Archive for 'College Recruiting'

HomeCollege Recruiting

Sometimes the answers are simple

Posted by:

This year marked my 18th NAGAP conference. For my acronym-challenged friends, this is the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals. My first presentation, in 1994 in San Francisco, was entitled “What is WWW?” Oh how the times have changed.

Over my career in higher education, I’ve attempted to bridge the divide between the undergraduate and graduate recruiting efforts — bringing the lessons learned recruiting an 18-year-old to the world of recruiting adults. However, I received pushback on a regular basis from the graduate professionals with claims of “we’re different” or “we don’t have the resources they have” or “we don’t have the same issues.”

Then came those pesky Millennials to their graduate program interview and campus tour with ...

Continue Reading
4
MAY
0

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, College Recruiting, Graduate Recruiting, Student Recruiting

A little less conversation

Posted by:

Change.

It’s an emotionally charged word in higher education, if not a dirty one.  And it’s been the war cry here at TargetX since day one.

When I joined the company back in 2005, I was quickly immersed into a culture of higher ed professionals trumpeting the need for industry change.  Defects from a world of cushy benefits and questionable accountability, they struck out on their own to become a voice of change in an industry sliding desperately into denial.

Together the team here wrote blog posts and email newsletters outlining how colleges needed to engage a new generation and operate more efficiently.   We spent years speaking at conferences about the impending shifts in technology, generations, demographics and more.  We even created our ...

Continue Reading
13
APR
0

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Change, College Recruiting, Leadership, Marketing, Overthrowing Dead Culture, Uncategorized

Ready for your Facebook facelift?

Posted by:

SUNY Cortland believes in looking at the big picture. At least when it comes to Facebook.

So the central New York campus is inviting students, faculty, staff and alums to submit photos for the new cover image that will dominate its Facebook page starting on March 30th. That’s the day the social goliath has set for its worldwide switch to “Timeline,” a redesigned interface that emphasizes photos, especially the one that spans the top of the page.

Many colleges have already converted to the new design, posting everything from breathtaking campus vistas, to inspirational taglines, to depictions of their athletic mascots. Others — like SUNY Cortland — have at least a strategy in place, if not an actual image. But there are ...

Continue Reading
16
MAR
0

Categories: Authenticity, College Recruiting, Facebook, Social Networking

Facebook without the whining

Posted by:

“I would have written this article sooner,” says business journalist Lydia Dishman, “but I was busy on Pinterest.” Turns out, she wasn’t alone.

In her recent story in Fast Company magazine — entitled “Why Pinterest Is So Addictive” — Dishman explores the reasons this relatively new social networking site is attracting so many people, including, perhaps, students you’re trying to recruit.

Launched in 2010, Pinterest has suddenly exploded in popularity, with nearly 12 million unique U.S. visitors last month. The site is a virtual bulletin board that enables you to create online image collages, then easily share those collages — called pinboards — with other users.

Part of Pinterest’s appeal is that it is visually beautiful and overwhelmingly positive (“like Facebook without the ...

Continue Reading
24
FEB
1

Categories: College Recruiting, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking

How to redesign a website

Posted by:

When Marketing VP Adrienne Hamson decided to redesign the TargetX website, she immediately thought about making it faster and simpler to navigate.  She knew it had to be more interactive.  And she vowed to make all the product information easily digestible.

But the real challenge, she realized, was to build upon all the best-practice advice that TargetX has become known for — and make the site a place where admissions professionals can go for content that will make them better recruiters and marketersShe succeeded, and TargetX just launched a new website that offers:

  • A video library consisting of the company’s popular “Free on Friday” webcasts aimed at admissions officers.

  • The iThink Blog, a compendium of posts about student recruiting from a variety of ...
Continue Reading
20
JAN
0

Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting, Websites

Writing your school’s resume

Posted by:

You’ve heard it a thousand times — Be distinctive; stand out from your competitors. You can’t do that with your faculty/student ratio, no matter how impressive. Or with your small class sizes, no matter how important. Or with the personalized attention your professors provide their students, no matter how beneficial.

Start your story with something that cuts through the college marketing clutter, say all the experts. But perhaps no one has said it quite like advertising executive Angie Jones.

“I have a Bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing,” Jones writes in a recent blog post. Pretty good, but unfortunately millions of people in America have the same degree and emphasis, she says. “Education-wise, I don’t stand out from ...

Continue Reading
11
JAN
0

Categories: Authenticity, College Recruiting, Communication, Marketing

Marketing is the future

Posted by:

American universities are not the only ones struggling with change these days. Sharply rising tuition and increasing competition from abroad have schools in the UK relying on marketing like never before.

