vision is to maximize enrollment while maintaining and continuing to enhance mission-aligned excellence. As co-directors of enrollment, our work is critical to this objective.

In formulating our annual goals last year, we realized something was missing: a way to clearly define how these goals contribute to the larger vision, while simultaneously tracking our work and assessing our results. We considered several effective goal-setting frameworks used by corporations and landed on “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs), a framework that has helped us define our goals, use metrics to measure them, and engage our board of directors in a more meaningful understanding of the process and our outcomes. The OKR framework works particularly well for enrollment, given how metric-driven it is. If our goal is to increase our number of students, then having such concrete and detailed numeric goals throughout each step of our process felt like the right path to take.

What are OKRs?

OKRs are a goal management framework that can help an organization implement and execute their strategy. It enables a team (and individuals) to set clear and measurable outcome-driven goals that encourage collaboration. As the name implies, OKRs are composed of “objectives” and “key results,” which are tied together by “initiatives.”

Objectives are clearly defined goals that will have a major impact. They should be challenging but attainable and align with an organization’s strategic vision.

Key results are how an objective’s progress is measured or monitored on the path to achieving the goal, which is powered by initiatives, all the projects and tasks that will help you achieve your key results.

Using the OKR framework ensures a greater focus on results that matter, increased transparency and better, more strategic alignment. Setting goals this way also allows an organization to measure what’s working and what’s not.

Engaging Board Members in Goal-Setting

In order to create OKRs with that kind of larger strategic alignment, it was crucial for us to engage with the stakeholders whose focus is on the big picture: our board of directors and, more specifically, our enrollment committee. Most of these dedicated volunteers are board members, while others are current parents with particular insights into our enrollment efforts. All of them bring diverse experiences, perspectives and expertise from the business world, the field of psychology and the nonprofit sector, making this collaborative process interesting and dynamic.

After drafting our OKRs, we review them with our committee co-chairs, which is an invaluable exercise to ensure we remain in sync and on the right track. We come prepared with both recruitment ideas and comprehensive enrollment data, and our co-chairs help to keep us thinking about our goals from a broader context. Once our OKRs are finalized, we are then able to present them to the enrollment committee and to the board of directors as a whole.

A powerful outcome of this process is transparency. The OKRs translate our work into operational elements, allowing the enrollment committee to focus on strategy. The OKRs also provide a framework for our committee meetings so we could report on our progress in a meaningful way and have more productive conversations. It requires a good deal of preparation in advance of each committee meeting, gathering the relevant data and updating our key metrics. Committee meetings are scheduled one week prior to each board meeting in order to be ready with the most relevant updates to help the board make key decisions.

OKRs in Action

Here are two concrete examples from our OKRs last year, one specifically related to recruitment and the other to retention.

Recruitment. Our goal last year was to both increase and widen “the top of the funnel,” meaning grow our number of prospects (by 40%) and ensure that our prospects were composed of a wider swath of the Jewish community. One initiative to accomplish that was our participation in Prizmah’s Engage program, a yearlong partnership between Jewish day schools and PJ Library. Our key result was to identify 30 new prospects over the course of the year as we hosted four community events with our PJ Library partner. By the end of the year, we actually identified 64 new prospects for 2024–25 (more than double what we hoped to achieve), many of whom were families we hadn’t been able to reach before.

Retention. With retention of current students being a critical piece of total enrollment numbers, we also put several initiatives in place to increase our retention rates. One specific goal was to secure at least a 90% retention between fourth and fifth grade, as we started to notice a growing attrition rate at that stage. We worked with the academic team to develop a program specifically for parents of students entering fifth grade to highlight how important that final year is at Perelman. The result: a 95% retention rate between fourth and fifth grade for the 2024–25 school year.

The Results

After implementing our OKRs, we are now welcoming 95 new students to Perelman for this academic year. And with a stronger retention rate, this translates to an enrollment of 329 students as compared to 285 last year. (For context, we have not had enrollment numbers this high since 2019.) Carefully tracking our key metrics enabled us to understand how much of this increase we could directly attribute to our strategies and initiatives, even as we also attribute a percentage of our growth to increased interest of Jewish families seeking more engagement with Jewish educational and community institutions in the wake of October 7 and rising antisemitism. This data also has been helpful in formulating our OKRs for this coming year. Reviewing the data to see what worked and what didn’t enabled us to streamline our initiatives and make them even more impactful.

As we’ve reflected on the positive impact of the OKRs, we realize that an added benefit has been the deepened collaboration with our board, aligning our work more deliberately with the school’s broader strategic vision. Central to this process was the importance of actionable data, which allowed us to make informed decisions, track progress in real time and quickly pivot when necessary. Any team or individual can create OKRs (or any kind of goals); they are much more powerful when they emanate from an organization’s larger strategic vision as a starting point.

By leveraging the expertise of our board members and grounding our strategies in concrete data, we’ve created a sustainable model for growth and strategic alignment. As we continue to refine our goals, this commitment to actionable data and strategic collaboration ensures that we are not just growing enrollment but also growing the strength and cohesion of our school community.

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