Kristina Pae on Marketing the World’s Best-Kept Secret in Education
Kristina Pae, VP of Communications and Marketing at Milton Hershey School, has spent her career as a builder. From a cloud-computing startup in the roofing contractor industry to a management consulting firm, then a decade at a mid-size independent school, she has always gravitated toward the places where a cohesive communications and marketing ecosystem didn’t yet exist — and built one. That instinct led her to apply for a Marketing Coordinator role at Milton Hershey School, a position well below her experience level, because the mission was too compelling to pass up. Within six weeks, her manager had left. Within four years, she was VP.
Founded in 1909 by Milton S. Hershey and his wife, Catherine, Milton Hershey School is genuinely one of a kind. It is a fully residential, tuition-free school for children in social and financial need, serving over 2,200 students from pre-K through 12th grade. The school covers education, housing, medical care, clothing, food, and up to $115,000 toward college or trades education for qualifying graduates, with all costs covered for families. It is backed by a multi-billion dollar trust and staffed by 1,500 full-time employees who, by all accounts, believe deeply in what they’re doing. A Hershey movie is in the works. Enrollment is growing. And Kristina Pae is the person engineering the awareness strategy that will help the world finally learn this school exists.
A Builder’s Career
Q: Your career path is not a straight line. Startup, management consulting, a decade in independent schools, and now a residential school unlike any other in the world. What’s the connective tissue?
Kristina: Honestly, I’ve always been a builder. Creativity and innovation, but rooted in tradition. That’s been my through line. At the startup, I was doing marketing, implementation, and painting the office when needed. You hustle, and you learn fast. At the consulting firm, I built their first website from scratch using Dreamweaver, taught by a local developer I tracked down because someone had to do it. At Harrisburg Academy, I took an unsophisticated communications and marketing program and turned it into a productive, collaborative ecosystem, piece by piece, over 10 years. I love the craft. I love the puzzle of figuring out how content, search, advertising, and storytelling all work together to achieve a business outcome. Each professional stop gave me a different lens on that puzzle.
Q: You left a Director-level role to take a Marketing Coordinator position at Milton Hershey School. That’s a title several levels below where you’d been. What made it worth it?
Kristina: The mission. When I resigned from my previous role, I’d taken some time off to think about what I really wanted. And what I realized was that my heart is in human-connected work. I needed nonprofit, people-oriented, human-impact work. When the coordinator posting at Milton Hershey School came up, I knew the school by reputation; I’d always had enormous respect for what the Hersheys built and the legacy they left. Even though the title was below what I’d been doing, it felt worth having the conversation. Six weeks after I started, my manager left. I applied for and was selected as Director of Integrated Marketing. Three and a half years after that, I stepped in as interim VP. A year later, I was named permanent VP of Communications and Marketing. I’ve now been in the seat officially for two and a half years. Sometimes the right mission finds you in an unexpected way.
The Brand Complexity of a One-of-a-Kind Institution
Q: Milton Hershey School is tuition-free and nonprofit, yet backed by a multi-billion-dollar trust. That’s a branding tension that most organizations don’t face. How do you manage the optics?
Kristina: We are so rooted in the values and the humility that this school was founded upon 117 years ago. When I talk about it, I get chills. We have 1,500 full-time staff members who truly believe they are part of something that will exist in perpetuity, a generous, selfless gift to the world from two remarkable people. That ethos is visible. People can feel it when they come to campus or interact with anyone from this community. As it pertains to the brand, we work to be approachable and friendly, yet polished and disciplined. Clear, high standards, but rooted in connection. And every conversation, every piece of content, every decision is centered on the students and on the mission. When you are that grounded, there isn’t much room for speculation. We’re doing what we say we’re doing, and our students’ outcomes are the proof. The consistency of that over time is its own form of brand equity.
Q: Tell us the Hershey story. The pillars, the mission, what this school actually is for readers who may not know it exists.
Kristina: There is no other school like this in the world. Founded in 1909 by Milton S. Hershey, the chocolatier, and his wife, Catherine. They married, were unable to have children of their own, and so they started a school. The mission has not changed since the day they founded it: to serve children in social and financial need and help them lead fulfilling, productive lives. We have over 2,200 students today, pre-K through 12th grade, and we provide everything. Top-tier classroom education, comprehensive whole child care, housing, medical, dental, clothing, food, all free of charge. Students live not in dormitories but in student homes, with 8 to 12 other children and a married couple who serve as houseparents. If students meet academic and behavioral benchmarks, they can accrue up to $115,000 toward college or apprenticeship trades education. We also have a Graduate Programs for Success program that stays connected with graduates as they transition to what’s next. In 2025, we celebrated our 12,000th graduate. Hundreds of thousands of children and families have been impacted. It is a profound, living legacy.
Marketing an Always-On, Deeply Complex Funnel
Q: The school’s marketing strategy has to simultaneously recruit students nationally and recruit houseparents, two completely separate funnels with a codependency. That’s an unusual challenge. Walk us through it.
Kristina: The three pillars of our marketing focus are student recruitment, houseparent recruitment, and thought leadership. Most school marketers don’t have houseparent recruitment as a core pillar. It is a distinct, robust charge in its own right. Fewer than two percent of Americans meet the criteria for the houseparent role to begin with. And the two funnels track concurrently, which means they’re codependent. You cannot have an influx of students without houseparents in place, and you don’t want to overhire houseparents if student enrollment isn’t there. My director of integrated marketing works arm-in-arm with enrollment management and human resources to craft a strategy across paid, owned, and earned that balances both funnels simultaneously. It makes for a genuinely interesting strategic challenge. One, I’d argue, not many marketers have faced.
