1,200 private K-12 school leaders rendezvoused at the Marriott Marquis in sunny San Diego last week for E3n’s annual Enroll26 conference, a weeklong event providing insights and strategies to admission and enrollment professionals.
VenturEd Solutions®, this year’s Lead Sponsor, left an expansive footprint during the event, which spanned September 22-26. With our “Dive Into Data” booth, VIP boat party, and multiple speaking engagements, the team left a lasting impression.
RELATED: The Private School’s Guide to Data Migration: Q&A With Bryan Black, VP of Partner Success
Navigating an Ocean of Enrollment Challenges and Opportunities
This year’s conference immersed attendees with an insightful lineup of presentations, with notable sessions covering how to manage enrollment with deeper data analysis, creating more personalized recruiting, and implementing AI into enrollment workflows.
Strengthening Schools’ Enrollment Experiences
As a major sponsor, the VenturEd team was in the spotlight with multiple high-visibility moments. On Thursday morning, the team hosted a session entitled, “The Enrollment Experience is Broken. Here’s How Schools Are Fixing It.”
Joining Craig Dodson, VP of Customer Support, and Callee Grisham, Lead Account Executive, were Tanya Espy-Disparti, Director of Enrollment Management at the Lowell School, and Kaylyn French, Assistant Director of Admission at the Norwood School.
With decades of combined experience working with and in private school enrollment offices, the panel discussed what really happens when schools overhaul admissions systems — breaking down department silos, preventing staff burnout, winning buy-in from leadership, and using data tools to work smarter.
Attendees came away with the following strategies to strengthen the enrollment lifecycle at their school:
- Identify specific friction points in an enrollment pipeline
- Distinguish between surface-level family experience fixes and structural workflow changes that produce lasting results
- Practical approaches for aligning admissions, marketing, finance, and academic teams around shared enrollment goals
- Find where to leverage enrollment software and data tools to reduce manual labor and improve operational efficiency.
“I hope attendees were able to see how friction points in their enrollment ecosystems can cause both great enrollment challenges as well as opportunities to solve these challenges,” explained Dodson. “How they bring about change can be different at each school, but data, qualitative and quantitative, should be at the core of decision making and action planning.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the team helped submerge attendees into the world of data. Our featured booth was perfectly positioned to have as many conversations as possible about how schools can use VenturEd’s Enrollment Insights® platform to benefit from real-time dashboards, custom reporting, predictive analysis, and executive-level insights.
“We met with several schools to show them some of the enhancements to Ravenna that are coming, such as using AI to summarize documents and making it easier for anyone to build reports,” said Christi Reece, Sales Director at VenturEd. “The major concern is nobody wants to remove the human touch. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
A Keynote Lineup to Inspire
This year’s keynote speakers came from a variety of backgrounds in the K-12 space, but each had an inspiring message for administrators. Jeff Selingo, a journalist and author tapped into his 25 years of experience covering higher education to give schools an up-to-date layout of the college admissions landscape.
Crystal Washington, futurist and author, spoke on how today’s trending technologies, including AI, social media, and edtech apps, intersect with modern classrooms to create the best learning opportunities for each student.
Finally, Donnie Campbell, the longtime high school teacher who coached a young Jason Sudekis in basketball and thus inspired the namesake character in “Ted Lasso,” motivated a room full of fellow educators with lessons in leadership from the heart.
Swimming With the Big Fish
E3n recognized the best of the best when it comes to private school enrollment. Professionals from five schools won awards recognizing them for outstanding performances.
Included in this list was Justin Baker-Rhett, the Senior Associate Director of Admissions at VenturEd client San Francisco University High School (CA). As a user of Ravenna Admissions, the school saw enough enrollment success for Baker-Rhett to win the Rising Star Award.
Surfacing for a Breath… and Happy Hour
It wasn’t all talk of dashboards and admissions. On Wednesday, following the opening reception, the VenturEd team hosted a VIP event aboard the Triton Catamaran on the San Diego Harbor. Guests enjoyed live music, drinks, and hors d’oeuvres while taking in the beautiful views of Coronado and the San Diego skyline.
On Thursday, senior VenturEd leaders Nick Laird (CEO) and Phil Charland (General Manager, US) were invited to a VIP experience at The Nolen Rooftop in downtown San Diego. The duo got to meet with E3n higher ups and enrollment officials from many prestigious schools, including Peter Park from the Peddie School in New Jersey, who was given this year’s E3n Changemaker Award.
“As a primary sponsor of E3n, we’ve been incredibly appreciative of the welcome and hospitality the team has shown us throughout the conference,” remarked Charland. “The VIP reception was a great reflection of what makes this community special — bringing together thoughtful leaders from across independent schools for genuine conversation, connection, and shared learning.”
Get the Full Depth of Enrollment Analytics With VenturEd Solutions
Enroll26 provided plenty of opportunities for learning, networking, and appreciating the joys of private education. Schools hold troves of data to power great admissions and enrollment pipelines, but sitting on that data without proper analytics leaves countless opportunities on the table.
The VenturEd Enrollment Insights platform powers school decisions from day-to-day dashboards up to executive-level analysis for schools, districts, and dioceses.
