Background
Christel House Indianapolis operates a network of four public charter schools built around a long-term commitment to student success. In addition to their two K-8 schools and one high school, the network also includes Christel House DORS, a charter school that helps learners of all ages return to school and earn a full high school diploma.
For adults balancing jobs, families, and transportation barriers, DORS offers students a chance to finish something they may have started years earlier and now need support to complete.
Christina Summers-Wooley, Head of Partnerships and Communications at Christel House Indianapolis, understands that mission from both a communications and recruitment perspective. She supports visibility and outreach across the Christel House network, and before moving into her current role, she spent five years as the student recruiter for all Christel House schools.
That experience gave Summers-Wooley a clear view of the opportunity in front of DORS: adults across Indianapolis could benefit from earning their diploma, but Christel House needed a stronger, more consistent way to reach them.
Challenge
When the old outreach playbook changed
For years, DORS relied heavily on word of mouth, community events, flyering, and in-person outreach to build awareness.
“When I started in 2015, community events were the biggest thing,” Summers-Wooley said. “All summer long, every weekend and lots of nights during the week, I was out at different community events, festivals, and fairs.”
Then COVID changed the rhythm of community engagement. Events stopped, and while some eventually returned, the landscape was never quite the same. There were fewer large community events and fewer opportunities to get out and talk to prospective students in person.
The audience was still there. The need was still there. But the old ways of building awareness were no longer enough on their own.
A growing need for a new recruitment channel
For DORS, that shift mattered because enrollment had become flat. The need in the community was there, but the hard part was helping prospective students hear about DORS enough times, at the right moment, to feel ready to submit an enrollment inquiry.
Digital advertising felt like a natural, necessary next step. It would give DORS a way to stay visible beyond in-person events and continue reaching adults who may need to see the message more than once before taking action.
But social media advertising wasn’t an area where Summers-Wooley nor her teammate felt especially confident.
“We knew social media was something we had to figure out, but it wasn’t a strength for either of us,” Summers-Wooley said. “We got to the point where we said, ‘We need help with this because this isn’t a piece we can do very well.’”
A full-time function for a lean team
At the same time, the communications role itself was becoming more complex. Summers-Wooley’s job spans both partnerships and communications, requiring her to spend time out in the community building relationships while also managing messaging, marketing, and internal communications work.
Hiring for digital advertising support would have been the best option, but like many schools navigating post-COVID budget realities, Christel House simply didn’t have the budget to add a new full-time marketing role.
That left the communications team needing to keep student recruitment moving without trying to absorb an entire digital advertising function. Running effective enrollment campaigns wasn’t something the team could simply learn in a weekend or manage on the side. It would require campaign strategy, ad creation, lead nurturing, and much more.
Rather than try to turn a lean, two-person communications team into a digital advertising team, Christel House decided to look for an outside partner that could bring the strategy, execution, and education experience the work required.
Solution
Finding an education-focused recruitment partner
As Christel House looked for new ways to generate interest in DORS, the team decided to partner with SchoolMint. “We were struggling with enrollment at that time,” Summers-Wooley said. “So we thought, let’s try SchoolMint for one year and just see how it goes.”
The goal was to bring in a partner that could help DORS reach prospective students through social media without requiring Summers-Wooley’s team to build and manage the campaigns themselves.
That education-specific expertise mattered. DORS serves a different audience than a traditional K-12 school, but the work still depends on understanding enrollment: how to reach prospective students, how to build trust, and how to make the next step feel approachable. With SchoolMint, Christel House had a partner that already understood the education context behind the campaign, rather than a general agency that first had to be brought up to speed on schools, students, and enrollment.
“SchoolMint is an education company, so we knew SchoolMint knew what they were doing,” Summers-Wooley said.
Making digital advertising easy to manage
From there, SchoolMint made the work simple. The team handled campaign strategy, ad themes, messaging, creative development, and lead handoff, while Summers-Wooley’s team provided photos, reviewed materials, and gave feedback when needed.
“It’s so easy. It is so easy,” Summers-Wooley said. “I have a file where I can dump pictures. Every once in a while, they’ll reach out and ask for updated pictures because we’ve been using the same ones. They come up with the themes and the talking points based on what we have sent them. We check to make sure everything reflects what we’re looking for. Then we say, ‘Okay, here we go,’ or we ask for changes.”
After that, SchoolMint gets the campaign ready to launch and helps keep the lead process moving. Interested students’ information is shared with Christel House, and Summers-Wooley’s colleague Cristian follows up directly.
“Once changes are made, it’s ready to go and then it’s done,” Summers-Wooley said. “We just pull in the leads. We could not have asked for an easier process.”
We just pull in the leads. We could not have asked for an easier process.
Improving student recruitment without creating more work
That ease was especially valuable because Summers-Wooley’s role requires her to balance two very different kinds of work. The partnership side requires her to be out in the community, building relationships and meeting with people. The communications side requires time in the office managing messaging and outreach across the network.
“It’s very hard sometimes to balance the two,” she said. “Having to add learning social media on top of it would be incredibly difficult.”
With four DORS campuses and multiple class schedules, managing digital recruitment internally would have added another layer of complexity. SchoolMint’s support gave Summers-Wooley a way to keep recruitment active without pulling time away from community partnerships and broader communications work.
“This really helps me balance the very different jobs I have in this one position,” she said.
Results
A more consistent way to generate interest
With SchoolMint managing the digital advertising work, DORS gained a more consistent way to reach prospective adult students without adding another role to Summers-Wooley’s team.
Each campaign helped keep DORS visible to adults who may need to hear the message more than once before taking the next step. And when campaigns went live, Summers-Wooley saw the impact in the form of new interest from prospective students.
“Every time a new campaign goes out, we see so many interested leads coming in,” Summers-Wooley said. “It’s fantastic.”
A clearer return on student recruitment investment
The results also gave DORS a clearer way to think about the return on its recruitment investment. When the organization’s business office reviewed the past year of advertising performance, Summers-Wooley shared that 24 leads had applied and six current students had come in through the ads — meaning one in every four applicants ultimately enrolled, helping DORS connect its advertising investment to real student growth.
And that current-student count gave the team a conservative view of impact. As Summers-Wooley notes, it doesn’t necessarily include adult students who may have enrolled and left or students who graduated.
But even with that conservative view, the investment paid off. As she added, “Six students more than pays for the service for us.”
For DORS, those enrollments represent more than campaign performance: they represent adults taking the first step back toward a diploma they may have wanted for years.
A recruitment process the team could sustain
The value of the recruitment partnership with SchoolMint wasn’t only in the numbers. It was also in what SchoolMint made possible for a small team that didn’t have the time or capacity to manage enrollment-focused digital advertising themselves:
- Instead of building campaigns from scratch, Summers-Wooley’s team could review the strategy, copy, and creative SchoolMint provided.
- Instead of managing every technical detail, they could stay focused on the messaging, mission, and student follow-up.
- Instead of trying to micromanage a digital advertising function, they had a partner they trusted to keep the work moving.
“I can’t say enough about the ease of use,” Summers-Wooley said. “Every person we have talked to or worked with has been incredibly helpful, so nice, and very patient.”
That ease has changed what recruitment looks like for DORS. Digital advertising is no longer an overwhelming task sitting on the edge of Summers-Wooley’s role. It is a managed, repeatable process that helps DORS continue reaching adult learners while giving her more room to focus on the partnership, communications, and community work that still needs her direct attention.
“It’s very nice to have all the materials there and know that it’s in good hands and that we don’t have to micromanage anything,” she said.