Q: Ninety-plus touch points before a family self-identifies and enters your admissions funnel. That is an extraordinarily high decision-cycle. What drives it, and how does your channel strategy reflect that reality?
Kristina: The decision carries weight. Parents are choosing to send their child, often across state lines, to be cared for day-to-day by someone other than themselves. That is an act of love and sacrifice, and we honor it as such. Given that weight, it makes sense that families need to encounter the school many times, in many contexts, before they take that step. Our channel portfolio is broad precisely because of this. Digital advertising, traditional billboards, postcards, television, streaming TV, all of it. We do awareness-stage marketing, lead nurturing, and conversion-stage work simultaneously. We also market to professional referrers, religious leaders, community leaders, and law enforcement officers who encounter children in need, utilizing channels including LinkedIn, Google search, Facebook, Instagram, and demand generation. The earned and owned sides are equally important. My media relations team pitches stories locally and nationally. We have a rigorous approach to search equity so that when someone needs us and searches online, we are what is found. And our website is built to efficiently guide audiences from landing to conversion while keeping the content authentic.
Q: LeadsRX has been a transformative tool for your team. What changed when you brought it in?
Kristina: Attribution. Understanding the actual touchpoints along the journey from awareness to conversion is hugely clarifying. Before, you were doing a lot of smart things but making educated guesses about what was working. LeadsRX showed us that paid Google is currently our top source for targeted students, followed by direct site traffic, awareness campaigns, organic Google, and streaming TV. That list shifts, and the order changes. But now we can see it moving in real time and dial up or pull back accordingly. We are also going deeper into the nuances of what happens once someone expresses interest. How quickly do we respond? What does the buyer’s mindset look like at that moment? The system is strong. Now we’re tinkering at the edges to make it more precise.
The Craft and the Strategy
Q: You describe yourself as passionate about SEO and the hub-and-spoke model. Those are not the things most VPs of Communications talk about first. Where does that come from?
Kristina: I think it comes from genuinely loving the puzzle of it. How do you use the internet strategically to achieve a business outcome while making the content feel completely authentic to the reader? That tension is fascinating to me. I became a little obsessed with search engine optimization at Harrisburg Academy because I was working on a nonprofit budget and had to make every dollar and every piece of content count. The hub and spoke concept, where your website is the hub and all the spokes, content, social, earned media, paid, drive back to it, that’s not just a tactic. It is a philosophy that holds that the entire ecosystem must work together to be effective. AI is starting to change search engine results page outputs, creating new challenges for search equity and for owning your own messaging. But the underlying philosophy remains.
Q: What would you want other marketing leaders at mission-driven organizations to take from how you’ve built this program?
Kristina: Start with the mission and let everything flow from it. It sounds obvious, but organizations rush to execution before they have done the work of getting truly clear on what they stand for. For us, it has never been complicated. Serve children in social and financial need. Help them lead fulfilling and productive lives. That clarity validates every content decision, every channel decision, and every partnership decision. The other thing I’d say is do not underestimate the complexity of what looks simple from the outside. For us, school marketing sounds straightforward. It is not. We are managing two codependent funnels, 90-plus touchpoints in the decision cycle, geography-driven prioritization, real-time capacity constraints by grade and gender, and student home availability. The craft matters. The data matters. And you need the humility to keep tinkering even when the system is working, to get even better.
What’s Ahead
Q: What do you want readers to know is coming, and what would you ask them to do?
Kristina: Two things. First, if you know a child who could benefit from Milton Hershey School, share the school’s story with them. We are growing. Our Deed of Trust challenges us to serve as many students as possible. We are at 2,200 students and targeting 2,300 within the next year. Children from lower-income backgrounds who are able to learn and thrive in a family-like residential setting meet our admissions criteria. Share the information. It may change a life. Second, if you know a quality couple looking to do something different and meaningful with their professional lives, the houseparent role is unlike anything else. It is a profession. It is a calling. And it is one of the most impactful things a person can do. The other thing I’m genuinely excited about is the upcoming Hershey film. I think it will be an incredible opportunity for the world to see the story of Milton S. Hershey on the big screen. How he failed, again and again, until roughly age 40, when he figured it out. How he and Catherine built an empire and then gave their entire fortune to start a school that would exist in perpetuity. That grit, that profound sense of values, the selflessness of it. We are the living legacy of that story, and I think the film will create awareness with so many more families who need us.
On the Record
Q: Is there a little-known fact about you that you’d care to share?
Kristina: I actually laughed when I read that question in the brief. I read it aloud to my husband, and he said, “Oh god, you’re going to talk about it again…” I am a competitive figure skater! I skate with an adult synchronized skating team and have been competing for roughly 15 years. It is how I decompress from work and from being a mom of two boys. I think it is genuinely important for professionals to have something in their wellness toolkit that helps them balance, de-stress, and stay healthy, so they can bring their best selves to their work. For me, that is synchronized skating. Coordinated, demanding, and a little unexpected. I’d say that tracks for how I approach the job, too.
Kristina Pae is building awareness for an institution that has changed hundreds of thousands of lives for over a century. The school’s best years, she believes, are still ahead. We undoubtedly agree. Thank you, Kristina, for your candor and your evident belief in the important work you’re doing.