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Render authenticity (Part 2)

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authenticity_erasedIn last week’s Recruitment Minute, Render authenticity (Part 1), I talked about why it is important to render authenticity in your campus visit experience.  In this week’s conclusion, I want to help you understand a few ways you can move that process along on your own campus.

College is a transformative experience.

Most colleges and universities hope to light a spark within their students, encouraging them to spend their lives learning something new, trying something different and striving to be their best. Institutions want students to participate in class, sign up for an internship, study abroad, engage in community service, live in the residence halls — and most importantly — ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Best Practice Documents, Blogs, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Change, College Recruiting, Experience, Experience Economy Stuff, Millennials, Storytelling

Making college fairs count

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Conference season is rapidly approaching for our team here at TargetX. Many of our folks will be traveling around the country meeting with current and future clients, presenting on higher ed industry trends and of course, showcasing TargetX products and services. NACAC college fair

As the conference planning coordinator, I’m very much involved in the process — from session proposals to final shipping (I know, super glamorous right?) – and I’m always looking for tips on how to improve our presence at tradeshows.

I came across a great article this week by Dan Roche in MediaPost, and that got me thinking about its value to all of you, our friends in ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, College Recruiting, Fall Travel, Spring travel

Campus Visit Tip: Reveal Outcomes

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Each month the Experience Team from TargetX will share with you a Campus Visit Tip, Trend and Talk. All of the “three T’s” are designed to give you a bit of insight into the work we do, the people we work with and the places we pull our inspiration from. Here is this month’s “Tip”.

Reveal Outcomes

Open up a newspaper and you are bound to see an article that questions the value of higher education. Heck, this morning on the Today Show there was an entire segment on it. The articles and stories all ask the question “is college still worth it?”. It is the question on the minds of most families as they come to campus for a visit or ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Blogs, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Campus Visit Three T's, Campus Visit Tip, Experience, Graduate Recruiting, Storytelling, Student Recruiting, Yield

Campus Visit Trend: “How much financial aid did ‘they’ give you?”

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Each month the Experience Team from TargetX will share with you a Campus Visit Tip, Trend and Talk. All of the “three T’s” are designed to give you a bit of insight into the work we do, the people we work with, and the places we pull our inspiration from. Here is this month’s “Trend”.

Ten years ago the number one question parents asked during a campus visit was, “What’s the party scene?” Then after the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois the priority question by parents was “How safe is this campus?” After our economy tanked the mainstream media began beating up Wall Street, then they singled out the mortgage industry; now they have their sights on higher education. ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Campus Visit Talk, Campus Visit Three T's, Campus Visit Tip, Campus Visit Trend, Financial Aid, Parents, Uncategorized

Chevy looks to Disney to improve the dealership experience. What does your admissions office look like?

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I’ve often said that much of our automobile brand experience doesn’t just take place in the car but in the dealership. It’s where you buy and get your vehicle serviced that often manifests the brand experience. This is why back in the 90′s I bought Infiniti(s) — they created well designed dealerships (and were early providers of the now near industry-standard roadside assistance and loaner vehicle).

Similarly we often say that your admissions office or visitor center space is the first, often the longest and last impression of your school. The importance of the campus visit and campus visitors are both on the increase. This crucial first “impression” is why so many schools are investing in new or renovated spaces. (Continue Reading

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience Economy Stuff

WPI videos and Oxy website get it right

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Next month we’ll be in Las Vegas for our Xpert Summit and many of our clients will be presenting about technology, the campus visit and recruitment marketing.

But I want to take a moment to highlight some new recruitment marketing creative work by a few other TargetX clients; Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and Occidental College (Oxy).

WPI videos
I love them because they tell a story, cut through the clutter and say something definitive. The animation is such a departure from the normal voice-over and standard shots of campus.

WPI “Rowbots”

WPI “Special Delivery”

OXY Website
Oxy launched ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Videos, Website, Websites, Xpert Summit

Social helps relieve summer melt

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School’s out for summer — but the work is far from done. Colleges are often concerned with summer melt — fearful that their enrolled class (and hard work over the year) will slip away. So what’s an admissions staff to do?

