Archive for 'Best Practice Documents'

HomeBest Practice Documents

Are you paying attention?

Posted by:

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? ...

Continue Reading
10
FEB
0

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

Season's E-Greetings

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
2
DEC
0

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

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
15
SEP
1

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

Connecting through chat

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
29
JUL
0

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Chat

10 Lessons from Starbucks

Posted by:

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. ...

Continue Reading
22
JUN
0

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

Know your niche and market to nobody

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
10
MAY
3

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

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
20
APR
0

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Experience, Yield

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

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
10
APR
0

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

Yield from all angles

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
25
MAR
0

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

Girl Scouts Are Using Them. What About You?

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
23
FEB
0

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

Practicing good mobile habits

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
3
DEC
0

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

Ethical college marketing?

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
17
SEP
3

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

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

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
2
SEP
2

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

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
18
AUG
3

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

Outstanding Ohio State Admissions Campus Visit Guide

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
29
JUL
2

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

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
23
JUN
3

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

5 Campus Visit Traps

Posted by:

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.

Continue Reading
27
OCT
1

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

Alfred Conference Bike a lesson in authenticity and change

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading
10
OCT
2

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

Campus Visit – don't forget basics and watch our free webcast

Posted by:

Since August 19 Trent Gilbert, TargetX’s Experience Evaluator and I have been on some 18 client campuses. And while many of our clients are really staging great experiences it’s important to remember and review the basics.

1. Take a tour – all admissions staffers must take a current campus tour

2. Get in sync – admissions and student guides need to know what each other are saying and not repeat it. Admissions should handle stats, programs and processes and students should tell their stories. Here’s a chart we’ve created to help you understand this:

SYNC-diagram_REV2

3. Set the Expectation - you’ve got to set the expectation (time for each segment and such) on your website, ...

Continue Reading
13
SEP
1

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Webcast

Setting the Pre-Arrival Expectation

Posted by:

Setting the expectation is important for any campus visit.  Here are some things to keep in mind about setting the expectation during the pre-arrival experience.

Continue Reading
14
AUG
1

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Online Experiences

Free on Friday Webcast: Your Campus Visit – Five Fixes for the Fall

Posted by:

Last Friday Trent Gilbert, TargetX Experience Evaluator, and I led the August Free on Friday Webcast.

The title was Your Campus Visit – Five Fixes for the Fall.

Thanks to the great marketing by my colleagues Adrienne Bartlett and Ray Ulmer we had some 600+ registrants and some 380+ unique schools online participating. And thanks to all those who participated!

If you registered and/or participated you should have received an email from Adrienne Bartlett, TargetX Client Concierge with how to access the video and download the presentation PDF – it’s password protected for those who participated in the webcast.

Remember the first participants who email Trent or me the photos (or online photo album) and results of your debrief will get ...

Continue Reading
11
AUG
1

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Workshops and Events

Smart Signature Moments and Memorabilia

Posted by:

Two of the tenets of The Experience Economy are Signature Moments (think throwing a coin in the Fountain Trevi in Rome and having your photo made with Mickey Mouse at a Disney park).

Recently I’ve come across three really great ones:

San Francisco Zoo

14511

Created posters with various animals parts, guest stand in front of them and they take photos where it appears they have wings, antlers and other animal parts. And as reported in Advertising Age, they’ve created an online gallery for guests to upload them and share. As put them out on city bus shelters as part of an award wining outdoor ad campaign.

Continue Reading

22
JUL
0

Categories: Authenticity, Best Practice Documents, Blogs, Campaign Intelligence, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience, Experience Economy Stuff, Lists, Uncategorized, Website

New visitor spaces at University of Akron and Kennesaw State University

Posted by:

Nothing makes me happy like change on a client campus!

Last week Trent Gilbert, our Experience Evaluator, and I attended the “reveal” ceremony of Kennesaw State’s Insight Room. This is the room where they host their guests and conduct the information session. Along with a long list of improvements to the visitor experience and tour, KSU had created a one-of-a-kind mural. It’s from the perspective of standing on the center green of campus and reveals many traditions. It’s also a provides storytelling talking points for presenters. It’s got great energy and has transformed a boring stale corporate room, into one with a fun, collegiate feel.

KSU Insight Room Before

img_9024


KSU Insight Room ...

Continue Reading
16
JUL
1

Categories: Authenticity, Best Practice Documents, Blogs, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience, Lists, Uncategorized

FLIP for a better campus visit evaluation

Posted by:

flipevaluation

All campus visits should be evaluated by students and parents. (And each should have different evaluations.) And the data for evaluations should be constantly used towards improvement.

The problem is most schools provide detailed, 20+ questions on two-sides of 8.5″x11″ paper and the whole thing is too taxing on those filling them out and those processing them.

This weekend I ate at FLIP burger boutique here in Atlanta. (By Top Chef contestant Richard Blais.) The place is contemporary homage to an American classic. But I’m not here to review restaurants.

Tucked inside the bill folder was a simple evaluation form on card stock. It asked to rank five simple topics ...

Continue Reading
12
JUL
3

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Blogs, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience, Experience Economy Stuff, Lists

What Home Depot can teach you about staging your campus visit

Posted by:

Home Depot used to be the King of DIY. It seemed like the country’s second largest retailer could do no wrong. But the hubris of success caught up with it. When you could find a customer service rep in the aisles it was a good chance that they were surly and behaved as if you interrupted their work. (I’ve felt this way at many a campus visit.)

So it seems like Home Depot is addressing the problem. I was reading in the May 7 Businessweek how Marvin Ellison, Executive VP for US Stores, is addressing employee morale and improving customer service.

-Improving morale of the workers? He’s limited emails from corporate and put all other information online, from the ...

Continue Reading
26
MAY
0

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit

Page 1 of 2 12