For a higher education system that has hummed along since the 12th century, aggressive marketing was something other industries had to worry about. But that is changing, says Britain’s William Annandale, and he offers five predictions for the future of higher education marketing that may have relevance for those of us in the colonies:

Differentiate or die. “All HEIs [higher education institutions, as they're known in the UK] need to think clearly about their proposition and how they differentiate themselves. Importantly, this should be addressed from the perspective of target audiences: ...

Continue Reading
9
DEC
0

Categories: Change, College Recruiting, Communication, CRM, Marketing

Going mobile in higher ed

Posted by:

Colleges consider a variety of communication channels important to recruiting best-fit students — and many would say mobile should be in the mix too.

“Given the increasing use of smartphones among the college-aged, this is an excellent time for your admissions staff to familiarize themselves with QR codes and with mobile marketing in general,” says Daniel Fusch of Academic Impressions. To learn more about this, Fusch interviewed web and mobile marketing consultant Bob Johnson about what he thinks campuses could be doing to kick-start their efforts.

QR (Quick Response) codes have become a popular choice for colleges and universities to begin building a mobile presence. Bob Johnson cites an example from Westminster College, which uses QR codes in their view book, leading ...

Continue Reading
18
NOV
0

Categories: College Recruiting, Mobile, Mobile Marketing

And the winners are…

Posted by:

As one of the leading change agents in higher education, Jeff Kallay is always looking for kindred spirits. Especially when it comes time to select winners of the X Award, the annual prize from TargetX that goes to those who did the most to “overthrow dead culture” in college admissions.

Kallay lobbied hard for two of the top private colleges in the South for their innovative approaches to recruitment marketing, and his colleagues at TargetX agreed.

As a result, Saint Leo University in Florida has received the 5th annual X Award in recognition of an institution that has made great strides to overthrow dead culture, the phrase adopted by CEO Brian Wm. Niles to represent the company’s philosophy of modernizing student recruitment.

And ...

Continue Reading
11
NOV
2

Categories: Change, College Recruiting, Marketing, Overthrowing Dead Culture

Relationship building with CRM

Posted by:

Jill Dougherty Cleary is busy. As Director of Marketing and Recruitment for Graduate Arts and Sciences at Saint Joseph’s University, Jill is responsible for generating qualified inquiries and leads for over 40 graduate programs.

“In the course of a day, I may have radio and online campaigns going,” she says. “I may have a niche publication advertising one of our programs.” Add to that monitoring search engines and social media marketing and it would be easy for Jill to get overwhelmed in the noise.

Jill and her colleagues rely on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to help them rise above the media din.

“What the CRM enables us to do is take a more global look at the ...

Continue Reading
21
OCT
0

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Graduate Recruiting, Marketing

In pursuit of the best-fit student

Posted by:

Numbers no longer have the same appeal for admissions officers at the University of Tennessee. They’re moving away from the SAT, ACT and grade-point average in favor of a more complete view of their prospective students, according to reporter Joan Garrett.

It’s a familiar goal among the nation’s colleges — go beyond test scores and other statistics to get a fuller picture of a prospect to help determine if he or she will be a best-fit student. Increasingly, Facebook and other social networks are serving as allies in the search.

The number of admissions offices using Facebook to learn more about an applicant has quadrupled in the past year, reports Garrett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. While schools are sensitive to ...

Continue Reading
7
OCT
0

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking

Is branding the solution?

Posted by:

Vince Lombardi would begin practice each spring by lifting a football and, with deep resonance, announce, “Men, this is a football.”

To winning teams, the fundamentals are etched in stone; they make up the DNA of every player. When it comes to enrollment, many colleges and universities have lost sight of the fundamentals.

Over the years, I’ve helped build the importance of “institutional branding” as it became a taskmaster, dictating to all who follow. Many say that branded messaging is the cornerstone for enrollment success and the engine driving the perception of institutional significance.

After more than two decades of creating institutional brands, my experience has proven otherwise.

Institutional branding should begin to form after the fundamentals have been drilled into the team. When ...

Continue Reading
16
SEP
1

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, College Recruiting, NACAC, Uncategorized

Social media marketing IQ

Posted by:

Getting more and more excited about marketing your school via social networking? That’s great, says interactive marketer Heidi Cohen, but first you need to check your social media marketing IQ.

“Here are 30 questions,” she writes in a recent ClickZ article, “that will help you assess where your organization is in terms of social media marketing maturity and where you may need to improve effectiveness.”

