Archive for 'Storytelling'

A student’s perspective

Posted by: Andrew Kapel

Applying to college has been a big part of my life for the past year and a half. It is an extremely important process for someone my age, looking ahead to where I’ll spend the next four years. But it’s definitely a process that could use some work! Here are some of the things I experienced, that I thought might be valuable to share with you.

I think simplifying applications would be beneficial to all colleges (and helpful to the students who are applying). Sometimes, when completing applications, I felt like the information that was being asked of me was a little too personal.

The fees associated with certain schools’ applications was ...

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Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting, Communication, Cost, Experience, Storytelling, Student Recruiting, Student Search

Let’s get visual

Posted by: Annemarie Nagle

I consider myself a “visual” learner. Draw out my thoughts on a whiteboard, watch a video tutorial, type out my weekly tasks in Evernote. So I wasn’t surprised to see Fast Company’s article “Fast Talk: The Visual Shift” — where industry experts were asked to weigh in on how businesses can adapt to our image-obsessed culture.

Experts from retail, news, government and more shared tips on how to infuse more imagery in your user and online experience, and they had some valid points that translated well to higher ed.

The Creative Visionary: Joe Stewart, partner and global creative director at Huge
“Consumers expect the same level of quality and service from digital that they would get in a store,” says ...

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Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Experience, Marketing, Online Experiences, Social Media, Storytelling, Student Recruiting

Render authenticity (Part 2)

Posted by: Emily Welsh

In 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

Brand shifts and yield in 2013

Posted by: Annemarie Nagle

Coming back from holiday break means that it’s time to kick into high gear your accepted student communications, yield events and many conversations with students and parents. It’s the time of year where the conversation shifts and families are getting serious about where they might go to school in the fall. It’s important for admissions (and the rest of campus) to start thinking about what message you want to be sending to those students in order to help them make a final decision.

My colleague Jeff Kallay passed along an article before the holidays, “A Brand Shift for 2013: From Aspiration to Inspiration” by Alan Snitow. It’s an interesting concept that I thought was worth holding onto and sharing at ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Change, College Recruiting, Communication, Communication Plans, Marketing, Storytelling, Student Recruiting, Student Yield, Yield

Real stories of change

Posted by: Emily Welsh

Each month, the TargetX Campus Visit Consulting team has been featuring stories of change from current clients, tips we have learned on campus and/or trends we have seen that impact higher education.

These posts (the “Three T’s: Talks, Tips and Trends”) are designed to illustrate that change takes time and change faces challenges. Campus visit tips can take all forms and the trends we see in our everyday lives impact the visit and the students we are trying to recruit.

When you read the posts, we want you to think about the experiences you have had that shaped the way you approach recruiting students at your school.

This month, Jennifer McLendon of the University of North Texas talks about how ...

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Categories: Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Campus Visit Talk, Campus Visit Three T's, Change, Storytelling, Student Workers

Campus Visit Talk: Jennifer McLendon and University of North Texas

Posted by: Emily Welsh

Each month the Experience Team from TargetX will share with you a Campus Visit Tip or 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 “Talk”.

This month’s featured Talk is with:
Jennifer McLendon
Visitor Experience Manager
University of North Texas, Campus Visit Client since 2008

Q: How did you work to create change within your campus visit?

I’ve been the Visitor Experience Manager for my alma mater, the University of North Texas, for over 11 years now. During that ...

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Categories: Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Campus Visit Talk, Campus Visit Three T's, Campus Visit Tip, Campus Visit Trend, Change, Storytelling, Student Workers, Uncategorized

Campus Visit Tip: Reveal Outcomes

Posted by: Trent Gilbert

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 Talk: Jodi Bailey and Alfred University

Posted by: Emily Welsh

Welcome to the first of a series of posts related to the Campus Visit! 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.

Recognizing that so many of us learn from the stories of others, we want to give you a glimpse inside the experiences of our clients. Each month we will profile one of our campus visit clients with the hopes that you can learn from them and ...

