Be Part of the Music: Help Get—and Keep—as Many Kids in Music as Possible

Spotlight: Be Part of the Music

Our mission has always been clear and straightforward: Help get — and keep — as many kids in music as possible.

Simple, we know. But incredibly important.

Be Part of the Music was founded by music educators who understand the real challenges facing music programs across the country. From a lack of adequate funding, to aging instruments, prohibitive course scheduling, and inconsistent administrative support (just to name a few), there are big issues that are impacting music education at every level.

Yet, improving enrollment seems to be the panacea to most music education-related problems.

Want more funds? Enroll more students. Want better facilities? Recruit more kids. Want better clarinets? Grow your program. Want more support? Increase enrollment.

But the one thing that solved nearly everything was the one thing that didn’t have an easy solution — so we decided to meet the challenge head on, from the ground up.

And that’s why Be Part of the Music exists — to help make recruitment better and retention easier for music educators.

What started as a small video project about the benefits of joining music has rapidly evolved into an advocacy-driven multimedia service that provides free resources to serve all facets of music education.

We’ve launched multiple video series, monthly webinars, online recruitment forms and documents, fill-in-the-blank print materials, pre-designed posters and banners, bite-sized music education commercials perfect for social media, automated recruitment plans and reminders, monthly parent advocacy messages, and much more.

Teachers who use Be Part of the Music show an average of 22% growth year-over-year, resulting in, on average, 17 additional students each year. Projected over a four-year cycle, that’s an additional 264 kids in each high school music program.

Considering there are over 16,000 active users and counting, we’re definitely making progress toward changing the way music educators recruit and retain their students.

As we look at the future, our aim is to refine our current resources and develop new ones that will make recruitment faster and simpler than ever, make retention seamless and automatic, and make your job satisfaction as a music educator higher than it’s ever been.