Ari Betof, co-founder of Mission and Data, joins the podcast to discuss the critical importance of making mission-driven, data-informed decisions. He explores the common challenges schools face with data governance and system migrations, emphasizing the need for longitudinal consistency and strong leadership partnerships to turn raw data into a compelling strategic story.

• Mission & Data, dedicated to the effectiveness, health, and vitality of educational institutions and other organizations
• EMA’s Impossible Questions Podcast, from the Enrollment Management Association
• EMA’s Enrollment Spectrum Podcast, exploring the central tenets of enrollment management strategy, focusing on components embodying the spectrum
• Articles by Ari Betof on Medium.com
• Stevenson School, independent Pre-K–12 boarding and day school located on California's Monterey Peninsula 
• Center for Institutional Research in Independent Schools (CIRIS), supporting the work of institutional research practitioners as they help schools collect, analyze, and operationalize data in support of their mission

Dan, welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host, Christina Lewellen,

hello and welcome back to talking

technology with ATLIS. This is Christina Lewellen, the

President and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent schools.

I'm Bill Stites, the Director of Technology at

Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher's

school in Richmond, Virginia.

Hello, gentlemen. How's everything

today? Day one with

kids? Ah, how's it going, sir, I've got a pounding

headache. Been here since 615 but you know, it's all it should

be time for the

Excedrin. Come on. But the energy has got

to be super fun, right?

It's always nice having the footsteps back in the

building for sure, 100%

that's why we're here. Yeah, it definitely

feels like fall in the air. Hiram, where are you at in your

schedule?

So we are starting week two. That's a shorter week

because we all had labor day off. But regrettably, we opened

up today after an email that went out from the head of school

that one of our sprinkler heads in our dining hall went off and

saturated all of our wood tables and chairs and projectors and

screens. We've got all that fun stuff, so we're eating al fresca

today. Oh well, it's a beautiful day for

it in the state of Virginia, so you just let the boys out in the

yard like prison. They're eating lunch outside.

Absolutely we'll throw a couple of extra toys out

there.

But I love it. Well, I'll tell you what you

guys this energy is infectious. Obviously, ATLIS staff, we don't

work at a school. We have kids who go to college and school and

all that fun stuff, but the energy is high, and I will say I

have a fun story to share with our audience. We got an email

from one of our fellow board members out on the West Coast,

Muhammad Ramadan, from the Charles Wright Academy, and he

shared with us this super cool AI storybook vibe thing that he

did for training for his faculty, where he took, kind of

his tech reminders, start of school year reminders. And it

has like this British accent, you know, Harry Potter style, as

if the narrator is reading to the audience. It's like a 10

minute video. It captures everything that Muhammad wanted

his faculty to be reminded of with these cool like animations

and AI generated images. I thought it was fascinating and

super cute. And it also had a little bridgerton kind of vibe,

because it kept saying, Dear gentle reader. And I just loved

it. So even though I'm not at a school, I'm still getting, like

residual, secondhand start of school vibes from you guys. You

know, before we start with our guest today, I was curious, how

did the back to school faculty stuff go? Did you also do AI

generated like zombie videos, or Star Trek videos, anything like

that? A la Muhammad,

we drew a line in the sand with copyright here,

and we had sexy copyright, and then we went right into cyber,

and we went into sultry cyber, is the way it was described. And

we got the attention of our faculty and staff with those

various adjectives that we utilized and got their

attention. And so it was a lot of

fun. Did you get called into HR for the

training? Dude? Like, come on. So we're

trying to figure out what the next term will be

that is used for all school faculty. PD, we

started with what is one of my favorite four

letter topics when it comes to independent schools and schools

in general, is calendars. We addressed the calendar conundrum

that we have that has been ongoing with three different

campuses, with multiple calendars. We think we finally

got around to the point where we have calendars where we don't

have duplicates, where we don't have people asking, Why am I not

seeing this on my calendar? Why is this on your calendar? What's

going on with that calendar? It was a process that started for

us in late May, early June, and is kind of just wrapped but it

is one that I think we're in a much better place. So nothing

sexy, but hopefully, fingers crossed, we have put this

problem to rest. And I'm just knocking on wood so that I'm not

going to be caught off guard by that, and then I have to come

back and bite me.

Calendaring is one of those endeavors that will

certainly put an organization to task. I mean, it is one of the

most complicated things, and everybody thinks they have their

solution, and everybody's only thinking about their piece. And

God bless you guys at MKA for going through that exercise.

I feel blog posts coming on. That's what I'll

probably do with it in terms of how we solved it that,

or holy water. Yeah,

exactly. You don't need therapy. You just you

go and you blog your way out of these traumatic situations. I

feel for you, because this is one of those examples where I

don't think about it, enterprise wide, calendaring, I don't have

to think about that because we set our system and we move on.

About the worst I have to deal with is when board members don't

know when meetings are. That's the extent of my headache. Okay,

so that is why I'm glad to have second hand vibes on start of

school rather than firsthand. 100% Well, I'm really excited

you guys. Today we have a guest that we've been trying to get

with for some time. And finally, the travel has kind of lined up.

The schedule has kind of lined up. Today, we welcome to the

podcast. Ari Brett, off from mission in data. Ari, you are

with us, but you are joining us from the Stevenson schools

podcast studio.