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Categories: Blogs, Blogs/Diaries, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Change, Experience, Storytelling, Student Recruiting, Student Yield

Storytelling lessons from Pixar

Posted by: Jim DeSanto

So what do a Pixar storyboard artist (Emma Coats), a songwriter (me), and a marketing or recruiting professional (you) have in common?

We are all trying to tell our authentic story in a way that our audience finds interesting.

Writer Cyriaque Lamar offers “The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar” — compiled by Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist for the CGI-focused movie studio who is now pursuing life as a film director.

This article has some great advice for anyone who is going to write anything… ever.

Here are my three favorite rules from the article:

#2 “You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Storytelling, Uncategorized

Ch-Check it out

Posted by: Annemarie Nagle

Yes, that’s a Beastie Boys song title. While some may scoff at the idea of learning something from three guys who go by Mike D, MCA and Ad-Rock — their 25-year career, international fan base and 2012 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is certainly no joke. And higher ed would be smart to listen up — there are serious lessons to be learned from this Brooklyn rap trio.

“The Beastie Boys Guide to Brand Storytelling” by Kimberly Bordonaro identifies seven elements that explain why their loyal following over the years didn’t happen because they got lucky. It happened through a unique blend of what the kids today would call “sick” rhymes, funky fresh beats, and for ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Marketing, Storytelling

10 Lessons from Starbucks

Posted by: Jeff Kallay

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

Building better tour guides

Posted by: Ray Ulmer

Be careful, warns U.S. News reporter Jackie Mantey to college-bound students, your campus tours may be led by guides who “decided pointing at landmarks would be a better job than flipping burgers for food services” and who rely on “a word-for-word recitation of the school’s brochure.”

As news media have increasingly focused on the critical role of campus visits in the college selection process, student guides who lead the tours have gotten a lot of press — and not all of it good.

“There seems to be this assumption that tour guides are paid to say exactly what the schools want,” says campus visit expert Emily Welsh. “Parents especially seem surprised that many student guides are volunteers and their schools are not ...

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Categories: Campus Visit Experiences, College Recruiting, Free on Friday Webcasts, Storytelling

Forget Facebook, if you want to yield students you should be on YouTube

Posted by: Jeff Kallay

Any dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xer can tell you that the first video MTV played when it launched on August 8, 1981 was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. Not as many can tell you the second video played on MTV. Do you know?

Video facts you need to know:
-43% of current prime time internet traffic is real time entertainment ( 12.2.2010)
-Netflix streaming accounts for 20% of internet traffic on any given evening (BusinessWeek 12.2.2010)
-Cisco predicts that by 2013 video will be 90% of consumer internet traffic (TechCrunch 7.9.2009)
-YouTube is a top “search engine” accounting for 28% of Google searches (Google 1.31.2011)
-There are 500 million monthly YouTube ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, College Recruiting, Communication, Communication Plans, Did You Know?, Facebook, Free on Friday Webcasts, Social Media, Social Networking, Storytelling, Student Yield, Videos, Web Traffic, Webcast, Your Website

Make a connection

Posted by: Annemarie Nagle

Will your yield activities include the admissions team presenting to groups of accepted students this spring? If so, create a presentation that doesn’t just inform students, but connects them to your institution.

Jon Thomas’ blog post “The Art of Storytelling in Presentations — Connecting” discusses the importance of telling a story that resonates with the listener.

“Stories are different from facts, figures and features. They connect us,” says Thomas. “They form a bond between audience and storyteller that can actually be felt. That connection can be immensely powerful and most importantly — memorable.”

Building great yield activities happens over time. Take a step towards a more successful, effective admissions presentation now and help students remember what it is that makes your college the ...

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Categories: Storytelling, Yield

Waiting for the Dead Poets Society Moment

Posted by: Trent Gilbert

They come in all different sizes and all different levels of content. Some give a specific route, others just a mandate on what to show. Some give facts and figures (there are 1,314,649 books in the library), others read like a Hollywood script. I am talking about the beloved tour guide training manual.

I wonder what the norm is for this manual?

