Archive for 'CRM'

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Avoiding data paralysis

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When I conjure up characteristics of a typical admissions professional, I immediately think of words like friendly, knowledgeable, professional, fun-loving (remembering NACAC 2011). My first thoughts aren’t about leveraging financial aid, predictive modeling or data integrity.

Being responsible for data can be a scary thought, even to those “techie” people in admissions who claim to love it. One hazard that CRM expert Mark Miller warns about is data paralysis. Sometimes knowing that all the data is out there waiting to be put to good use can be enough to stop you in your tracks. So, let’s talk baby steps.

Miller offers three suggestions for bringing things under control:

1. Favor smart data over big data. What data ...

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17
FEB
0

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, CRM, Data, Uncategorized

Marketing is the future

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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: ...

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9
DEC
0

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

Relationship building with CRM

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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 ...

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21
OCT
0

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Graduate Recruiting, Marketing

In pursuit of the best-fit student

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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 ...

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7
OCT
0

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

The Pillars of Technology

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Two pillars stand tall in the shifting landscape of recruitment technology: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Social Media.  Providing real-time access to data, CRM solutions offer in-depth information on every touch-point with a student; Social Media allows admissions staff to meet students where they are, delivering (and receiving) multimedia messages across a variety of channels.

In many cases, however, both solutions face solely outward, addressing the relationship between recruiters and prospects, but ignoring the relationship of recruiters to each other.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, confronts this chasm in a recent Forbes magazine article (the magazine gives Benioff the top spot in an issue focused on innovators in business).  In the accompanying article by Victoria Barret, Benioff effuses about Chatter — “software ...

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19
AUG
0

Categories: Cloud, Cloud Computing, CRM, Social Media, Uncategorized

Persuading the parents

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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, ...

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15
JUL
2

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

Measuring online sentiment

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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 — ...

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10
JUN
0

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

Eliminating the phone relay

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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 ...

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27
MAY
1

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Data, Mobile