Yes, I am joining you from Stevenson school at the

radio station. K, s, p, b, petell Beach, 91.9k s, u, r, big

Sir, 90.1 I'm loving this. And there's a little note on the

wall here that says legal. Id say both. So I have said both.

Good job. You've done great. You've paid

your proverbial rent. We're so glad to have you join us. You

are on the road. What's shaking over at the Stevenson school?

Why are you on the west coast this week?

Stevenson is a wonderful boarding and day

school here in peteville beach, pre K 12 school, and I'm doing a

California swing. I'm here. I'm heading up to Sanford University

tomorrow, and then heading down to LA and Santa Monica on Friday

and Saturday. So really excited to be visiting our friends and

colleagues and clients out here on the West Coast.

All right, well, give Allie a hug for us,

and please tell those folks at Stevenson how much we appreciate

that you were able to pop into their studio very early on the

west coast to join us for this conversation. We appreciate

them.

We appreciate them too, and big thanks to our

friends at Stevenson. Argano, I've

got one question for you, Christina, I told you I

was going to do this to him right when we got on with him.

Here we go. You were obligated to say all that about the radio

station. I've got something I need to say to you, and I need

to see if you are understanding your obligation when I say this

to you,

the answer to every question you realize bill is go

birds. Go birds, baby, go birds. Sorry, had to do it. I'm not

even sure what the question is yet, but no, that was

it. It was just go birds. I just needed to make

sure the call response was there, go birds. Go birds.

There you go. Christina, it doesn't stop. It

doesn't stop.

Thursday, the banner goes up. I do have two hats with

me. Oh, my Philly's hat, which those of you listening on the

podcast are not going to see. I also have with me my Super Bowl

champion Philadelphia Eagles hat in honor of Thursday night's

game against that other team in Arlington, Texas, the team that

shall not be named Exactly.

This is exciting. Ari, I went to a

Phillies game over the summer. And, yeah, you people are crazy.

We had to talk about it on the pod the following week because I

was like, Bill, what is happening? I actually think that

I'm going to a wedding now from a complete stranger. And he was

eating the end of my fries like this is how the Phillies game

went for me. That's why they greased the poles.

Grease the lampposts.

Christina, are you suggesting that in some ways,

not normal by the way, Christina, you and I have been

to a baseball a Major League Baseball game we did together

with Damian Kavanaugh,

which is always a good time, because he

is a crazy baseball fan. Yes, yeah, that was fun.

Do you remember what city we were in when we did

that? Were we on

the West Coast? It was an Atlanta Braves

game. But were we in Seattle?

I believe we were in Seattle. Yes. Yay.

Nice. Great stadium,

great stadium, great stadium.

So Ari, clearly, we know you. We have a

lot of history and great memories with each other. But

let's get everybody up to speed. Let's start with your

background. So you are the co founder and partner at Mission

and data. And mission and data is a very quickly growing

organization, company in our space supporting independent

schools. So I want to talk about mission and data and kind of

where you guys started and you've become sort of

synonymous, I think, with schools trying to dig deeper

into their data and do productive things with it.

Before we get to mission and data, though, I'd love to know

just a little bit about your background. For people who don't

know you pre mission in data, tell us a little bit about your

experience in the Independent School world.

I'm an alumnus of George school in Newtown,

Pennsylvania, which is a school that absolutely changed my life

as a high school student, and then I will always be deeply

indebted to then went to college and majored in physics and math

and had a minor in psychology, played soccer and tennis and the

Honors Program at Del for college down in Greensboro,

North Carolina. Atlanta, and then I started my teaching

career at Northfield Mount Herman school in Western

Massachusetts, and in that great boarding school way, I taught

physics and math. I came in to coach soccer in tennis. I made

the mistake in my interview of saying to the athletic director

that I had wrestled for a week in high school, and so I found

myself being the head JV wrestling coach.

One week, that's all you needed, right?

One week of experience, I

was out on the field training for soccer the middle

of the winter, and one of the wrestlers ran out to the soccer

field and said, How much do you weigh? And I told him how much I

weighed, and he ran back in, and he ran back out, and he said,

Coach, whatever the coach's name was at that time, what's to see

you? And then three days later, I found myself on a wrestling

mat. So I coached those three sports at NMH, and I also lived

in a wonderful dorm called Overton, better known as Tron,

with 88 boys. And so had the wonderful boarding school Triple

Threat experience, did my doctorate at a University of

Pennsylvania, started studying the concept of organizational

stewardship, and then the great recession happened with Lehman

collapsing, and a lot of things around organizational

stewardship sort of pivoted to financial and organizational

sustainability. And so I was able to bring a lot of the

things from my time as a physics and math major in computational

modeling, and some of the work I had done, which maybe we'll talk

about today at north of Mount Hermon, about their

consolidation to one campus, into that work. And then I had

the chance to go back to George Cole and be a senior

administrator there, and was Director of Enrollment

Management with Christina Donovan and Janet Davis, and

then became Director of Institutional Advancement, and

then became the head of two schools. And I was also in

between the chief advancement officer at Minerva University

and started mission and data with my friend and your friend,

Kelsea Vroman. Kelsea has been a wonderful co founder and partner

with me, and that is the very brief, very meandery version of

how I got here to the Stevenson school in peteville Beach,

California.

