Program

All Sessions will be recorded and available on-demand after the event.

View Program Sessions

Session 1: School Marketing the Right Way: Your 60-Minute Transformation Guide

Take part in this focused, high-impact session that distills the core principles of Brendan Schneider’s book, School Marketing the Right Way, into actionable steps for immediate implementation. Brendan wrote this book to help independent school marketers cut through the noise and focus on what truly moves the needle—providing a clear, strategic approach based on years of hands-on experience. Learn how to revolutionize your school’s marketing approach through interactive exercises and real-world examples, from developing targeted personas to leveraging AI tools. Perfect for busy school marketers who want to maximize their marketing effectiveness quickly.

Speaker: Brendan Schneider, Founder and CEO, SchneiderB Media

Session 2: Advocates, Activists, and other A-words: A Peek at How SAS Navigates the World of Parent Engagement

Are you trying to implement an impactful new program?
Need to shake up an outdated system?
Or maybe you’ve got a building project proposal just waiting for approval?

Big changes can’t be made in isolation. You need parents. This means working with the advocates, activists, and sometimes the other a-words too. In this interactive session, we will share our strategies, lessons learned, and some of our missteps so that you can navigate the parent engagement journey and be sure your school improvement plans are implemented successfully!

Speaker: Kyle Aldous, Executive Director of Communications, Singapore American School

Session 3: Make It Fun! The Power of Joy in Strategic Communication Initiatives

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule diet? It suggests eating nutritious foods for 80% of the time and relaxing on the remaining 20%. What if this concept applied to strategic communications? Join us for an insightful exploration into the power of the 80/20 rule in school communications and Seoul Foreign School’s journey integrating this principle into our work culture, where 80% of our efforts are dedicated to essentials while 20% spark joy through creative projects. Discover how this approach not only boosts team morale but also garners fantastic community engagement. In this session, we'll exchange ideas, uncover each other's 20%, and leave with actionable steps to enhance our communication practices. And hopefully, have fun in the process!

Speaker: Cyrielle Bazin, Director of Strategic Communications at Seoul Foreign School

Session 4: Crafting Targeted Appeals: Strategies for Marketing Success

How do you create targeted appeals that truly resonate, inspire engagement, and strengthen community support? In this session, we’ll take you through NIST International School’s journey in crafting the award-winning "Once A NISTree, Always A NISTree" campaign. Learn how strategic audience segmentation, and connecting with your audience, as well as tips for leveraging data and insights to refine your strategies. Whether you're looking to refine your fundraising strategies or build a stronger sense of belonging within your school community, this session will provide practical takeaways from NIST’s experience.

Speaker: Yvonne Trisynthia, Director of Engagement, NIST International School

Session 5: Content Chaos: Taming the Social Media Beast with a Tiny Team

In a world where content is king, how can small marcomms teams effectively produce creative and strategic content that engages their target audiences? How do you balance frequency with quality? How does social media content align with your marketing and advancement goals? These are the questions that my small team of three has been wrestling with as we work on improving our social media strategy. We’ll take a look at some of ASIJ’s approaches and how to structure a deliverable strategy for a smaller team.

Speaker: Matt Wilce, Director of Communications, American School of Japan

Session 6: Elevating Your Brand with Social Proof

As enrollment goals and market demands grow, it is no longer enough to tell parents that your school is the best in the region or country. You have to prove it. This session explores how to create a collection of stories using videos and photos to use as Social Proof, reinforcing why your school is the best choice for prospective families while utilizing minimal resources.

Speaker: Brittany Haney, Communications and Marketing Coordinator, Jakarta Intercultural School

Session 7: Are You Making the Most of Your Digital Platforms?

Are you fully leveraging the digital tools at your disposal? Join us for an insightful session where we'll explore how to leverage your school's digital platforms to streamline processes and enhance communication. We'll guide you through assessing the effectiveness of your current digital tools, identifying areas for improvement, and sharing tips to consider along the way.

Concerned that your website doesn't accurately reflect your school but don't know if it need simple updates or a complete overhaul? Perhaps your community struggles to find the information they need due to the absence of a centralized portal, and you're uncertain about where to start. Or maybe your team is spending excessive hours each week compiling the school newsletter. If any of these scenarios sound familiar, then this session is for you.

It’s time to take full advantage of your digital tools to improve communication and lighten your workload. Walk away with a clear plan to maximize the potential of your digital toolbox, ensuring your school's communication is efficient, effective, and engaging.

Speaker: Liz Kingston, Independent Consultant and Digital Project Manager, Inner Works For Schools

Session 8: Inspiring Action Through Compelling Storytelling

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in your toolkit. It connects hearts, inspires action, and drives meaningful change. Whether you are a seasoned professional or new to educational advancement, join us to learn how to craft an authentic narrative that engages emotions and motivates your audience to act.

