Should This School Event Stay or Go? How Schools Can Evaluate Events and Programs with Miriam Stein

Schools are really good at adding things. A new event, a new tradition, a new fundraiser, another community-building moment, and every one of them started for a real reason. The problem is that almost nothing ever comes back off the calendar. So you end up with programs that look successful from the outside while quietly draining staff time, volunteer energy, and budget that could be going somewhere with more return.

In this episode, I sit down with Miriam Stein of Thrive Hive to talk through the part nobody loves to say out loud, which is that some of our events have run their course. Miriam shares a simple decision-making matrix she adapted from a corporate CFO and rebuilt for schools, and it gives teams a way to move past the emotion around a beloved program and into a shared, honest conversation about whether it still serves the mission, the enrollment goals, and the people doing the work.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

• The emotional reasons schools hold onto events long after they stop working, from legacy and fear to the one influential donor or board member nobody wants to disappoint
• Miriam’s four-quadrant matrix and what the heart, the star, the question mark, and the money tree each tell you about a program
• Why an event can be completely off mission and still be worth keeping
• The clearest signs it’s time to reevaluate, including drag around volunteers, last-minute RSVPs, and any program that’s run more than seven years on autopilot
• Why staff hours and time investment almost never get counted in an event’s real ROI, and what that hidden cost is actually buying you
• The one in, one out approach to keeping your calendar from ballooning every single year
• How to communicate a cut or a change to families in a way that ties back to mission instead of sounding apologetic or defensive
• Using the three words your families actually use to describe your school to anchor the messaging around every event you run