I love it so much so now let's peel back the

onion on mission and data. So you and Kelsea. Kelsea, of

course, is one of our founders here at ATLIS, and you all went

off and founded mission and data. Why it seems like y'all

stepped into a spotlight that was sorely needed at a really

critical turning point for schools. And it's interesting,

because even though I haven't been around for decades and

decades, I've been around long enough to know that when your

company came into the space, we all kind of went, Oh, of course,

we need that. Like it was obvious, but where did you guys

come up with that idea? And what was the initial game plan for

mission and data. And now what has it grown into?

I had always been doing a little bit of consulting

ever since I had finished my doctoral work in 2011 and so

since then, I'd always kind of dabbled in some consulting. I'd

also done some lecturing at University of Pennsylvania in

their mid career doctoral program and Master's program.

And so I got to know a lot of emerging senior leaders and

wonderful mentors of mine who had taught in that program. And

so I had a little bit of a running start in that work. So I

had gone out and founded my own practice called organizational

sustainability consulting on the through line of something I

talked about in my doctoral research, which was this idea of

mission driven Community Center data informed decision making,

and particularly that idea of mission driven data informed

decision making was kind of deeply rooted in my values as a

practicing Quaker and as somebody who cares deeply and

has taught, I think pretty deeply, about organizational

dynamics and organizational stewardship. And independently.

Kelsea, just after that, about six months after had left NAIS,

where she had done such amazing work and founded her original

practice, and her focus was a bit different, but she and I had

worked together. We had both been faculty in NAIS School

Leadership Institute program, so we had known each other pretty

well. And my wife, who worked in the program for heads, and

spouses of heads for NAIS for a while, also knew Kelsea through

that work at NAIS. And so at the height of the pandemic, there

was a real synergy of Kelsea and me being able to come together

and kind of meet market need in that moment, because we are so

philosophically aligned on the idea that we don't want schools

to become dependent on consultants. We don't want

schools to hire our firm or any firm, for something they don't

really need. What we want is to really be a value add to help

schools live their mission, schools associations like ATLIS,

as authentically as they can today, tomorrow, 1025, 50, 100

years from now. But to do that, they need to get much better at

making mission driven decisions, but that are deeply informed by

accurate, precise and ideally well visualized data for us.

Ari, you're describing exactly why MKA

engaged with. Mission and data, everything that you're talking

about there, seeing it in the work that we've been doing with

you guys over the past year, leading up to the real nuts and

bolts work, like where we're really going to dig in and get

at it, is really one of those reasons why I think the work

that you're doing, as Christina mentioned, it really hit on

something that I think a lot of schools need it in terms of

looking at things like your strategic plan, looking at all

of those things that you do in and around, like accreditation,

post accreditation work, you know, how are you proving? What

are the proof points that you've got that are allowing you to

hold to that and actually show that you are meeting those goals

and meeting those needs. So I can thank you already for it. At

the point where we're still, I'll say we're still launching,

because it hasn't completely taken off, I think, in the real

meat of the work. But it's been great so far,

and it brings such joy. We've now gotten to work

with about 240 independent schools, about 25 membership

associations, and watching your schools and your association

vibrantly thrive is something that we take real joy in. I

think that's because so many of us have been, or continue to be,

in the case of a lot of our team still embedded in schools or

associations. And really it's about, in a lot of cases,

getting the foundation in the steel of the building right. And

yes, sometimes we're working on financial and organizational

sustainability projects or organizational transformation

projects, but sometimes the most important thing a school can do

is get their data governance house in order to just think

about data wrangling and data cleaning and those pieces. And

so we have not grown because we have wanted to grow. We've grown

because we get to work with exceptional people and there's

need. But at the end of the day, what I really appreciate is that

we get to work with fantastic clients doing good work, to live

their mission, and to do it in a way that helps them thrive today

and then also thrive into the future. And it is really joyful

work to get to do with folks like you. Bill in your school.

I'll climb on that hill as well, because we're also

a client of Michigan data. We were first exposed listening to

a presentation by Jason Kearns, current board member, at ATLIS,

and he kept talking about squishy metrics.

He used that term squishy metrics.

Squishy metrics,

if you are playing mission and data bingo, you

probably want the phrase shared understanding in the middle of

your board. Okay, got it, but squishy is definitely one of the

things you want. We talk about squishy metrics and other

squishy things a

lot. I think I have a new shirt to make for

Kern. Yeah, I

brought this concept back because we were

trying to figure out how, you know, of course, the cart was

already before the horse, where we had the strategic plan in

place, but we were trying to figure out, how do we measure

the success of this? And Jason was really helpful in helping us

define what we were actually trying to measure with our

strategic plan. And I'll take a step back just slightly and say

when I introduced this concept of using mission and data, there

was a slight pause our head had not yet heard of mission and

data. We had made the pitch a couple of times to him, and then

I got a phone call, and he happened to be at a conference,

and he says, Hiram, do you know Kelsea vrooman from mission and

data? I was like, yes, it's like, I'm really impressed by

what they're doing. It's like, that's the organization that

we've been talking about. And he's like, I got it now. I

understand that totally. See where you're coming from. And

we've since then developed a wonderful partnership with

mission and data.

