Three CUES is GDA Integrated Services' free electronic newsletter. In each edition, we focus on only three items taken from our College & University Environmental Scanning (CUES) and our GDAIS research. Unlike most higher education newsletters, Three CUES often looks beyond news about colleges and universities to review greater social and marketing trends. Produced several times during the academic year, Three CUES not only provides information, but also offers observations and recommendations concerning each topic.
Spring 2006 Edition:
The Future Is Now
Start Preparing for It Today
The positive demographic curve for high school graduates that has been so kind to colleges and universities for the last 10 years will soon be a thing of the past. Is your institution positioned to face the challenges that will come with the new demographics? What will your institution look like in 10 years? Are you in a position to weather the next major enrollment storm? Even though applications nationwide are running at an all time high it is not too early to begin planning for this known eventuality.
There are several steps you can take to help secure a brighter future for your college or university. While these steps will require a long-term commitment of resources, the end result – an institution that stands out from the competition and thrives in the 21st century – will be well worth the investment.
Conduct an Institution-wide Assessment
The first step in preparing for the future is to conduct a comprehensive competitive assessment that looks at how you are positioned to compete in the difficult years ahead and evaluates how your institution is organized to compete. A starting point for any assessment should be to seek answers to the following questions:
A thorough assessment of this kind will help you understand the strengths upon which you can build and the weaknesses that need to be corrected. It will also help you determine where the holes are and what market research might be necessary to complete the picture.
Understand Your Market Through Research
Planning and implementing strategies that are founded in and supported by research is very important. The upfront work means you avoid costly and time consuming mistakes down the road. Quantitative survey research that is Web- and/or telephone-based allows you to look at a wide variety of issues from a large, objective sample of participants. For example, you can:
Develop an Integrated Marketing Strategy
Based on results of the assessment and guided by the market research, the next step is to develop a long-term integrated marketing strategy that can be rolled out in manageable phases. Integrated marketing is much more than just matching your print publications to the look of your website. It involves the application of a comprehensive marketing strategy to all aspects of your institution's presentation. Some important elements of an integrated marketing strategy include:
Evaluate Success and Make Adjustments as Needed
Don't forget about evaluation and measurement of results. The importance of evaluating your results and obtaining regular feedback is that it enables you to test the success of your efforts and make any adjustments that may be required due to changes in the marketplace.
Perhaps It Won't Surprise You, but You Don't Have To Go It Alone
Not all institutions face the same issues or have the same needs. GDA Integrated Services offers a broad range of marketing and recruitment services and has the experience to guide you and your staff through each step of the process. We can help you design a customized strategy based on where you are today and where you want your institution to be when hard times arrive.
GDA Integrated Services has helped many colleges and universities plan for and thrive in the future. For more information, contact Christopher Small at topher@dehne.com or 860-388-3958.
Falling short of your enrollment goals?
A short-term fix with long term implications
Developing a long-term integrated marketing strategy designed to place your institution in a stronger enrollment position takes time. If you're falling short of your enrollment goals, you need an effective short-term plan for meeting budgeted new student numbers while the long-term marketing strategy, integrated communication plan and other deliverables are being developed.
Good Old-fashioned Recruitment
The reality is that the job is going to have to be accomplished by the admissions staff. To succeed, they have to be a team that can effectively make the case for the college to the requisite number of prospects in order to build an applicant pool large enough to meet enrollment goals. They have to work through the maze of prospective students in the inquiry pool, determine where the genuine interest is, develop tactics for getting to these students and then tell the story in a way that turns a modest level of interest into genuine enthusiasm for the college.
This will not happen without quality one-on-one communication between the admission counselor and the student. Occasionally a student can be convinced with as little as one such conversation, but typically it takes a series of dexterously orchestrated sessions over the course of the entire admissions cycle. Some of these contacts may be off-campus at a high school visit or hotel interview, others may be on the telephone or by e-mail, but the goal should be to persuade the student to visit the campus, where there is an opportunity to fully make the case directly and in person.
This kind of recruitment is not easy to do. The most effective admission counselors, those who are able to turn prospects into admitted applicants, share certain key characteristics:
At the same time, if the counselor is going to create the necessary trust and bond with the prospect, he or she has to be:
And, perhaps most important, it takes a very competitive spirit, one that accepts accountability and is eager to take on the challenge.
A highly talented admission staff is critical because at many smaller colleges fewer than 10% of prospects consider the college their first choice. Fully 80% of applicants at such schools do not consider the college their first choice. It is this group that needs to have their minds changed about where they intend to enroll. This is no small order, given the pull of the established higher education pecking order. The brighter and more affluent the students, the more choices they have and the less willing they are to even consider an institution that they know little about and their peers have never heard of. This is the challenge faced day in and day out by admission counselors working at small private colleges. Given these circumstances, it is hard to understand why so many colleges continue to put their futures in the hands of poorly paid modestly trained unsophisticated recent graduates, whose credibility is suspect with parents and students.