That’s where social engagement comes in.

Social sites aren’t your magic bullet, but they can certainly help you to stay connected. And if you do it right — you might just keep those incoming students engaged right on through til move-in day.

Business writer Courtney Rubin blogs about “The Secret to a Perfect Facebook Post,” and shares some insights from a recent Buddy Media report for businesses using Facebook to interact with consumers. And guess what? They just so happen ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Facebook, Social Media, Summer Projects

Are you paying attention?

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Before parents and students set foot on your campus for a tour, you can bet they’re searching for reviews of your college online. You may have an archive of wonderful case studies, interviews or testimonials from recent grads and current students on your website, but do you know what the sad truth is? Parents and students don’t always trust them!

After surfing admissions site after admissions site and flipping through countless viewbooks, most of the marketing messages from each college begin to sound the same. So what are students and parents doing? They’re hitting up Google to find college reviews from each school on their list.

What can you do as a higher ed marketing professional? ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Website, Websites

Season's E-Greetings

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Holiday emails are a great opportunity to engage prospective students. You can share with them the celebrations and traditions of your institution, or share all the fun and interesting activities that the New Year will bring to your college. Not sure how to execute the perfect holiday greeting? You’re not the only one.

“Season’s E-Greetings! Great Examples of Year-End Outreach” by Jennifer Doak provides us with some best practices for creating effective holiday e-cards, videos and messages that resonate with your audience (and she shares some examples from colleges and universities too).

Here are a few tips from Doak’s post to keep in mind while creating your college or university’s message:

Tap into student and alumni talent. Alumni can tell stories of their ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Email, Email Campaign Ideas, Email Recruiting, Videos

What Mercedes and other auto brands can teach you about your visit experience

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I’m a car guy.

Back in 6th grade I had subscriptions to Road & Track and Car and Driver. My father sold cars and managed dealerships. He used to quiz me on the year, make, and model of cars we passed while driving – by day and by night (Yes, I can identify a car based upon its headlights).

Take a look at the Global Fortune 500 top 25 companies list. It’s inundated with oil and car companies.

So what does all this mean to you in admissions? At TargetX, we always encourage you to look beyond the school up the road for best practices and to look outside of admissions. Car companies are a great place to look for best ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit Audits Sidebar, Campus Visit Experiences, Change, Customer Service, Uncategorized

Connecting through chat

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A few weeks ago TargetX hosted Client Advisory Board meetings at our headquarters to discuss topics and trends in higher education. Since those meetings I have been spending a lot of time reflecting on the great conversations and feedback gathered from our clients. One topic in particular seemed to bring about mixed emotions — Is chat dead?

There was a clear divide surrounding the topic. Some people have abandoned the practice completely while others are still finding success, having fun with it and making it a regular part of their recruitment cycle. Being that I am a former Admissions Counselor myself, it got me thinking about best practices for hosting a successful chat:

Promote, Promote, Promote. Many chat events fail because they’re ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Chat

10 Lessons from Starbucks

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My TargetX colleague, Scott Parks, sent a great blog post link that I’d like to share with you. It’s 10 Lessons from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul.

The blog post challenges radio broadcasters, who like college administrators are facing challenges, to “think how these lessons apply to you.”  The guts of the post are quoted below. Let me throw out the same challenge: Think how these lessons apply to you.

1.  Don’t Lose Sight of what Matters

“Our strategy was to do more of what worked in the past.  But we were not pushing ourselves to do things better or differently. ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Customer Service, Storytelling, Student Workers

Know your niche and market to nobody

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When I talk with admissions leaders, cabinets, or boards, everyone wants to talk about what separates them from the school up the road. Yet, most schools tend to look and sound like the school up the road.

It seems like schools that are trying to be all things to all people are the schools that are having enrollment challenges. Ambiguity confuses the market place. A university president once asked, “What’s the greatest mistake we can make regarding a campus visit?” My reply was to have a family get in the car at the end of of their time on campus and say, “Nice school, but nothing special.”