One of the things that you mentioned that I think

really helps a lot with the work that you're doing, is you

mentioned the focus on data governance. Hiram and I have

said this before, when we would go in and consult with another

school, we would talk about this, and it would get a certain

level of buy in, because the consultant said that, and that's

one of the best things that has come out of for me, at least.

And I'm speaking personally as the tech director of somebody

who's got to wrangle all of that data that focus on, what are we

tracking? How are we tracking it? Where are we tracking it?

Who's responsible for tracking it? How clean is it in terms of

the work that we're doing to track it, because if we're going

to use all of these pieces to put together this picture of

success in terms of what we're doing, we need to have that good

data governance. So the work that mission and data does to

drive the school success also helps, from a tech director

standpoint, really helps reinforce a lot of the things

that I think we've been talking a lot about, but often have very

difficult time getting buy in around, because we don't have

that one thing that we're all reaching for in order to put all

of it into so that we've got this product that's going to

allow us to do something. And really see the fruition of all

of this work and all of this effort. So it's hugely helpful,

because it gives you that North Star to shoot for when we're

doing all this work.

It is hard to be a prophet in your own land. It

just is. And when I stepped into my first headship, I had just

finished my doctoral work on financial and organizational

sustainability of independent schools, and I moved into the

role of new garden Friends School, and we had some work to

do in that area. But even as much as I had been thinking

about that area for a long time, one of the wisest things I've

ever done was ask Bruce Stewart, who had been the head of Sidwell

Friends, had helped found new garden to come back onto my

board, because he could be that wise person in the room that

could say things differently than I could say, and I don't

think any organization should hire a consultant unless they

really, really need it. In fact, we spend a lot of time

recommending that people to reach out to us, work with

ATLIS, or work with CIRIS, or work with a state and regional

Association. That's a much better solution in a lot of

cases, financially. But there are certainly times where in the

sort of spectrum between DIY and fully outsourcing something,

that's a big spectrum, and finding that right combination

in between can really help move a school or an initiative

forward, because at the end of the day, Bill, to your point,

they are human processes and technical processes, and if you

don't manage both, very bad things happen.

Yeah, absolutely. And that actually

brings me to one of my pressing questions for you, Ari, is, what

is it that you're wrestling right now with schools? I'm sure

it varies from school to school, but mission and data works with

a lot of schools across a bunch of different categories of

independent school. So I'm curious, what are the challenges

that you're helping schools wrestle, or are there

opportunities that they are overlooking that sometimes the

data can reveal

we get to cross pollinate a lot between schools

that we work with. Obviously, we can't share confidential

information, but there's just a lot of insight from getting to

work with this many schools. But we also get the benefit of being

a strategic data partner with Enrollment Management

Association and with the work we've done with tabs and with

ATLIS, with NAIS, with case, with NBOA, and I'm very grateful

that we have been able to dip our toes in that many different

pools, because I think it really is of service to our clients to

have those insights and perspectives. One of the areas

that is most challenging right now is just how dynamic the

landscape is. If you're a boarding school with the

challenging context related to international student visas, the

lack of clearness about the direction of the economy. All of

those are contextual pieces that are making boards and donors and

families paying tuition skittish in various ways, so that amount

of unknown and dynamic environment is challenging. I do

think that there is a growing awareness from boards about the

importance of leveraging data, of visualizing data. Often they

don't know exactly what would be most helpful for them to serve

as trustees and fiduciaries and stewards of the institution, and

so sometimes they can lead the board down a rabbit hole without

meaning to by asking for more and more and more. And

sometimes, for example, when we work on an enrollment and market

analysis, we'll say to them, No, this is operational

visualizations, because you can drill down to the individual

student level, and it's not appropriate for the board to do

that, but then having a view that is appropriate for the

board, for example, can be really helpful. They're hungry

to make wise decisions. And boards, especially as a group,

can be incredibly in cycle, wise bodies, but we have to put them

in a position to do their best work. That is a challenge. The

amount of turnover. We see this a lot in head roles, CFO roles,

enrollment, advancement, directors of technology. Roles

are all roles where, when we see churn, there's so much lost

institutional progress and institutional knowledge. And my

one bugaboo, if we want to get deep into the data, is the

number of schools right now changing technical systems, and

either by their choice or at the recommendation of the company

that they're working with, not bringing over sufficient amount

of their historic data. Lots of schools, it's been recommended

to them that they only bring over two or three years of data,

because that's the only data that's clean. But if you don't

at least bring it over, you have no chance of ever cleaning it

and then getting greater historic insight. And so our

recommendation is always to bring over as much data as you

possibly can. You may not be able to use it all for analysis

right now because of institutional bandwidth, but you

can't go back to data that isn't there.

Yeah, let's stop down on that for a second,

because there are, I think, increasing price. Pressures on

schools from our observation that yesterday's tech isn't

necessarily doing what today's consumers need. By consumers, I

sometimes mean teachers, sometimes students or parents,

administrators, so there's this pressure to maybe advance our

tech stack. And yet what you're saying is really interesting,

because it might be tying our hands in ways that we didn't

necessarily anticipate if we try to do a data project down the

road. Is there anything that you can recommend other than pulling

over as much as you can if you're going to do a transition?

What are the ways that tech teams can help enable and unlock

these efforts to pull good data out of the systems, in other

words, like, if you walk into a school, is there a certain

situation where you're like and kind of rolling your eyes at

like that? It's such a mess.

