Discounting and Financial Aid is a multi-session, virtual workshop series designed for school teams to explore new and innovative financial aid practices and other tuition-discounting strategies.
School heads and their teams don’t often have the focused time or methods for bold and constructive thinking about their affordability and its impact on their mission and enrollment goals. Using curated frameworks, data, and tools, the NAIS Strategy Lab team will facilitate your school’s work to generate new ideas for connecting your vision to your goals for access and affordability. Leave with a pitch deck and a concise, compelling story that outlines new strategic approaches for discounting tuition and leveraging financial aid.
Pre- and Post-Session Details: Registered schools can attend the pre-workshop session to learn how to pull critical elements of data from NAIS Data and Analysis for School Leadership (DASL) and other sources to guide your strategic work. Registered schools can attend the post-workshop session to discuss implementation progress, next steps, and strategies for tracking metrics both in the near and long term to maintain momentum around your innovation efforts. Make sure at least two members of your school team attend the pre- and post-sessions.
Using data in strategy and innovation work can be overwhelming at times. Where should schools go to find useful data points to drive meaningful discussion? Which data are important for comparison points? How can schools effectively communicate data that motivates future change?
The NAIS Strategy Lab has partnered with the NAIS DASL team to answer these questions and more through the additional sessions related to this workshop.
The pre-workshop session is designed to support school leaders who struggle with where to start when collecting data and need a simple and effective process for analyzing, visualizing, and communicating insights to others. You’ll find that by embedding data collection and analysis in a problem you are already trying to address, the work becomes more motivating, relevant, and engaging for those most interested in data-driven decision-making.
The post-workshop session will help schools consider how to be more precise in collecting evidence on what is working (or not), provide frameworks for continuous reflection, and discuss the tools needed for ongoing communication and collaboration to make lasting change. You will be better able to enact new ideas or strategies that outline what success will look like and, more importantly, how you will know if/when success is achieved.
These sessions won’t just teach you how to pull the data, they will teach you how to use the data to address a key issue you’re facing today.
The deadline to register is Friday, October 17, 2025 due to the pre-workshop session and the prework required to complete prior to the session start date.
Schools select up to six participants to make up their workshop team. The ideal team includes three to six participants. The minimum number of school participants is three people. Individuals or pairs are not recommended due to the significant amount of teamwork time built into the agenda. You need to know the number of participants at the time of registration. You can make updates to the attendee names that fill your spots until two weeks before the event. There are no discounts for schools that decide not to send participants to either the pre- or post-workshop sessions.
Cancellations must be received in writing at strategylab@nais.org. Cancellations received up to 30 days before the program’s start date (September 20) will be fully refunded, less a $75 administration fee. Cancellations received fewer than 30 days prior to the program will not be refunded.
Please contact strategylab@nais.org or (202) 973-9700 with any questions.
Pre-Session: October 20, 2025, 1:00 – 2:30 PM ET
Main Session:
Post-Session: January 13, 2026, 1:00 – 2:30 PM ET
Schools should send teams of up to six people to this virtual workshop from diverse roles at school, including the head of school, CFO, admission director, trustees, financial aid director, or other administrators in similar roles.