Speaker: Emanuel Diaz Miranda, Head of Content, IE University

Session 9: Clear Comms in a Complex Community

How do you ensure your parents are hearing you? How do you navigate language and cultural differences? Explore ways to deliver your message clearly in an international school community.

Speaker: Brooke Burns, Assistant Director of Communications, Taipei American School

Session 10: Onboarding AI: 10 Ways to Optimize Your New Team Member

Don't let the challenges of onboarding create any road bumps for the marketing and communications efforts at your school. Explore 10 actionable strategies to optimize onboarding and set your newest team members (and you!) up for success.

Speaker: Magdalen Gray, Director of Advancement, American International School of Budapest

Session 11: Precision Marketing: How to Use AI to Elevate Your Strategic Edge

This session is for professionals looking to move beyond content generation and harness AI as a strategic asset. We’ll explore how to enhance decision-making, refine strategy, and optimize execution by breaking down three key areas: the foundations of strategic thinking, providing a framework for integrating AI into high-level marketing decisions; AI’s role in strategic marketing and campaign development, ensuring smarter, data-driven approaches at every stage; and ChatGPT customization for strategic and improved prompt outputs.

Speaker: Gustavo Segui, Executive Director Marketing, Admissions & Advancement, International School of Curitiba

Session 12: Trust by Design: Checklists for Building Trust with Colleagues

Checklists are both art and a science. Psychologically, checklists serve as external memory aids that reduce cognitive burden, and when we check items off a list, our brain releases dopamine as a “reward.” The art of the checklist is how we strategically design and intentionally use them.

Melissa Richards, “The Checklist Guru” and author of “The 30-60-90-Day Handbook: Checklists for Communications and Marketing Leaders in Higher Education”, will discuss the psychology of checklists and offer practical steps for building trust with colleagues up, down, and across the institution.

Walk away with actionable strategies, tactics and tools to strengthen your professional relationships.

Speaker: Melissa Farmer Richards, MPA, APR, Principal and Founder, iMarketingMix LLC

Session 13: Master the Art of Video Storytelling

Whether you’re working with a hired crew or producing in-house, make the most of what video has to offer. What compels audiences is not that 500-foot drone shot, it’s not slow-motion playground scenes, and it will never be — for goodness’ sake — hearing about your school’s “tradition of excellence.” What drives people to take action is a memorable story. And you have one!

Jeff Nesmith is a video and multimedia producer at CASE, where he oversees a wide portfolio of photo, video, animation, and motion graphics for the organization. Formerly the Director of Marketing and Communications at an independent school in Washington, DC, Jeff has several years of experience in digital video and marketing for NGOs and international schools across Southeast Asia and Africa. Find him at linkedin.com/in/nesmithcreative

Speaker: Jeff Nesmith, Video and Multimedia Production Manager, CASE

Session 14: AI and the Future of Advancement

In this session, we'll dive into the powerful role that psychographic data plays in transforming donor engagement strategies. Beyond traditional demographic information, psychographics reveal deeper insights into donors' values, motivations, and behavioral tendencies. By understanding what truly drives donors to give, advancement professionals can create highly personalized outreach and engagement strategies that resonate on a more meaningful level. Attendees will learn how to collect, interpret, and apply psychographic data to build stronger, more loyal donor relationships, enhance campaign effectiveness, and ultimately increase donor retention and support. This session is perfect for anyone looking to make their fundraising efforts more targeted, strategic, and successful in today's data-driven world. By integrating AI with psychographic data, we’ll show how you can create detailed donor personas, test engagement strategies in real-time, and gather actionable feedback to continuously refine your approach. This allows for truly personalized outreach, resulting in deeper donor connections and more time-efficient, effective, data-driven fundraising efforts for senior and executive leaders.

Speaker: Andrew Weller, Dean of Admissions and Enrollment, The Birch Wathen Lenox School

Session 15: Demystifying Generative AI

Join Christy as she breaks down how to leverage generative AI to boost productivity and streamline workflows. You’ll learn more about the best uses for different Generative AI platforms, the Do’s and Don’ts of implementing AI in your daily work, and real world use cases for small teams.

This session is perfect for individuals and small teams eager to harness the power of AI to drive efficiency and innovation.

Speaker: Christy Moss, Vice President of Membership and Marketing, University of Illinois Alumni Association

Session 16: It's All in Your Mind - Skills You'll Need for the Road Ahead

This is a challenging time for school communicators. Political realignments, demographic shifts, the culture wars, unending crises, and the pace of change demand skills and a temperament that is flexible, adaptable and unflappable. Come learn how to not only survive but thrive in this new reality, provide strategic insights to your leadership team and support your school community while promoting your own career.