Cohen divides her questions into such categories as goals, strategies, content, metrics, budget — and the all-important “listening” factor. Included among the 30 are:

- Do you have brand monitoring and/or other analytics in place? These can range from professional social media monitoring to free options such as Google Alerts and Twitter Search.

- If you are listening as ...

Continue Reading
9
SEP
2

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Social Media, Social Networking

An important population

Posted by:

Trends within corporate marketing and media often foreshadow what’s to come in higher education. A great supplemental piece provided by Advertising Age dedicated to a hefty slice of the American population holds great value for the corporate world and higher education too.

The eighth annual Hispanic Fact Pack was developed as a guide to Hispanic marketing and media in the United States — keeping advertisers and marketers up to speed on a population that Laurel Wentz of AdAge calls “the future of America.”

While some sections of the Fact Pack may not be of immediate relevance to some college admissions professionals — notice the steady increase in advertiser spending to this key population as well as their language preferences when buying from ...

Continue Reading
12
AUG
0

Categories: College Recruiting, Misc., Research, Uncategorized

Campus tours are important, why?

Posted by:

News reporters seem fascinated by the campus visit — sometimes because their own kids are in the middle of the whirlwind process and sometimes out of journalistic curiosity. “Why so much attention to such a low-tech endeavor?” asks the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff Gammage.

As many reporters have done in recent years, Gammage ended up interviewing Trent Gilbert, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the impact of the in-person experience on student recruiting.

“I get that for students or parents who are going to spend $30,000 to $50,000 a year, it’s crucial to see the place before making a final decision,” Gammage said to TargetX’s Chief eXperience Officer. “I’m less clear on why it’s important for colleges to stage a good tour.”

After ...

Continue Reading
5
AUG
0

Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting

Persuading the parents

Posted by:

Beware the parents, says popular thought leader Jeff Kallay. They’ve morphed from the relatively benign helicopters to more savage stealth bombers, and you’d better be prepared to make a good case for why they should pay all that money to send their kids to your school.

Today’s college-bound students are the offspring of Generation Xers, who are more cynical, skeptical and stealthy than the parents of your previous classes. So forget the hype, be authentic, demonstrate your return-on-investment, said Kallay in a rousing conclusion to TargetX’s Xpert Summit — the company’s annual event for users of its technology and consulting services.

Kallay’s concluding keynote was not the first time many of the attendees thought about parents during the two-day conference. In fact, ...

Continue Reading
15
JUL
2

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication Plans, CRM, Email Recruiting, Generations, Millennials, Parents, Xpert Summit

The reliability of the cloud

Posted by:

While developing a new course for the TargetX Education & Training Center (ETC), I realized that some of the material I needed echoed research I had conducted over a decade ago.

In an attempt to hunt down my source material, I searched through some old paper files, only to come up shorthanded.  I then turned to sorting through CDs.  Nothing.  It finally occurred to me (as a desperate last resort) that I may have saved the file in an email account that I have not used for years.

Amazingly, my log-in attempt worked (thank you, Yahoo) and I quickly found myself overwhelmed by a number of old email folders saved like a frozen time capsule — in the cloud.

There is a lot ...

Continue Reading
8
JUL
1

Categories: Cloud, Cloud Computing, College Recruiting

Don't forget to test

Posted by:

Email marketing is so economical, it can make us lazy. Many marketers who work hard at testing their direct mail so they can roll out the best offer, headline or creative, don’t bother to do the same with their email.

“Email marketers all too frequently ignore years of direct marketing lessons,” says Jared Blank, an analyst at JupiterResearch. “They won’t or can’t or don’t test aspects of their email messages. They think, ‘Email is so inexpensive, why bother testing?’”

The answer, says Blank, is that email carries a different kind of cost when it is not as relevant or effective as it could be. “Email is very expensive when its irrelevance drives prospects away. Or when recipients delete your message at first ...

Continue Reading
24
JUN
0

Categories: College Recruiting, Email, Email Recruiting

Measuring online sentiment

Posted by:

One of the newest marketing challenges is keeping up with your school’s “online chatter” — that is, how your students, prospective students, parents of students and other key groups are treating you on the social web.

“Monitoring and responding to online chatter is becoming more important as customers take to the Internet to voice praise and complaints,” says Sandra Fathi, president of public relations and social media firm Affect. “Today, for almost any company, online sentiment is absolutely critical. It affects their sales, it affects their employee morale, and it definitely affects their customer and prospect base.”