After searching high and low, and talking to several schools, I have found one that is challenging the norm: Alfred University. They aren’t even calling it a manual, but rather a Reference Guide. Only a few pages long, it has information for the guides to reference – expectations, the tour route, a brief history of the buildings, list ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience, Storytelling, Student Workers

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

Posted by: Jeff Kallay

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

XpertTip No. 159: Storytime continued…

Posted by: Adrienne Hamson

Did you read the Recruitment Minute last Friday?

In case you missed it, it was all about the power of storytelling and why it’s the most effective way to communicate what’s truly authentic about your school.

To take it a step further, telling stories is a great way to stave off summer melt and keep prospects and their families engaged in the next few weeks.

How much does your content strategy revolve around letting current students, faculty and staff tell the real stories of your institution?

These “snacks” of information make the perfect subject matter for web pages, social networks, microsites, student portals and profiles (and we know email is the best way to drive folks there so they can keep the conversations ...

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Categories: Storytelling, Student Yield

Appeal on an emotional level

Posted by: Annemarie Nagle

Colleges and universities need to appeal to prospects on an emotional level through storytelling and the campus experience to engage best-fit students.

The recession has made consumers think differently about how they shop, buy and — in higher education — choose a college. Adweek Research writer Mark Dolliver states, consumers want good value for their money; while rational sales pitches and practical benefits have ruled the school of thought for decades, a shift is necessary to more emotional appeals. The same is true for higher education.

Dolliver reviews the results from a survey of client-side marketers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and they reveal that emotional benefits should be more balanced with the rational/functional benefits. Marketers see the need for ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience, Research, Storytelling

A Makeover in California

Posted by: Trent Gilbert

No, I am not going to talk about the latest spa treatment in Hollywood, or am I going to share with you who met who at the club in Santa Monica. I will leave hardcore reporting like that for all those magazines you find at the grocery store check-out.

I want to share with you an experience from my travel through the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) last week. This is an airport that I have been in at least a hundred times in my life. This trip through LAX was different, though. Upon landing at LAX, I was caught off guard by a change of the flow of traffic since my last visit. I was inquisitive about the change. Then I ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Campus Visit, Campus Visit Experiences, Experience, Storytelling

A pause to refresh

Posted by: Jeff Kallay

Do you know about TED? TED’s mission is to give knowledge-seekers around the globe direct access to the world’s greatest thinkers and teachers. And they do! TED charges the most fascinating people to give the talk of their lives in 18ish minutes.

Here’s how a New York Times Magazine writer describes Ted:

“Oh why oh why have I been bingeing on TED talks again? I promised myself I would quit watching the ecstatic series of head-rush disquisitions, available online, from violinists, political prisoners, brain scientists, novelists and Bill Clinton. But I can’t. Each hortatory TED talk starts with a bang and keeps banging till it explodes in fireworks. How can I shut it off? The speakers seem fevered, possessed, Pentecostal. ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Experience, Storytelling

XpertTip No. 131: Don't shoot the messenger

Posted by: Adrienne Hamson

You know how this time of year goes — before you can even put your Halloween costume away, department stores will be all decked-out for the holidays and radio stations will be spinning The Waitresses 24-7.*

But while the premature holiday push can be frustrating, it does remind us that the end of the year is coming on fast.

So today I’d like to remind you to start making plans for any special holiday campaigns you’d like to execute in the next few weeks — especially if they involve creative services.

I know it’s early, but you’ll need the time to brainstorm, refine your concepts and get the right people involved (before it’s too late).

Here are a few ideas to help kick your ...

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Categories: Communication Plans, Email Campaign Ideas, Storytelling

Good storytelling

Posted by: Ray Ulmer

So much of the marketing discussion these days is about technology, says entertainment executive Corey Torrence. Should we be on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or MySpace? Can we take advantage of text messaging? What can we do with the iPhone?

“Technology is quickly changing the way the game is played,” he acknowledges in a recent post on iMedia Connection. But the fundamentals of the game are no different than when Homer scratched out the Odyssey on papyrus scrolls.

Successful marketing is all about good storytelling.

“Concentrate on storyline-rich content that resonates with your audience,” says Torrence, who is CEO of Animax Entertainment. “The simplest way to gather an audience — dating back to ancient times — is good storytelling.”

So think of technology tools as ...

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Categories: Storytelling

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