Back-to-School School Outreach: The Cheapest New Students You Will Ever Get

Scottie Jackson covered seven schools in a two-hour window last week. Not seven schools over a season. Seven schools in one night.

“It was in one night. It was two hours, one night,” he told us on our coaching call. “Boom. We went out, did it, came back.”

Roughly 200 leads. About 60 appointments on the calendar he could point at, concretely. And people were still walking in for trials while we were on the Zoom talking about it.

Here’s what it cost him: “Scottie’s cost for doing this was just the cost of printing whatever collateral they handed out at the deal.”

There’s no other channel in this business where the cost line is paper and the output line is sixty appointments.

Run the Math Against Facebook Before You Argue With Me

I’m not anti-digital. Google advertising is great, being search optimized is great, Facebook advertising is great. But do the arithmetic instead of absorbing it from the people selling it to you.

To get 35 appointments from Facebook you need 70 to 100 leads. Cost per lead runs $25 to $75, so take a middle number and say $40. “100 leads at $40, so I’ve got to add two zeros. I’ve got $4,000 in ad spend.” Plus whatever the agency charges. Call it $5,000, for 40 appointments, 20 intros, 10 enrollments. That’s $500 per enrollment.

Is $500 per enrollment acceptable? Sure. If they’re paying $500 plus $397 the day they enroll, I broke even the day they enrolled. But the industry has been brainwashed to think that’s the only way, “and by the way, it’s because of all the bozos marketing to martial arts schools.”

Meanwhile Christian Arias in El Paso sat at one movie theater for a Paw Patrol release. “12 to 7,” he told me. Seven hours, one theater, “40 leads, 35 appointments.” For momentum and scale without putting a ton of money in it, nothing beats being out there in person.

First, Draw the Right Map — Not a Three-Mile Circle

Fix the radius first. Know every private school, every charter school, every Catholic school, every public school that’s anywhere conceivable in your radius. And when I say conceivable — what happens a lot of times is we draw a 3-mile circle around the school as a knee-jerk reaction. “That’s not really the way that people decide to go to a service business.”

There are barriers people won’t cross. Jason and Krista in Seattle are both literally on islands. One direction from Jason is Bainbridge Island: “it makes no sense to spend any time at all marketing where they’re gonna have to take a ferry.”

Now flip it. My schools on the west side of Denver backed up into the foothills. I could go 15, 20, sometimes 35 minutes up into the mountains, where there was a string of little communities whose residents were already used to driving into Denver Metro. Those elementary school programs worked great — and my staff would never have found them:

“I had to always go instigate it, because my staff wouldn’t think about that. So I’d have to go down, put them in the car, and say, let’s go up 285, let’s go up I-70, here’s this school, this school, this school, this school. They say, well, that’s too far away, and it’s like, no.”

You really gotta look at your area. Put all your students up on a map, or pins, or feed them into software that maps them for you, and you get a sense of where you’re pulling already. Then decide how far out to go — and with school programs I push the distance, because if I build a relationship, “hell, they’ll drive past 5, 6 martial arts schools to get to me.”

The Priority Order

Go through the checklist. In this order.

1. Back-to-school days, meet-the-teacher nights, orientation nights

If that hasn’t come and gone in your area, that’s the biggest opportunity — it’s already scheduled and already full of exactly the parents you want. You don’t have to create the event. You just have to be standing in it.

The best number I’ve heard, for a single location, was 550 appointments from about 12 schools. The last one I personally attended with one of our schools, we made 85 appointments in 2 hours, at a K-8 charter school — a pretty big one, not an elementary school with 200 kids.

2. After-school enrichment programs

“But again, after the back-to-school day, my number one priority is the after-school enrichment programs. That’s where I found the biggest bang for the buck.”

You go in Tuesday-Thursday, or Monday-Wednesday, for three weeks, and you use PE teacher for the day to promote it. My last big blitz of this type of stuff: “in 9 months, 460 enrollments. Best day was 36 enrollments in one day. Best month, I think, was 78 enrollments in one month, just from elementary school outreach.”

One caution — the mistake that quietly kills the whole thing. We had a school running enrichment programs who kept telling us they were doing exactly what we told them and getting no enrollments out of it.

“Well, it turned out that when they had the graduation, instead of having it at their martial arts school, they were having it at the pizza place. It’s like, well, no, no, no, no, no. The whole point is to get them into your schools, not to get them into somebody else’s business.”

Every enrichment program ends with the kids and the parents standing on your mat. That’s the entire design of the thing.

Pizza places as partners are a different story. For years I had Hungry Howie’s next door, and they’d put flyers on the boxes anytime I asked, because we bought so many damn pizzas from them. Papa John’s, same deal. Karl Kanthak had a good variation: sports teams have an end-of-season party, and he has a pizza place one door down. “I’ll do my intro class, and then they go next door and have pizza, but it’s another chance to get them in.” Class at your school, pizza second.

3. PE teacher for the day

Followed by PE teacher for the day without an enrichment program if I had to, or as an alternate — maybe spring versus fall. It’s the easiest yes you’ll ever get from a principal, and it makes the enrichment program conversation almost automatic.