Training and Retaining a Top-notch Admissions Staff
The obvious question to ask yourself is, “Is my admission staff prepared to take on this level of challenge?” The vast majority of college admission staffs are not. The places that succeed at meeting enrollment goals despite image and visibility disadvantages generally have the requisite level of professionalism in their admissions office.
Training and retaining a top-notch admission staff is an important first step toward solving your short term enrollment problem and placing your college on the road to longer term stability.
GDA Integrated Services does staff evaluation and training for colleges and helps them develop sophisticated recruitment plans that capitalize on the newly developed skills. To learn more, contact Topher Small at topher@dehne.com or 860-388-3958.
Using History to Understand the Evolution of Online Marketing
Websites for institutions of higher education are among the most complex and extensive in existence. By definition they must characterize the entire institution and all of its constituencies, including faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents of students, prospective students, donors, the local community, and the larger academic community, to name just a few. It is the large number of users as well as the diversity of these users that necessitate the many thousands of pages comprising a typical college website. In short, the college website must be all things to all people. It needs to be a useful tool to those on campus just as much as it needs to define and represent the richness of the college community to those unfamiliar with the institution.
A Brief History of College Websites
The first generation of college websites typically came into being out of necessity, the emergence of the World Wide Web as a popular medium, and the technical skills of those who happened to take an interest in them at the time. Like many initiatives in higher education, college websites were not strictly defined and planned but tended to evolve though the efforts of those who took an interest in the Web. In many instances, the IT department or a few academic departments (usually in the sciences) began making the first institutional pages and content. As the awareness of the Web increased across campuses, other departments and, inevitably, the college administration began to take an interest in how their institutions were being presented online.
The second generation of college websites was largely characterized by rapid growth and an explosion of content. Many colleges realized the Web was here to stay, and they began to create a more permanent administrative infrastructure to care for their fledgling sites and add pages, sections and content to represent the entire campus community. This is where the growing pains became most obvious, as some sections of the site had robust content and intricate design and others clearly suffered from lack of attention. As the role of the college webmaster became formalized, colleges put an emphasis on adding content that would help provide at least some basic level of online representation for each of the different areas of the institution, but in many instances, the content and talent was not evenly spread throughout the site. Departments or individuals with some aptitude for HTML design were given free license to add content with little centralized control or brand integrity.
The third generation of college sites saw increased attempts to evenly distribute content and add more design consistency. College webmasters were charged with policing the site for runaway pages to bring them in line with a more consistent graphic look and feel that would maintain the institutional brand. The slow process of analyzing and revising the vast amounts of existing content began. The communications and public relations departments were tapped to provide a more consistent and uniform public face for the college in the online medium. This is the stage at which most colleges and universities find their current sites.
In the past few years, we have seen the emergence of more fourth-generation college and university websites. These sites take their cues from commercial sites and the user-centric perspective. Colleges at this stage take a long, hard, critical look at their sites and undertake a major revision with the users and the emergent best practices in mind. Although much of the content they currently have on their sites will still exist, how it is written and how it is presented are reinvented. Fourth generation sites are reborn as utilitarian tools rather than technological bell and whistle showrooms. Form must follow function in these sites, and designs are revised from flashy showpieces to functional, elegant simplicity.
What This Means for Your Site
We have come to accept that people do not want to dig through every page of college websites; they want to quickly orient themselves and find the fastest route to the information they want. They are not willing to read everything posted on the pages; they want to scan content, bookmark things they may want to read in more detail later, and they want to be entertained as well as informed.
The first, second, and third generation sites were not designed with usability in mind. They grew organically as content was piled on and as needs expanded. They tend to have too many links and pages with long passages of dense copy written for the print medium. Advancing these sites to fourth-generation sites involves major revisions of the content, and, more importantly, a dramatic change in the site structure, organization, and navigation.
If you would like to see how your institution's website measures up, GDA Integrated Services conducts website audits that can help evaluate your site's effectiveness as a marketing tool. We also do extensive communications planning to help you make the most of your site by using e-mail and other active mediums to integrate your electronic communications with your printed publications. We also have a full-service Web design team and have worked with scores of colleges to create websites, site templates, more functional site navigation schemes, and mini-websites.
Please contact Jonathan Steele at jonathan@dehne.com for more information, or call 860-388-3958 if you would like to discuss your specific Web marketing challenges.
GDA Integrated Services is a marketing consulting, research, strategic planning and services firm specializing in customized, integrated marketing solutions that help colleges and universities compete successfully for students, funds and visibility in the twenty-first century.
We provide colleges and universities with the following services:
For a complete listing of our services, please see our website at www.gdais.com.