We never roll our eyes when we start with a new

client,

sure, not publicly, I'm sure. And it would

never happen at Hiram Bill school either, I have no doubt.

But like, you know, there's got to be things that tech teams can

do to make this easier.

I want to go back to something Bill said earlier, and

that's the importance of both the technical side and the human

side, and maybe I'll name one thing on each so I still love

the concept of a cradle to grave data system, the idea that

everything is in one beautiful place that has a common ID and

maps the experience from a time a family first inquires to the

time that hopefully they give a planned gift at the end of their

life. Like that is a lovely concept. And Bill, you look

really excited about it. And the reality is is most schools are

nowhere near it, and it doesn't meet all of their needs in all

the ways they want. And so I love the concept. I think in

reality, it has not worked as well as we hope. On the

technical side, the part that is most pressing, I think, is the

need to have, obviously, clean data, but then to be able to get

it into a common place, so whether it is a data lake or

somewhere else, so that there is, you know, a unique

identifier, and that we can connect these disparate data

sets in ways that have fidelity and longitudinal consistency is

really important. As a quick example, when we start working

with a new client, we can almost always tell when there was a

change in the Director of Enrollment Management position,

because it shows in the data and how things are being tracked,

and that is not in the institution's best interest to

have that much variability based on who the most senior leader of

the enrollment office is. So that's sort of on the data side,

on the human side. I think there's a much greater need for

the most senior technical leader, whether that's titled.

And there's a lot of variety and titles in the technology world,

the head of school, the CFO, and then the other functional

leaders, to be working much more in partnership with one another,

to be having that conversation, to understand what institutional

capacity there is, to be doing this work where they may need

some help to kind of move from their own two yard line to the

50 yard line, and where the school can carry it forward. One

of the reasons I'm really grateful that I get to work with

such insightful people that kind of bridge being at the

intersection of theory and practice, Eric Heilman and Sarah

Angelle and rock and John Dorse Simon and Mike Kegler and folks

like that, is that they are living that in their schools

every single day. And like you all, they get the benefit of

seeing across a wider landscape at the same time. But that

partnership, that institutional savvy really, really matters.

You notice my excitement with the idea of the

cradle grave, and I know it doesn't exist, because there's

too many different places where things branch off and there are

better ways to do things in other systems. I was glad you

mentioned the data warehouse, in the data lake, whatever

direction you choose to go with those because in the work that

we're doing here and the work that I've done with other

schools, being able to have a place to store all of that,

because you don't know what you're going to need until you

actually need it. So the ability to have that there and have that

in the place, I think, is incredibly important. We're

trying to go through this process right now. We just

dumped all of our razor's edge data into Veracross and the

number of keys, reference IDs that we're now sharing between

all of those systems is a growing list, and one where, you

know, there's a good deal of management, but if you can

capture those and carry those into those other systems, I

think it really makes our work as tech directors a lot easier

when you're trying to then pull it all together and present a

complete portrait of a constituent in the school as it

relates to all of those systems, because emails change, even you

know, first and last names change to some degree. So having

something that you can hold on to, like that unique idea.

Identify, or whether it's in one system or multiple systems, is

something that I can't stress enough, both in the work that

we're doing here and the work that we all do when we talk with

other

schools. You know, back in 2005 2007 when I was

working at George Cole, we were on a system that was in the

higher ed space called Gen Z bar, the SQL based system, and

at that point, we were talking about Microsoft data, Cuevas and

things like that. And I say that to say it's 20 years later, and

we're largely still struggling with the same topic. We haven't

made a tremendous amount of progress, and it's because I

think it is not a technical issue, it is a workflow issue.

It is a data governance issue, and we are not I don't think

making the argument compellingly enough, why as schools, we need

to value data governance, why that longitudinal consistency

really matters? As a firm, we can do some really interesting

predictive enrollment and net tuition revenue modeling for

schools that have a critical mass of historic data about both

enrollment and applicant pool, but we can't chew that if

there's no data fidelity. And so the fact that we're two decades

into the same challenges, I think, should be an indicator

that we need to begin to have these conversations differently

and with different people to help the full organization

understand there are some real signs of progress. And I just

want to name two I mentioned when we were on Jens of our so

there was an amazing database administrator at George Cole

when we were there, named Tom Rogers. Tom's an alumnus of the

school, and literally 10 minutes before I jumped on with you all,

I found out that Tom had just joined George Schools Board of

Trustees this year, right? And so one of the things that made

Tom so amazing in his role within the IT team was that he

both spoke technology and school. And I'm borrowing a

phrase from Cindy Albertan on our team, who says that she

speaks finance and school, which is true, but Tom really did, and

he could do that translation between the two. And I think

about somebody like Sarah Hansa line rock, who I mentioned

before, who's now on the board of Aisne in New England. And so

I do think that we're starting to see organizations recognize

the importance of lifting up technology leaders and

Institutional Research leaders in having a healthy and thriving

organization.

