Show Notes: 

Find out more about the 2025 SchoolCEO Conference and get your tickets at https://www.apptegy.com/conference/. Early bird pricing ends on May 9th!

Learn How to Master School Communication in the Digital Age from a kick*** mom and marketer at Apptegy.

To read more about Katherine Wentsch’s journey to self-acceptance, read her book: Slay Like a Mother.

Subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.schoolceo.com/subscribe-now/. 

Visit us at schoolceo.com and connect with SchoolCEO on LinkedIn or X/Twitter @school_ceo. If you have a story you’d like to share with the SchoolCEO team, email us at eileen@schoolceo.com or schedule a call.

SchoolCEO is powered by Apptegy, the maker of the leading K-12 communications and brand management platform.

Episode Transcript:

Happy Mother’s Day everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. We’ve been talking about school comms’ strengths, but today I want to take a bit of a detour to tell you about the SchoolCEO Conference this fall! Early bird pricing ends this Friday, May 9th, so get your ticket now. This year’s conference will take place September 24th and 25th in Little Rock, AR on the theme of What Parents Want. Join us and learn how strategic parent communication drives enrollment and community trust. We have incredible speakers lined up this year including The Mom Complex CEO Katherine Wintsch and Managing Director Ellen Fitzgerald. If you’re not familiar with them, The Mom Complex is a research and marketing firm that helps some of the largest companies in the world such as Walmart, Sam's Club, Chobani, and Airbnb develop new products and services for mothers. 

At 27 years old, Katherine Wintsch became the youngest VP in the company’s history at The Martin Agency, an advertising firm in Richmond, VA. At 29, Wintsch was part of the team that pitched to win Walmart’s $40 million advertising business. She actually delivered the final pitch that clinched the deal at Wal Mart’s headquarters in Arkansas, just down the road from us. Within two weeks of returning, she found out they had won the account. Within one week of returning, she found out she was pregnant with her first child. 

Despite being a textbook overachiever, Katherine found motherhood to be extremely hard. And with her advertising hat on, she began to reexamine the way most advertisers spoke to women. She found motherhood was idealized, it was glamorized and it didn’t reflect Katherine’s actual experience. What’s worse, these rose-colored images sowed Katherine’s self-doubt. Why didn’t her life look like that? Was she doing something wrong?

After giving birth to her second child in 2009, she met with the Martin Agency’s top leaders and in her words, “told them how much marketing to women sucked,” she recalls. Out of that conversation with her bosses, The Mom Complex was born. It sought feedback from actual mothers and advised companies how they could better depict mothers, develop products for them and support them. And why not? Moms control or influence 85% of household spending in the U.S. 

And they also tend to be more involved with their children’s education. So what can you do to meet them where they are? 

• First, have you asked your mothers what it’s actually like to be in their shoes? The Mom Complex’s first big project was for Asda, a British supermarket chain owned by Walmart. The firm asked moms to track their pleasure and pain points throughout the day. But do you know your mothers’ pain points? You can collect really good anecdotal evidence by visiting with them in the carpool line. Or joining them for family dinner. Because they’re busy and they may not have time to stop their day to talk to you. But also because observing them as they go about their routines will reap more insights. 
• Second, do you have mothers in school leadership roles? One of Katherine’s biggest strengths as a marketer now is her experience being a mother. She can speak to their needs. She can relate to them in a way non-mothers might not. And while research shows the majority of teachers and school comms pros are women, principals and superintendents are more often men. 
• Third, because you probably DO have so many mothers in teaching and other roles, you are wasting a golden opportunity by not seeking their advice about everything from program offerings to communication platforms. 
• Third, if mothers doubt themselves, what can you do to acknowledge what a difficult job it is? Appreciate that even in a contentious debate with a mom, for instance, they are all doing the best they can and you all share the same interest: what's best for their kids. 

To close, I’ll tell you one big thing Katherine has learned over time. Emotional narratives resonate with mothers. So keep telling stories about the amazing things students are doing in school—and consider telling more stories about the amazing things mothers are doing, too. 

To find out more about the 2025 SchoolCEO Conference: What Parents Want, visit schoolceo.com or click the link in the show notes. Hope to see you there.