Somewhere right now, a parent is trying to find a summer program their kid will actually get into before it’s fully booked. Whether they succeed often has nothing to do with how many emails a nonprofit sent about it, and everything to do with whether anything findable existed when that parent went looking. When a program underperforms, the standard response is to promote it harder. That response is sometimes right but, more often than not, it really isn’t.
The Myth: “We Just Need to Promote It More”
The belief goes like this: if enrollment is low, the organization hasn’t pushed hard enough. Send another email. Post again. Ask a board member to share it with their network. It’s an appealing diagnosis because it’s cheap, fast, and entirely within the team’s control, nobody has to build anything new, they just have to try harder.
Picture a summer day camp program that’s underselling six weeks before it starts. The response, almost reflexively, is to add two more reminder emails and ask staff to personally mention it at every community event between now and the deadline. Nobody stops to ask whether the shortfall is a promotion problem, or something else.
Why the Myth Feels True
Here’s what makes this belief so durable: it sometimes appears to work. A second reminder email does occasionally produce a few more sign-ups, someone who missed the first announcement, or who needed a nudge to finally act. That small bump feels like proof the theory was right all along.
However, those extra sign-ups came from people who were already on the list, already following the organization, already one email away from deciding. The myth gets credit for reactivating a warm lead, not for reaching anyone new, and every kid whose family was never on that list stays exactly as un-enrolled as before.
Why the Myth Survives Inside Most Organizations
Part of why this belief persists has nothing to do with whether it’s true. “Send more emails” is something a communications team can point to as effort. A board member asking what’s being done about low enrollment gets a concrete, visible answer: three reminder emails, five social posts, a personal outreach push. Building a findable program page doesn’t produce that kind of visible activity, so it’s a much harder line item to defend in a monthly update, even when it would do more good for more kids.
The incentive structure rewards looking busy over the quieter work of being findable to a family that was never going to see a single one of those emails. That’s not a communications team’s failure; it’s what happens when effort and impact get measured by different yardsticks.
The Reality: Promotion Has a Ceiling Discoverability Doesn’t
Promotion’s reach is capped by the size of the audience the organization already has: a newsletter list, a social following, a board’s personal network. Once everyone on that list has seen the message three times, a fourth message mostly adds noise.
On the other hand, discoverability isn’t limited to people who already know the organization exists. That parent searching “summer day camp for 8 year olds near me” has never heard of this specific program, and unless something built to be found is sitting there when they searches, no volume of internal promotion changes that.
That audience, the people with the actual need who don’t yet know you exist, is usually larger than the mailing list, and it doesn’t expire the week after a campaign ends.
Promotion follows the organization’s calendar; discoverability follows the public’s need.
What Changes When You Test the Myth Against Reality
The myth and the reality make different, testable predictions, so testing them against your own enrollment data settles the argument instead of debating it. Pull up how each registrant found the program: email link, social post, or organic search with no prior relationship at all.
If most sign-ups trace back to email and social, promoting harder to that list really is the right lever for this program. But if the organic number is close to zero, that’s not a lack of interest, it’s a family with nowhere to land when they searched. Building one plain-language page for the day camp, dates, cost, eligibility, a registration link, doesn’t replace the reminder emails. It’s the only thing that gives the family that never got one anywhere to arrive, which is, after all, the entire point of running the program in the first place.
Key Messaging
- A promotional bump from an extra reminder email usually means you reactivated an existing contact, not that you reached a new family.
- Promotion’s reach is capped by your existing list. Discoverability’s reach is capped only by how many people have the need, which is usually the bigger number.
- Before promoting harder, check where sign-ups actually come from, existing list or organic search with no prior relationship.
- A program with zero organic sign-ups doesn’t have a promotion problem. It has nothing built for the people who needed to find it on their own.
To explore how to diagnose and fix these enrollment bottlenecks in your own organization, read Chapter 4 of Leap The Nonprofit Discoverability Gap, available for free online.