So Ari, it really sounds to me, we're talking

about a school culture issue, predominantly in terms of the

recognition of the importance of that data governance. There's a

lot of chatter about data governance, but it's getting

everybody within a leadership team up to speed about

understanding the importance of it longitudinally, looking

forward. What do you currently have in house? Bill mentioned

earlier that we had done several different consulting gigs with

schools, and the schools that we have found that do their best

are the ones that are open to actually making the systemic

changes that are needed internally in order to get their

data to do what it needs to do, and that you're doing this not

because admissions needs this. You're not doing this because

the development office needs this. You're doing this because

the entire school needs this. And I think that's the secret

sauce. But to your point earlier, where you were saying

that certain people can speak both their area and school,

there's such a need there to tell that story, because

oftentimes, when they hear data, people just kind of throw their

hands up and they want the end result, but they're not willing

to put the work in on the front end to make it do what it needs

to do.

Yeah, they probably want the dashboard, the

pretty colors and the output, but they don't understand all

that goes into it. Just make it work, right? They come to you

Ari, and they want something cute and something their board

can look at, but they don't realize how much goes into

it. And there's a real danger in that point as

well. Look data. Storytelling is an art as much as it is a

science, right? And we're talking about Kelsea Roman

earlier. She is the best data storyteller I have ever met in

my entire life. I, by my nature, make things more complicated,

for better or worse, and Kelsea can take incredibly complicated

data and consolidate them down to a visual data story that is

consumable and that really is a superpower, but it is a

superpower that can be learned. I do think there is also a real

danger, though, in well visualized data, because if it

is not accurate and precise, if we go back to sort of middle

school science, right, if it's not measuring the thing that you

think it is, and if it's not actually calibrated, then you

can really lead yourself astray. One of the most dangerous parts,

and this is a worry that I have is there is continued talk that

AI is just going to make dashboards, and I think there

will be a point where AI can just make dashboards. They'll

either make them directly into Google Looker studio or

Microsoft bi or Tableau. But if there's no critical analysis of

the underlying data, that's a real challenge, and one of the

most vulnerable points is at that moment where. You have a

well visualized dashboard, if you don't, then look at every

single visual, every single data point, and make sure that it is

correct, not just when you launch it, but over the course

of an entire year cycle. Because we know things change at a

school over the course of a year, then you just run the risk

of relying on things that are wrong, they're just wrong. And

that's actually in some ways, a more dangerous position to be in

than not having a well visualized dashboard at all. And

so that's a piece of work that we tend to do with schools to

really lean in to that last piece of making sure that they

can leverage the tools they have in front of them.

I think Jason Kern, who just was at MKA a week or

two ago, that was some of the best work that he did. Because I

think you make a very good point. You know, a visualization

is only as good as the story that it's telling, because it's

one chapter in that overall story that you're trying to

tell, and being able to understand and see how all of

those pieces fit together, I think, is incredibly important

and incredibly powerful. And one of the things that I think, in

this case, mission and data, Jason did for us was to help us

figure out the questions that we're going to need to ask to

tell our story based on what we're saying is coming out of

our strategic plan. I'm glad you said it, because the

storytelling aspect of this is something that I think really

needs to get out there more so that any of the work that we do

in data is about a long story. It's not about like a single

piece. And the more we can do to build understanding around that,

because the work that we've done on dashboards in the past all

focused on this one dashboard and this one thing that we were

looking at. And as you said before, boards will ask for more

questions around this one thing, and you end up down these rabbit

holes that you never intended, nor are not really ever going to

do anything to really help move the school forward? So by having

clearly articulated questions, by having multiple data points

that are in a more comprehensive dashboard, not just a single

point, I think, really help with that idea of telling the proper

story.

We haven't talked about training, but that's a

huge piece of this. If the idea is that you're going to build a

tool and roll it out to a functional team within the

school or the board or anyone once, and train them once, and

then they're going to use it forever more. That's just

following. And so we're doing a lot of thinking about what does

it mean as part of new trustee orientation to train the new set

of Trustees, not just on how to get into the dashboard and

what's there. But what does it mean? You know, Kelsea helped us

frame these three questions, what do we see? What does it

mean? Why does it matter? And part of the work that our

governance team, Anne Marie Balzano and Barb rostin And

Sadie and others have done is try to help norm that in

schools, so that when there are discussions, whether they're

discussions inside the school or with trustees, that when people

are looking at data and they don't understand what they're

looking at, they don't understand what it means or why

it matters, that we norm that that is a right question to ask

and to take away the stigma from that part of that is managing

up. And we don't talk enough about that. Managing Up is a

great John Cole quote that managing up is not manipulating

your boss, and it's really true. Understanding how to frame these

dashboards or other data tools are incredibly important. And

Bill, the part you said about Jason and one of the reasons why

Mike Cobb and Jason were such a good team when they were inside

of a school was their work with synergistic similarly, we see

synergies in these data tools. So you know, when we're working

with a school on accountability and implementation either of a

strategic plan or rolling out a set of accreditation

recommendations and how a school is going to address those over a

series of years, there's often a view at the board level, which

is a higher level view, and then a view at the leadership team

level which is much more detailed. And it's not just that

there's confidential information in one and not the other. It's

that it's the appropriate level of information for each of those

groups to see. Now it's a fine line between there and hiding

things from people, and we're not talking about hiding things

or manipulating what people see. That's unethical, but getting

people the information so they can do their best work is really

important.