Speaker: Jan Abernathy, Chief Communications Officer, The Browning School

Session 17: Boost Your Brand and Build Enrollment with Search Advertising

Every day, thousands of searches are made for boarding-school-related terms, making it challenging to achieve high organic rankings due to intense competition. However, advertising on platforms like Google and Bing Ads offers a powerful way to ensure your school appears at the top of search results with a compelling message to attract the right-fit families. In this session, Landmark School and Enroll Media Group will share best practices for executing a holistic digital advertising search campaign, complemented by effective creative strategies, email marketing, and analytics to boost your brand and drive enrollment.

Speaker: Angie Ward, President, Enroll Media Group

Session 18: The Power of Partnership: Effective Data Sharing for Communications and Advancement

Whether you're running a fully integrated Advancement Model or working together on a more ad-hoc basis, sharing data across systems can prompt questions and issues we sometimes don't think about until it's too late. In this session we'll discuss some easy ways to head off pain points when sharing data between systems.

Speaker: Emma Sonduck, Director of Development, The San Francisco Bay School

Session 19: Taxing Times: The 2025 Legislative Outlook for Schools

What does the Trump Administration and Congress have in store for independent schools this year? And how will U.S. tax reform impact giving to schools? This session will cover the legislative landscape for schools in the U.S., with a particular focus on issues affecting school advancement offices and how you can support CASE and NAIS’s advocacy efforts. Global legislative developments impacting schools will also be discussed.

Speakers: Justin Perillo, General Counsel, National Association of Independent Schools; Whitney Silverman, Assistant Legal Counsel and Director of Government Relations, National Association of Independent Schools; Crickett Kasper; Director of Schools, CASE

Program schedule at-a-glance by region

SGT (Singapore)

9:00 AM – 9:50 AM
Session 1

10:00 – 10:50 AM
Session 2

11:00 – 11:50 AM
Session 3

Noon – 12:50 PM
Session 4

1:00 – 1:50 PM
Session 5

2:00 – 2:50 PM
Session 6

3:00 – 3:50 PM
Session 7

4:00 – 4:50 PM
Session 8

5:00 – 5:50 PM
Session 9

6:00 – 6:50 PM
Session 10

7:00 – 7:50 PM
Session 11

8:00 – 8:50 PM
Session 12

9:00 – 9:50 PM
Session 13

11:00 – 11:50 PM
Session 14

Midnight – 12:50 AM (2 April)
Session 15

1:00 – 1:50 AM
Session 16

2:00 – 2:50 AM
Session 17

3:00 – 3:50 AM
Session 18

4:00 – 4:50 AM
Session 19

5:00 AM
End

BST (UK)

2:00 AM – 2:50 AM
Session 1

3:00 – 3:50 AM
Session 2

4:00 – 4:50 AM
Session 3

5:00 - 5:50 AM
Session 4

6:00 – 6:50 AM
Session 5

7:00 – 7:50 AM
Session 6

8:00 – 8:50 AM
Session 7

9:00 AM – 9:50 AM
Session 8

10:00 – 10:50 AM
Session 9

11:00 – 11:50 AM
Session 10

Noon – 12:50 PM
Session 11

1:00 – 1:50 PM
Session 12

2:00 – 2:50 PM
Session 13

4:00 – 4:50 PM
Session 14

5:00 - 5:50 PM
Session 15

6:00 – 6:50 PM
Session 16

7:00 – 7:50 PM
Session 17

8:00 – 8:50 PM
Session 18

9:00 – 9:50 PM
Session 19

10:00 PM
End

ET (US/Canada)

9:00 PM – 9:50 PM (March 31)
Session 1

10:00 – 10:50 PM
Session 2

11:00 – 11:50 PM
Session 3

Midnight – 12:50 AM (April 1)
Session 4

1:00 – 1:50 AM
Session 5

2:00 – 2:50 AM
Session 6

3:00 – 3:50 AM
Session 7

4:00 – 4:50 AM
Session 8

5:00 – 5:50 AM
Session 9

6:00 – 6:50 AM
Session 10

7:00 – 7:50 AM
Session 11

8:00 – 8:50 AM
Session 12

9:00 – 9:50 AM
Session 13

11:00 – 11:50 AM
Session 14

Noon – 12:50 PM
Session 15

1:00 – 1:50 PM
Session 16

2:00 – 2:50 PM
Session 17

3:00 – 3:50 PM
Session 18

4:00 – 4:50 PM
Session 19

5:00PM
End

Program

View Program Sessions

Program schedule at-a-glance by region

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