Bronx Engineering & Technology Academy: 800 Applications for 172 Seats

Client & scope

A New York City public high school in the Bronx. A teacher reached out directly. Designland took on the school’s whole recruitment presence — a new website, paid social campaigns, and printed flyers and banners placed around the neighborhood.

The problem

With the city in isolation, every channel the school used to recruit families had closed. Open houses were gone. School fairs were gone. Applications decide a public school’s future, and the school had no way to reach the families it needed.

What we did

Enrollment is a marketing problem: if families can’t come to the school, the school has to reach them where they are. We rebuilt the school’s presence online and in the neighborhood at the same time — designed and launched a new website, ran Facebook and Instagram campaigns targeted to Bronx families, and, working alongside the teachers, designed and printed flyers and banners placed throughout the community to reach the parents who were never going to find the school online.

What happened

For 172 open ninth-grade seats, roughly 800 applications came in — more than four applicants for every seat, at a school that months earlier had no way to reach families at all.