Something that my family always said when I was

growing up was talk to me like I'm a third grader, and not to

talk down to me, but to talk to me and boil things down to their

simplest form so that I can clearly understand them. And I

think that's one of the other things that you kind of touched

on there, is that when we think about these visualizations, when

we think about the way in which we're presenting data and

presenting our story, also understanding that not everyone

has a degree in statistics, not everyone knows how to properly,

and I'm speaking for myself here, properly read. Box plot,

like it was one of these things where it's like, I'm looking at

all of these different ways in which we can visualize the data,

but I don't know what it's telling me. It looks good, but I

don't know what it's saying to me. And I think being able to

simplify the story, or do the training around how we're going

to look at these things, and what is this thing that I'm

looking at showing me you can't make assumptions around that.

You can't make assumptions that everyone understands what you or

I or someone else might take for granted, and that training work

around that aspect of it, I think, is critical. And like all

the professional development work that we need to do, it just

can't be a moment in time. It needs to be ongoing. So I

applaud you for all of those pieces.

Ari, I'm curious. I know that you can't

necessarily disclose any individual client, but you see a

lot of this, and I'm assuming that there's a certain amount of

we need to look at certain aspects of enrollment or staff

retention, so you probably get, like, the run of the mill stuff.

But is there any particular story that has been stand out or

notable to you in this work? Is there any case study that kind

of surprised you, that as you talk to schools, if they're

coming to mission and data and saying, Hey, what's possible

here? Are there any stories that have landed with you, maybe a

little bit more surprising or impressive than others.

Yes, maybe I'll highlight two of them. So we

have nine practice areas within the firm, and I lead both our

financial and organizational sustainability practice and our

organizational effectiveness and transformation practice, and

sometimes that is schools that are fighting for viability and

trying to stay open. You know, we're working with a school that

just crossed a billion dollars of endowment, another that

finished about a half a billion dollar comprehensive campaign,

and a lot of things in between, right? That's a big spectrum,

but two stories sort of across that spectrum that are

interesting, both of which I think reflect the school's

commitment, in their own words, not mine, to a mission driven,

community centered, data informed approach. So there's a

wonderful school in Wilmington, North Carolina, called Cape Fear

Academy. And Cape Fear acquired about 11 acres contiguous to

their campus, and their really wise Head of School, Ed Ellison,

recognized that before they decided what they wanted to do

with it, before they brought in a campus master planning firm,

they really had an opportunity Wilmington. The population is

growing, but they didn't want to overgrow the school. They didn't

want to change who the school fundamentally was. They want in

our language. They wanted to protect what was immovable about

the school. So they decided that they wanted to figure out how

big they wanted to grow and in what configuration before then

they decided what they wanted the campus to look like. And so

we worked with working group of the leadership team and board on

that, and then they did strategic planning, and then

they did accountability and implementation. And in the

middle of that, they also brought in a campus master

planning firm to be synergistic with Ed, and that's a whole

school approach with students and mission at the center of

that work. And I really give Ed and the board credit for kind of

fueling the resource engine to make those things happen. No

school has infinite resources, and so they really decided

strategically where they wanted to invest in those on the other

side, there's a wonderful school up in Connecticut, Westover

School, which is doing some incredible things right now, and

their head of school, Polly, is doing wonderful work with her

leadership team and the board in partnership, making the School

vibrant and growing enrollment in what is a complicated market

and time as a boarding and day school, and similarly, deciding

what things they want to carry in house, where they need some

short term external expertise. But again, in that way, where

they are very clear they have shared understanding of what is

in the DNA of Westover, what they need to steward and

protect, and then they can talk about how to leverage data to

really capitalize on opportunities and address

challenges that are in front of them in ways that are so

thoughtful and agile and it's very, very impressive,

those are really great examples. Thank

you. That's exactly what I was curious about. I know that

mission and data also does a lot of work with associations.

Obviously, ATLIS is one of them, and we're really proud of the

projects that we've done with you guys. We have a compensation

dashboard. One of my favorite aspects of that is something

your team brought to us, which was the idea of a salary band

predictor. We have enough data now where if you put in a

variety of variables, you can predict what your salary could

or might should be if you are looking at a new job or trying

to benchmark where you're at. So I love that tool. I also I

haven't talked about it too much on the pod. It's kind of an

emerging resource that ATLIS has put together a really neat

interact. Version of the ATLIS 360 self study, where you can

kind of do a tech audit, and it saves your data. So if Hiram

goes in on year one and year two and year three, he can look at

his own notes and his own data, which would be private to him,

but then he could also create a peer group and compare how he's

doing, and let's say cybersecurity, compared to

another set of peer schools. So the work we do with you, I get

hyped up about as kind of a data geek myself, so I love that

you're doing incredible work with other associations in our

space. And I guess my big picture question for you, having

worked with a lot of us, is, do you think the role that we're

playing is shifting lately. You know, coming out of the

pandemic, I think that the things that our heads of school,

that our technology leaders, our Business Officers, are expecting

of the associations in terms of understanding how they fit

within a peer group is kind of shifting and changing that might

be coming from awareness of their boards, wanting to know

how they're playing in the sandbox with other competitors,

perhaps. But do you think that you're seeing some shifts in how

Independent School Associations are developing relationships

with data?