Great marketing and positioning might offend. It might not appeal to the masses, but it ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit Experiences, Outside Resources, Word of Mouth

Capital University's mascot does the chicken dance, GTL and a Jedi Challenge to help yield students

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Seems like almost every college, the media, students, and parents are all stressing about yield and deposits.

But the folks at Capital University are having some fun in all the madness.

Their Mascot Mayhem video site is adding some levity to the “May”hem as deposit time approaches. Accepted students are invited to visit a special URL – www.mascotmayhem.capital.edu – where they can use their student ID number to request Capital University’s mascot, Cappie the Crusader, to “Make Some Mayhem.”

Prospective students have come up with a Jersey-style GTL (Gym, Tan, Laundry) routine, a chicken dance, and a Jedi challenge.  The mascot goes out on campus (revealing more of the campus and community) and a quick video is made of the ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Experience, Yield

Heading to a conference? Here are six tips to maximize ROI.

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It’s admissions conference season!

This week I’ll be at OACAC with my colleague Adrienne Bartlett while our colleagues Trent Gilbert and Emily Welsh are at SACAC and Kevin Corr is at GPACAC.

Whether you’re attending, exhibiting or presenting the cost of participating at a conference is significant, and with budgets the way they are many of you are attending less and conferences.

Be sure to have a plan to maximize your conference ROI. Along with attending sessions featuring TargetX educators and stopping by our exhibits, here are six tips for earning a better return on any conference investment:

1. Be where you are.
2. Don’t feel pressured to do it all.
3. Figure out your balance.
4. Keep up with the buzz.
5. Dial ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Did You Know?, NACAC, Workshops and Events

Yield from all angles

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As you focus on yield this spring, hopefully you are keeping students engaged in every way possible: in print, in person, over the phone and online.

In his most recent blog post, Michael Fauscette explains the importance of engaging customers on Facebook. “Moving from a transactional relationship to one of trust and engagement is fundamentally about the customer experience. Positive or negative — experience trumps everything else.”

Fauscette developed a best practice list for companies that can be easily translated to help build relationships with your accepted (and excited) students.

Some of his tips include:

Make your page interactive. Ask questions, post frequently and make it a place students want to go.

Personal connections are powerful; personalize posts with “real” humans. Videos or posts from ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Facebook, Social Media, Student Yield, Yield

Girl Scouts Are Using Them. What About You?

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As we’re approaching the time to convert applicants to deposited and enrolled students, everyone is thinking about yield.

Each yield communication and event should have a purpose and a call to action; it should take you to the next step.

Many of you will be hosting events for students who have applied and have you near the top of their list. While you’ll roll out the red carpet, gussy up the campus, serve better-than-average food, and have a meet and greet with your president, do you have a plan of action to get the students to take the next step?

These events are about garnering the deposit, so why not take a cue from Girl Scouts? They are selling cookies to countless small ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience Economy Stuff, Mobile, Mobile Marketing, Yield

Practicing good mobile habits

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Is your website content ready for mobile devices? Forecasters predict that by 2013 there will be 1.7 billion mobile internet users. You can be sure that many of those users will be prospective students (and their parents) doing college research through their mobile devices.

“Many folks spend a lot of time working on the design of their site for modern browsers, but fail to realize the ever-increasing percentage of site visitors that come by way of mobile devices,” says Brian Gardner of Studio Press. You know that you only have seconds with a prospective student on your website. How much time do you think you will have with a visitor to your site via a mobile device?

“How to Make Your Website ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Mobile, Mobile Marketing, Websites, Your Website

Ethical college marketing?

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Remember when your faculty recoiled at the word “marketing” and made you feel cheap and dirty? You say some still do?

Refer them to the Education Marketing Council, a new organization devoted to “recognizing and promoting ethical marketing practices in postsecondary education.” That’s right, not only is higher education marketing now so well accepted that it has its own council, but the organization professes a devotion to best practices, ethical standards and the highest interest of the students being recruited.

Maybe that will make your provost think twice about trying to cut the marketing budget.