4. A booth at whatever live events the school already runs

While you’re in there setting up the enrichment programs, find out what else the school has going on. “Do they have a fall festival? Do they have a harvest festival? Do they have Halloween things? What other holiday events they have?”

You’re not creating an event, you’re renting a table at one that already has a crowd. Same booth system, same wheel, same forms.

5. Charitable fundraiser flyers

“Probably number 3 on the list is the charitable fundraiser flyers. I call it Children’s Hospital, but we did the flyers that went out to all the kids. We always positioned it as a non-profit that we were providing a month of lessons and a uniform. For $47, we were providing the uniform. 100% of the net proceeds went to the charity.”

Read that again — 100% of net proceeds. That’s what makes the school hand your flyer to every kid in the building. With private schools you flip the beneficiary: “sometimes, especially with the private schools, you can do that as a fundraiser for their building fund, or their gymnasium fund, or the band uniforms, or whatever it might be.” Now the school isn’t doing you a favor. You’re funding their gym.

“We Don’t Have Enough Staff” Is Not a Reason

Here’s what Scottie did differently, in his words:

“So this year, what we did was I grabbed all my advanced belts and a handful of my intermediate ranking belts, and we did the spin wheel. We did 7 schools. Some of them had never done the wheel before, had never done the booth before. I only went, personally, to one school.”

The year before, he’d built it around a banner-and-tablets setup promoting a board-breaking bash — “we were only able to really do one or two schools at a time. We didn’t have the personnel.”

Grand Master Jeff Smith put his finger on it:

“This is what happens with a lot of our schools. They don’t go do these things because they don’t have enough staff. And here you were at 7 schools, and the way you did it was just to recruit some of your leadership people or some of your advanced students. And then just train them, because it’s so easy to train on the spin wheel.”

And why the students said yes is the part to sit with:

“They were eager to do it because it was an opportunity for them to wear their uniform in public, to go to their district school. Other students got to see them at their school. It worked out really, really well.” — Scottie Jackson

You’re not asking them for a favor. You’re giving a 14-year-old the chance to walk into his own middle school in his uniform as the guy running the prize wheel.

The wheel is the other upgrade: kids get triggered and come to the table, and it beats buying 10-inch tablets for seven locations. The prizes were two-week training packages and uniforms — things they had to come to the dojo to collect.

Master Smith’s booth system, 40 years old and still the correct answer:

“3 is my perfect number, because one manning the clipboards, one checking the clipboards and making the appointment, and then the other one spinning the wheel and writing the prize down and reconfirming the appointment.”

Person two reads the form back and fills in whatever they left blank. Person three hands over a business card with the appointment written on it, stapled to information about your school. Three is ideal; two works; he’s done it with one.

Two small things that aren’t small: buy the pens with the chain that permanently attaches them to the clipboard, and print your school information on the pens. “We didn’t care whether they took the pen or not, because they would just have our contact information.”

The Contact Data Is Where This Is Won or Lost

Scottie moved to a QR-code form this year and wants to eliminate paper entirely. We had a friendly disagreement, because the real issue isn’t paper versus digital.

The thing that’s flatly wrong either way: “The worst possible option is I try to take an iPad out there and fill it out on my device.” Cellular connection, not charged, I should have had 10 and I had 2. Essentially 100% of the people you’re dealing with already have a phone in their pocket.

On QR forms versus clipboards:

“Having somebody type in on their iPhone doesn’t solve bad information. It shifts the bad information.”

We get opt-ins all the time for the schools and for Martial Arts Wealth, and we get bad phone numbers and bad email addresses constantly. Auto-complete helps. It’s not a cure.

And on the claim that paper slowed the line down: “I would argue that you’re misattributing some of the problems to being paper forms.” I had boxes and boxes of clipboards with the paper and the pens attached. If we had a line of 40 people, all 40 got a clipboard and filled it out in line. It never slowed anything down. Greg Moody’s method beats both — “he has the person who’s spinning the wheel fills it out for them.” No handwriting problem, no typing problem, no blank fields.

Now the part almost nobody gets right. What you capture, in order:

“What’s my first priority on contact information? Phone number. What’s my second priority? Mailing address. What’s my lowest priority? Email address.”

A phone number gives me a live human being calling a live human being — my first priority for follow-up — plus text, voice AI and ringless voicemail. A mailing address gives me a postcard, a letter, a package. Physical direct mail alongside the digital is the one thing everybody is missing the boat on.

Why is email last?

“What we know is email is dying a slow and painful death. A lot of younger people, let’s say under 30, unless they’re in a job environment that requires it, or unless their college is communicating with them, don’t use email. I have one kid who’s 25 and one who’s 18, and I would never think of sending them an email, because I would never expect them to see it.”

Don’t get comfortable with text either. Text is going through the same cycle, because it’s been usurped by spam, and voice is starting to go the same way.