With the nearly religious devotion that young people have for their favorite social networking sites, you know they’re saying a lot about you online — ...

Continue Reading
10
JUN
0

Categories: Cloud Computing, College Recruiting, CRM, Social Media, Social Networking

Eliminating the phone relay

Posted by:

Mobile access to the Internet (and in particular, to Customer Relationship Management — CRM) has expanded significantly over the last decade. According to a recent Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast, “Last year’s mobile data traffic was three times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.”

And those numbers are only expected to rise. Cisco’s VNI forecast goes on to predict that by 2015, “There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users” and, most shockingly, “There are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they do not have electricity at home.”

With Internet accessibility reaching beyond even the power-grid itself, colleges and universities are faced with a tremendous opportunity: Embracing mobility allows higher education to ...

Continue Reading
27
MAY
1

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Data, Mobile

Irresistible subject lines

Posted by:

For level of scrutiny and intensity of debate, there are few marketing topics that generate as much interest as email subject lines.

Do a quick Google search and you’ll have your choice of over 6 million references — advising you to keep your subject line to 45 characters or less…or be purposefully vague because that intrigues people…or ask a question since that’s sure to draw your reader in. Or not.

A recent subject-line advice column questions conventional wisdom that shorter is better, and backs up the claim with some research results.

Brad Bortone, an editor with online publisher MarketingSherpa, posted an entry to the Marketing Experiments Blog. He reminds readers that most people aren’t looking for a reason to respond to your email; ...

Continue Reading
20
MAY
0

Categories: College Recruiting, Email, Email Recruiting, Subject Lines

Trust the Cloud

Posted by:

As a child, I thought that the people I saw on TV were actually inside my parents’ TV and that the musicians I heard on the radio were actually inside the radio. And why not? When you’re three years old, Occam’s Razor is rule number 1: the simplest solution must be the right one.

I now see similar behavior in my own daughter. We regularly video chat with my sister, who lives out of town. Each time we chat, my daughter inevitably looks behind the thin laptop screen, trying to connect the image on the screen with the reality of our dining room. I imagine she’s thinking, “Ok, I see her from here, but where IS she?”

Recently, a lot of folks ...

Continue Reading
13
MAY
0

Categories: Cloud Computing, College Recruiting, Data

Making email mobile

Posted by:

If you’re like most marketers, you work hard to understand good email design. Then everything changes.

A few years ago, email design needed to adjust to the increasing use of preview panes and to images being blocked by default, says marketing researcher Chad White. Now you have to adjust again — to the wave of HTML-friendly smartphones and the exploding popularity of tablet computers.

“Sales of smartphones that render HTML email well are booming thanks to the iPhone and a mega-slew of Android-powered phones,” he writes in MediaPost’s Email Insider. And contrary to the common belief that email readership is languishing, these smartphones are driving increased use of email — especially among teens.

White offers several recommendations for adjusting your email design to ...

Continue Reading
6
MAY
0

Categories: College Recruiting, Email Recruiting, Facebook, Millennial Generation, Mobile Marketing

Helicopter Grandparents

Posted by:

If you’re still hosting an event called “Parents Weekend,” you’re behind the times. The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson suggests you recognize a growing force in the college-choice process: Grandparents.

Increasingly, admissions staff at Marymount University are finding themselves entertaining grandparents who aren’t up for the walking tours of campus, writes Johnson in her higher ed blog.

“I have never seen so many grandmothers,” said Michael Canfield, director of admissions at the Virginia school. “In many families, higher education has become a core value, so the families are congregating around it.”

What’s happening at Marymount reflects a trend that is prompting many campuses to change “Parents Weekend” to “Family Weekend,” writes Johnson, whose coverage of higher education for the Post includes frequent contributions to ...

Continue Reading
15
APR
0

Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting, Free on Friday Webcasts, Generations, Parents

College for colleges

Posted by:

There’s a good chance you’ve heard some of them present at a conference or workshop on student recruiting. And if you have, you probably noticed the room was packed and the energy level high.

Adrienne Bartlett noticed, especially when people approached her after her sessions and remarked that she and her colleagues at TargetX consistently give the most informative and entertaining presentations. She began to realize that TargetX is viewed as more than a technology provider, more than a source of admissions consulting. “First and foremost, we’re educators,” she says. “People rely on us for our industry expertise — our webcasts, weekly tips and trends, workshops, conference presentations.

“All of that expertise goes into our products and services, of course, but it ...

Continue Reading
1
APR
0

Categories: College Recruiting, Email Recruiting, Generations

Page 1 of 9 12345...»