The EMC was created a few months ago as an “information-sharing partnership” of higher education institutions and companies that serve those institutions. Its goals certainly sound worthwhile:

“Our aim ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, College Recruiting, Ethics in Recruiting

Baldwin-Wallace College now includes van ride during campus visit experience

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beevan

August and September are hectic times for our consulting campus visit team members. Trent Gilbert, Emily Welsh and I are crisscrossing the country conducting ambassador/tour guide training and checking the status of campus visit improvements at many clients.

But it’s also one of the most rewarding times. Besides having the opportunity to inspire student guides to be master storytellers, render authenticity and have fun, we get to see the progress consulting campus visit clients are making based upon our recommendations.

Recently Baldwin-Wallace College in NE Ohio implemented a walking-riding tour. BWC has a unique physicality because it’s the merger of two campuses (Baldwin and Wallace Colleges) and a third campus ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Change, Experience, Experience Economy Stuff, Parents

The future of the internet – we seem to get it wrong

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Working for TargetX, college administrators seem to think that we have a crystal ball into the future of the internet and everyone is always asking us what’s next. Be it Facebook, MySpace, twitter, or ning. it seems that our industry and society has a BSOS (Bright Shiny Object Syndrome) pandemic.

I recently heard a report on NPR’s Morning Edition about the Google/Verizon “Net Neutrality” proposal. Correspondent Alex Bloomberg’s closing line of the report rang so true, “What we know though, when it comes the internet most of our predictions about its future are wrong.”

Just six or seven years ago, while working at Mindpower, I’d go to college campuses to do discovery for branding or publications ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Videos

Outstanding Ohio State Admissions Campus Visit Guide

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The Ohio State University has one of the best visit programs we have encountered, yet they’re always looking to improve the experience.

To inspire you, here’s a copy of the new piece:

img_1658

The creative folks in admissions worked hard to create a visit brochure that sets the expectation and reveals visit basics, while giving it the feel of a travel brochure. They’ve outlined Four Ways to Discover Ohio State: Sport Enthusiast, Foodie, History Buff and Academic Explorer. The brochure unfolds to reveal places and spaces in these themes complete with photos, insider tips and more.

At the CIVSA conference in Lexington this June, they told us that the majority of families bring the piece ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit Experiences, Communication, Experience Economy Stuff, Twitter, Uncategorized

York College of Pennsylvania – Campus visit makes front cover of their magazine

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When prospective consulting clients ask us what we do, or what they get specific to the campus visit, the answer is often big picture. We make the campus visit a top priority within admissions and ultimately campus wide. We help our clients fight the fight for the campus visit at their school.

Lately Trent Gilbert, TargetX’s CXO, Chief eXperience Officer, and I have been receiving a number of emails from consulting clients about improvements to their campus visit since working with us. That’s really the ultimate in satisfaction.

Recently, our clients at York College of Pennsylvania; Steve Neitz, Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management and Nancy Spataro, Director of Admissions sent us both electronic and printed hard copies of the ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Change, Experience, Experience Economy Stuff, Followup, Storytelling

5 Campus Visit Traps

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We were recently asked by the folks at University Business to give them insight into the most common mistakes that we have been experiencing within the campus visit.  In this month issue of the magazine you can read the mistakes; then watch the video for more in-depth explanation of these mistakes.

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, College Recruiting

Alfred Conference Bike a lesson in authenticity and change

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Chances are you’ve read about the Alfred University Campus Tour Conference Bike in various higher education press resources or in my colleague Ray Ulmer’s Recruitment Minute.

But let me give you the inside story.

Alfred University and their Director of Marketing, Jodi Bailey, are the kind of clients all services providers love to work with. They embrace change (even though they face internal hurdles) and are fun to work with.

Back in the winter of 2008 when I first toured Alfred’s beautiful mountainside campus in Western New York, I told them, “Your admissions office in Alumni Hall is on one far end of campus, and you’re walking tours about the full length (about 1/2 mile) to the other end ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience Economy Stuff, Lists, Parents, Student Workers

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