Which brings me to the highest-leverage tweak on this list, and Scottie wasn’t doing it: send them your contact record. A vCard. As soon as they submit the form, an autoresponder sends it. Then when they step up to spin the wheel you say, “Here, check your text. Click that, add to contacts, now you have our phone number, our address, our email address.”

“That’s essential, because people aren’t answering unknown numbers. And if you’re in their contact database, it helps it ring through on an inbound call, helps the email get whitelisted — in other words, hopefully not end up in the promotional or spam folder — and helps the text get through.”

You just spent an evening collecting 200 leads. If half never answer because you’re an unknown number, you didn’t collect 200 leads.

Diagnose. Don’t Celebrate.

Scottie did great work and I told him so. Then I told him the rest of it.

“With 7 locations, I don’t know how big the schools were, but the absolute numbers weren’t very big, right? So, probably each one of them should have been triple or quadruple or five times.”

Sixty appointments across seven schools is under nine per school, and I’ve watched one K-8 charter school produce 85 in two hours. The number to be proud of is that they covered seven schools with a crew that had mostly never done it. The number to fix is per-school yield.

“Anytime the numbers are a little bit low, you want to go through and diagnose — what do we need to do next time to get the numbers to be bigger?”

Master Smith’s framing is right for year one: “even if you don’t know how to do it, just go do it. And if you mess it up, then we can see what you did wrong. You learn by doing.” Scottie ran this last year and didn’t get these numbers. He got them this year because he ran it last year.

Timing: Always Be a Semester Ahead

Right now — staff back, kids not yet back, or just as school has started — is the time to set up PE teacher for the day and the enrichment programs for the rest of the year. Then stop treating it as a fall activity:

“I was always trying to have the fall and the spring set up by fall, but then in the spring, have the next fall set up, and always be a semester out, or more, having this stuff set up.”

That’s how you stop the cycle I see over and over. You get momentum, you get comfortable with your new student flow, you take your foot off the gas, and then you can’t figure out why you’re not getting enough new enrollments. You’re just not doing enough stuff to generate them.

None of this feeds your adult program. But for the kids’ market, right now is the time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the highest-return back-to-school marketing activity for a martial arts school?

Back-to-school nights, meet-the-teacher nights and orientation nights come first, because they’re already scheduled and packed with parents. After those, I rank after-school enrichment programs number one — that’s where I found the biggest bang for the buck. My last big blitz produced 460 enrollments in 9 months from elementary school outreach.

How many appointments should a school get from school outreach events?

Benchmarks from our member schools: 85 appointments in 2 hours at one K-8 charter school, and 550 appointments from about 12 schools for a single location. Scottie Jackson covered 7 schools in one two-hour window for roughly 200 leads and 60 appointments — real results, but each school should have produced three to five times more.

What is the correct priority order for school outreach in the fall?

One, back-to-school and meet-the-teacher nights. Two, after-school enrichment programs. Three, PE teacher for the day. Four, booths at the school’s own live events — fall festival, harvest festival, Halloween. Five, charitable fundraiser flyers offering a month of lessons plus a uniform for $47, with 100% of net proceeds to the charity.

Should martial arts schools use QR codes or paper forms at booth events?

Either works; the worst option is handing prospects your own iPad. A QR form doesn’t solve bad information, it shifts the bad information. Greg Moody’s method is to have the wheel-spinner fill the form out for the prospect. Capture phone number first, mailing address second, email last.

How much does school outreach cost compared to Facebook ads?

Scottie’s cost was just printing the collateral his team handed out. By contrast, 100 Facebook leads at roughly $40 each is $4,000 in ad spend plus agency fees — call it $5,000 for 40 appointments, 20 intros and 10 enrollments, or $500 per enrollment. Outreach produces comparable volume for the price of paper.

What To Do This Week

Put your active students on a map. Build the real list — every public, private, charter and Catholic school inside the radius your students actually drive. Call the ones whose back-to-school night hasn’t happened yet. For the rest, get in front of a principal this week to book PE teacher for the day and the enrichment program, and ask about their fall festival and Halloween calendar. Then buy two prize wheels, print the pens, chain them to fifty clipboards, and set up the vCard autoresponder.

If you want to see how our schools run every piece of this — the booth scripts, the enrichment curriculum, the fundraiser flyer, the follow-up — come to a live meeting. Quick Start is October 1–2 here in Colorado, the 1st at my home in Evergreen and the 2nd at the hotel in Golden. Leadership Mastery runs October 2–3, so on the 2nd you’ll overlap with most of our million-dollar school owners.

Bring your staff. It’s a mistake to have full-time staff you don’t include. When you go home and tell them the numbers other schools are getting, they tend not to believe you. When they hear it from the other owner’s mouth, it’s much more believable — and much easier to get them to implement.

Fly into Denver International. Let us know your head count.

Related Reading

• Martial Arts School Marketing: How to Fill Your School in 2026
• How to Sell Martial Arts Memberships: The Enrollment System
• The Back To School Book offer we send school owners
• How Tim Harrison tripled TM Martial Arts to over $100K a month
• Martial Arts School Owner FAQ: marketing, retention, pricing, staffing and scaling
• The Martial Arts Wealth Mastery Program

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