Session five
Session Five — Synthesis, the Plan, and the Action Plan
A free companion artifact from The Enrollment Director Field Guide to AI. The guide explains when and how to use it; this copy is yours to adapt for your school. More at haitani.org/field-guides/enrollment-director
Q3 2026 edition · last updated August 13, 2026
What this is. The last of five working sessions, and the longest. It runs in four moves: a synthesis report that holds your research against your goals, a discussion of what it found, the strategic plan itself, and the 90-day execution plan.
Plan on two sittings. Moves 1 and 2 are one working session; moves 3 and 4 are another. Running all four in one stretch produces a plan you have skimmed rather than argued with.
Open a new conversation in your project with all four summaries in the folder.
Move 1 — The synthesis report
This is Session 5 of 5. Read my Session 1, 2, 3, and 4 summaries in the project files. Write the synthesis report. Its purpose is to hold the research from Sessions 1 through 3 up against the goals from Session 4 and tell the truth about where they align and where they do not. Be specific: name the finding, name the goal, explain the tension or the support. Do not manufacture alignment that is not there, and do not manufacture alarm. Where the evidence is thin, say so. Plain text, capital-letter section headers, no markdown symbols, no asterisks, no em-dashes. Structure: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (under 150 words) WHAT THE RESEARCH SHOWS (organized by value proposition, local market, and family sentiment) YOUR STATED GOALS WHERE THE RESEARCH SUPPORTS YOUR GOALS WHERE THE RESEARCH AND YOUR GOALS DIVERGE QUESTIONS WORTH DISCUSSING (3 to 5 pointed questions, for me) Roughly 1000 to 1400 words. Address me directly as "you".
Move 2 — Interrogate it, then rehearse the hard conversation
Work through the report with the AI. If you disagree with a finding, say so and explore why — a finding you can dismantle should be dismantled now rather than defended in February.
Then run the rehearsal. This is the highest-value twenty minutes in the whole kit:
Take the role of a skeptical head of school or trustee reviewing these targets. Ask me your five hardest questions, hardest first. Be genuinely adversarial: ask why a number is achievable when the entry-grade pool is shrinking, what happens to net tuition revenue if the growth arrives needing aid, and which line in this plan absorbs a competitor's response. Do not soften the questions and do not congratulate my answers. After I answer each one, attack the answer.
The question that lands without a ready response is the weak plank in your plan, found in private with time to fix it. The simulation is plausible rather than predictive — its value is that you arrive at the real conversation having already survived a harder one.
When the discussion settles, ask for a short alignment memo: each target, the evidence for and against it, the assumptions it rests on, and any revisions the evidence forced. Save it as Alignment Memo. A director who brings that memo negotiates targets from evidence.
Move 3 — The strategic enrollment plan
Draft the strategic core of the enrollment plan. Ground every element in the research and in our discussion; where you must make an assumption, label it as one. Plain text, capital-letter headers, no markdown symbols. Address me as "you". Structure: TARGET FAMILY PERSONAS Three distinct personas most likely to apply to this school, drawn from the actual catchment demographics, employers, income picture, and sentiment evidence. For each: a short name and one-line essence, who they are (family shape, work, income band, neighborhood or zip pattern), what they want from a school, what would make them choose us, what would make them walk away, where they get information, and a rough estimate of what share of the realistic applicant pool they represent, with your reasoning. MARKET SEGMENTS THIS SCHOOL SERVES The segments behind the personas, sized as well as the evidence allows, with a note on which is growing fastest and which is most contested by competitors. MARKETING PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING SCHOOL YEAR Positioning statement, messaging emphasis for each persona, channel strategy, admission funnel tactics from inquiry through enrollment, and how this plan addresses the misalignments named in the synthesis report. Roughly 1200 to 1600 words.
Then push on the personas. This is where the model reaches for generic private-school-family archetypes if you let it. A persona you cannot connect to a specific finding from Sessions 1 through 3 is decoration. Ask it to name the evidence behind each one, and rework any that cannot cite it.
Treat every market-share figure as a structured guess to refine against your own inquiry and enrollment data. It is a starting hypothesis, not a fact.
Once the personas hold up, turn them loose on your own materials: how well does our website speak to this family, and where are the gaps?
When you are satisfied:
Produce the final version of the plan. Apply every change I asked for, keep everything I accepted, and do not introduce new ideas we did not discuss. Same structure and formatting rules.
Save it as Strategic Enrollment Plan.
Move 4 — The 90-day action plan
Turn this strategy into an execution plan I can start tomorrow. Be concrete: every item should name an action, an owner role if relevant, and how to know it is done. Prioritize low-hanging fruit early. Ground the content calendar in the real private school admission cycle for our focus grades. Plain text, capital-letter headers. Structure: 30-60-90 DAY ACTION PLAN First 30 days: 5 to 8 actions focused on immediate wins and foundations. Days 31 to 60: 5 to 8 actions. Days 61 to 90: 5 to 8 actions. Each action on its own line with a short rationale. OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS Three objectives drawn from my stated goals, each with 3 measurable key results, with numbers wherever my goals allow. 12-MONTH MARKETING CONTENT CALENDAR Month by month from the start of the upcoming admission season. For each month: theme, 2 to 3 content or campaign items, which persona each targets, and the admission cycle moment it serves. RISKS AND MITIGATIONS 3 to 5 likely derailers with a practical mitigation for each. METRICS TO TRACK The short list of numbers to watch weekly and monthly. Roughly 1400 to 1800 words.
Then cut it down. Strategy documents die of scope, and the plan that comes back will be sized for a team you do not have. Reduce it to what your actual people can do between now and the end of the quarter. An action plan sized for an imaginary team is a wish.
Save it as 90-Day Action Plan.
The plan is a cycle
Each season the market brief updates, the sentiment scan reruns, and results get compared against the 90-day metrics. Then the personas and targets are revised against what actually happened.
The second pass through the five sessions is much faster, because your Enrollment Layer persists and only the deltas need work. A plan revised every season on evidence is a different instrument from a plan written once and shelved.
From The Enrollment Director Field Guide to AI (Q3 2026 edition) · haitani.org/field-guides/enrollment-director · Linda Haitani LLC
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