Facebook is everything for her. She needs the views, the likes, the shares, and will actually pay to get them. She does all of this from her desk, and her boss doesn’t even mind. She is Laurie Ehrlich, CESJDS’s Director of Marketing and Communications.

The Strategic Plan that was released at the beginning of this school year, which set out the school’s goals for the future, announced that the school would seek to increase its K-12 enrollment to 1,200 students, a jump in roughly 200 students from this year’s numbers. According to Director of Admissions Miriam Stein, enrollment is currently the school’s top priority, as it aims to meet the new enrollment objective within three years.

To reach this number, JDS expanded its admissions department from three people to six people, hired Ehrlich and enlisted the help of a branding firm, EM2, to help the school develop an image that would appeal to prospective parents.

As Director of Marketing and Communications, one of Ehrlich’s primary responsibilities is to heighten awareness of JDS in the local community, with the ultimate goal of getting more people enrolled in the school. To further this goal, Ehrlich has begun to build a public relations program for the school to get it more coverage in local media.

“A piece of it is identifying reporters from a number of different publications in the area, some including the Washingtonian, the Gazette, Bethesda magazine, the Washington Jewish Week, and just building relationships with education reporters [and] arts and culture reporters so we can communicate all the great things we are doing up here,” Ehrlich said.

For example, prior to the opening of the STEM innovations lab, or iLab, in the Lower School this September, Ehrlich found a number of local reporters who had been writing about STEM education and invited them to the ribbon cutting. Suzanne Pollack of the Jewish Week attended the event, and quoted Ehrlich in the article she wrote about it.

The iLab is “a great recruitment tool as we’ve had children from Bnai Israel [and] from the JCC actually come into the iLab to to do these mini STEM events,” Ehrlich said.

The Marketing department also worked to promote the iLab via posts on Facebook, another medium that Ehrlich uses to publicize the school. Ehrlich regularly creates Facebook ads for the school’s promotional events, which, for the right price, will target Ehrlich’s desired audience.

“What you can do is you can boost a post,” Ehrlich said. “It can be $10 or $200 and you can either promote that to your friends and their friends or you can specify an audience … If we were targeting prospective kindergarten parents I would say probably females on Facebook from age 25 to 35 who live within 10 miles of Rockville or D.C. or Silver Spring.”

The $50 Ehrlich put into promoting the school’s monthly “I Heart Storytime” program for preschoolers got the post 5,304 views. These ads are especially useful because Facebook allows Ehrlich to see who likes, shares and clicks on the posts.

“These metrics are really important to see who’s engaging with our posts,” Ehrlich said. “People aren’t engaging with our posts if we post things that are controversial … or are completely uninteresting.”

When that happens, Ehrlich knows not to make a similar post again.

Ehrlich has also been planning to overhaul the official JDS website. The current website has been up for five years, which Ehrlich says is the typical life expectancy of a website.

“Websites pretty much go stale every four to five years,” Ehrlich said.

Ehrlich went on to say that the school’s “new brand doesn’t match the current design of the website.”

In late May of last year, EM2 came to JDS for a few days to develop a comprehensive “brand” that the school could present to the community as well as prospective parents.

According to Chris Martin, who led the project, EM2 aimed to “square up definitively what JDS is” in order to distinguish it from other local schools and to draw more parents in. After countless surveys, workshops, interviews, photographs and presentations to the Board of Directors, EM2 developed the Brand Guideline and the Brand Promise.

The Brand Guideline has not yet been completed, but the part that has been finished outlines in great detail the literal image that JDS should present to the community, specifically noting what colors, fonts, photos and graphic elements JDS should use in its content. Additionally, the guideline gives examples of things like admissions brochures, fundraising posters and web content that use the prescribed aesthetic elements.

This year, the Marketing department began heavy implementation of these new features. Before Thanksgiving, for example, Ehrlich sent an email to the staff, notifying them that the school was partnering with them as “Brand Ambassadors.” As such, staff members were asked to incorporate the new brand into their everyday work, through things like adding a new JDS signature to their emails and downloading the specific fonts and colors that EM2 decided should be a part of the JDS brand.

Another document that was developed by EM2 and voted on by the Board, the Brand Promise, summarizes what, in their view, is the essence of the JDS experience. The workshops in which the Brand Promise was developed were comprised of a “cross section of faculty, administration, leadership, parents, and alums so we’ve got within that group a full spectrum of opinion,” Martin said.

In them, “we sat around and we discussed what were the brand attributes that we thought were most important to communicate,” said President of the Board Rich Handloff, who is also the Director of Marketing for the Washington Post.

The Brand Promise references things like JDS’s “dynamic expression of contemporary Jewish life in America,” its “comprehensive academics” and the connection between teachers and students that “often continue into their professional careers.”

Many of the values expressed in these statements can be found in JDS’s new Viewbook, the brochure the admissions department presents to prospective parents, as well as in other documents such as the Strategic Plan.

Another noticeable change to JDS’s online presence has been Rabbi Malkus’ weekly blog posts and the “In the News” section of the JDS website, which has been updated much more frequently this year.

The blog was Malkus’s idea and he began writing it last year, before Ehrlich started. However, he would originally post only sporadically, which Ehrlich saw as a problem.

“I noticed that between March and July, when I started, there hadn’t been a blog post and I said ‘if you want to have a blog that’s great but it has to be consistent,’” Ehrlich said.

Since then, Malkus has been writing the blog posts every week. Ehrlich has also been closely in touch with community members in an effort to keep the website’s “In the News” section updated and interesting. She sends emails to parents asking them to send her news, reads the Upper and Lower School campus bulletins and gleans information from leadership team meetings. In addition to facilitating better communication within the school, these updates often appeal to prospective parents.

“Last year I know that there were five students who were national merit scholars. That’s huge for families that are looking for an academically rigorous program and are interested in that college prep side,” Ehrlich said. “People also want to see that students are doing things other than just being here and doing their work and going home and doing their homework.”

Currently, it seems as though it is too early to judge if this marketing and branding initiative has had a positive impact on enrollment, which is one of the primary goals of the Marketing department as well as the school in general.

“Can we quantify that yet, not yet,” Ehrlich said. “But I think it will be interesting to see how our enrollment numbers shape up for next year.”