I'll tell you the thing that hasn't changed first,

which is I think there is a group of CEOs or executive

directors of membership associations that are deeply

focused on meeting member need, and that is critically

important, and it's an easy thing for associations to

forget. Right to meet their members where they're at, and

so, yeah, I do think meeting them where they're at is

changing, because what schools and school leaders need are

changing, but the consistency is that through line and i

Christina and I think about the work you're doing, even in the

transition, for example, between Heather hurl at EMA and now Mike

Flanagan, who's going to lead the new combined organization of

Enrollment Management Association and ERB Deborah

Wilson at NAIS. So one of the things I got to do this year

that I just love doing was help facilitate the conversations

between NAIS and Ema about the new dasl definitions for

Enrollment Management, which is a project that many of us have

wanted to take on for a while. It is wildly complicated because

you want to create historical comparison, and there were some

opportunities to be capturing some data, new data, and data

differently that were really important and balancing that.

And so when I think about membership need, yes, there is a

place for flagship research projects. You know, Sarah enter

line, and I have been talking with EMA about the report that

we just published about perceived value and

affordability with them, like those big projects almost nobody

can take on besides a membership association. But these other

just in time tools, like you're saying and just in time tools

that also have longitudinal consistency. So if Hiram is

doing that, and Hiram, unless you plan to sit in your seat

until the earth stops revolving around the sun, the ability to

hand that off to a next person you might sit in your seat, and

to have good institutional memory about things like that.

Those are things I think membership associations are

pushing themselves on when that makes sense, when it's beyond

the scope of what we can do right now, how to help

facilitate those and there's not a perfect right or wrong answer,

because every organization, including membership

organizations, only have so much human, financial and adaptive

capacity, but that's the work. Christina, I think you all are

really challenging yourself and your teams to be doing well and

thoughtfully right now.

Ari, as we start winding down our time, I'd

love for you to tell our listeners a little bit about

other podcasts that you are involved in, you have a

podcasting career as well.

I definitely do not nobody should have to listen to

me that much, but I am grateful and glad. It brings me great joy

to co host em as impossible questions podcast with Christian

Donovan, previously with Hansa mundall. So the whole through

line of that podcast are people send us the hardest, gnarliest

questions that they don't know how to answer, and then we

figure out really smart people to solve them, or at least to

answer them. Often, there is some sort of enrollment

connection to those given the fact that it's hosted by EMA.

But as we know, strategic enrollment management is both

broad and deep, and so that's a pretty big swimming pool to swim

in. And then recently, I've been co hosting with Christina Dodge

in a mini season of EMAS enrollment spectrum podcast

focused on this new report that I mentioned about perceived

value and affordability in independent schools. And we've

just did a wonderful interview with Amadi tourism Mark Mitchell

from NAIS, right before that, we did an interview with the head

of Cornell University's New York City Campus at Cornell Tech.

He's a behavioral economist and expert on price signaling. And

so one of the things that I love is getting to learn from people

way smarter than me. And both of those podcasts are a great

opportunity. To collaborate with people I really enjoy and hear

from smart folks.

I love that people will put those links in

the show notes so that everybody can go find them. That sounds

really great. So okay, we're wrapping up, but given that we

started with go birds, go birds, let's just end this conversation

with something that's deeply pressing to the entire

community. How about the old Philadelphia girl getting

engaged to a Kansas City boy? I'd like your reaction to the T

swift Travis Kelsea engagement.

I just love when she was on the podcast, and they

actually read that she was from Nashville, Tennessee, and he

corrected that very quickly to call out that she's actually

from reading

she's a Pennsylvania girl, indeed. So

Bill, are you excited about this? Ari, do we have feelings

about this big engagement?

I love it, and I love it because the intersection of

the Kelsea brothers and Kylie Kelsea and Taylor Swift is one

of the most wholesome, lovely. It is joyful things you will

ever see. In full transparency, I watched the entire podcast

video. It made my heart happy. So anybody that is not excited

about the idea of people being happy, heart of stone. Yeah, I

don't have a lot of time for that.

That is exactly the right answer. Ari,

I'm so excited that you loved it. I loved it too. The news of

the engagement dropped when we were at the ATLIS staff retreat,

and I think they all thought I was a little nutty, but it made

me really happy, because I love people who are happy.

What I want to know is, when is When is she going to

be on? Not going to lie with

Kylie? Oh, I'm sure she will. It's got to

happen. She's got to

be on there. Because that's, I hate to say

it. That's the other podcast that I listen to all the time. I

listen to her. I'm not going to lie

so often in our recordings. I will mention

something about my family, my wife, my parents. People meet

them, and they are so impressive, and then they wonder

what happened to me, because they shine so much more

brightly. And I love that about my family. It really makes me

really happy the world is getting to see that Kylie Kelsea

as wonderful as Jason. Kelsea is like Kylie Kelsea is a shining

light in our world. They all are. It makes me so happy that

people are getting to see her authentic self, and that's

pretty

great. I think that right after Kylie's

podcast, she should come here. I'm just saying that would be a

get Peter Call Taylor Swift's people. Oh, I thought you met

Kylie Kelsea. I'd take her. Oh, either that's who I want. Yeah,

that would be a get both all any of them. Peter, Get on it. Call

them. Thank you, Ari, for joining us. I'm so grateful that

we had this time with you. We'll let you get back to real work.

But this was a pleasure. It's always great to chat with you.

Come back anytime.

Thanks to the three of you. It was great to be with

you all.

This has been talking technology with ATLIS, produced

by the Association of technology leaders in independent schools.

For more information about ATLIS and ATLIS membership, please

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