iThink Blog

The days are gone when schools could place syrupy, self-serving quotes in the mouths of students and expect prospects to be impressed. Evidence of that can be seen in the growing number of student diaries on college websites.

What separates these journals from the millions of student blogs floating in cyberspace, reports the Christian Science Monitor, is that they are university sponsored and featured prominently on a school’s admissions pages.

“It’s a trend,” says Bucknell University’s Jim Shaynak, “and more and more institutions are finding the need to present their schools not just through marketing materials, but also by showing real student experiences.”

Students typically have carte blanche, writes education reporter Lisa Leigh Connors in Tuesday’s edition. Their journals are posted unedited ...

Student recruiting isn’t brain surgery, you know. It’s more complicated and stressful than that.

Listening to a room full of top admissions officers last week provided a glimpse of the rapidly changing world of student recruiting and the challenges faced by institutions of all sizes and shapes.

The Client Advisory Board of interactive recruiting firm TargetX met in Philadelphia and spent some time looking at communications tools and trends. Among the observations:

- More than half have a communications plan for high school sophomores — or younger.
- Almost all of them use the email addresses that come with Search lists to reach prospects electronically.
- Many have reduced their postal mailings, consistent with the trend to decrease printing but ...

Georgia bureaucrats have managed to do what many admissions officers can only dream about: Create a college website that is easy to use, full of relevant information, visually consistent and highly interactive.

This website is for the college-bound, and Georgia’s governor unveiled it at a news conference earlier this week. State officials call it a one-stop cybershop for teenagers trying to decide where to go to college, how to get in and how to pay for it.

Creators of the site seem to understand the Millennial generation better than many of the colleges and universities trying to recruit them.

For example, Millennials expect to get to the information they’re seeking quickly and easily. If they can’t, they’re gone in 60 seconds, according ...

There are no state lines on the electronic superhighway. So you can expect an escalating online battle for students among the nation’s public universities, according to a recent New York Times article.

“A new era of student poaching is dawning across the land,” writes NYT reporter Greg Winter in last Saturday’s edition. “Public universities are plunging into what private colleges have already mastered: scouring the nation in search of students.”

Winter points to shrinking pools of high school students that are prompting some state universities to look hard at regions rich in college-bound Millennials. For example, Vermont and Alabama are trying to lure students from Florida and Texas.

The demographics are forcing public universities to be as aggressive and ...

“Where Are the Men?” screams the headline from Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune. Reporter Laura Fasbach details the growing gender imbalance on the nation’s campuses and reports that colleges are now courting males like never before.

“Admissions officers say they can’t stand idly by and watch the schools become mostly female bastions,” she writes, “so colleges are taking steps to reverse the trend by reaching out to high school boys through marketing.”

The role of Internet marketing is critical. After all, males have traditionally spent more time online than their female counterparts. So what is the best way to take advantage of interactive communication?

A new study offers some answers. Stanford University’s Center for the Quantitative Study of Society provides insight into the ...

The blinding speed and addicting informality of email is creating a typographical nightmare, says Karen Gedney, an award-winning copywriter.

She is seeing a stunning number of typos and other mistakes in promotional emails, she writes in a recent ClickZ article. “Sometimes they’re right in the subject line,” she adds with exasperation.

To prevent errors in your emails to students, parents, counselors and other key audiences, she suggests you:

• Put email through the same proofreading process as your printed materials.
• Send a test message to yourself and anyone else involved in the approval process.
• Check how the email looks with different email clients, like AOL, Yahoo and EarthLink.
• Print out the email to make sure all copy is legible.
• Read once for meaning and once for typos.
• Pretend ...

A rite of passage for many college-bound students is fading into history. The daily dash to the mailbox to see if they’ve received a thick or thin envelope is being replaced by the click of a mouse and the noncommittal “You’ve got mail.”

More and more colleges are using email or the web to notify applicants of their acceptance or rejection, reports the National Education Association’s NEA Today magazine.

“Perhaps as many as one-third of colleges and universities currently notify students of their status by email or secure websites,” estimates Barmak Nassirian, an official with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO).

Many schools find the approach too impersonal for communicating information of such consequence, the magazine reports. “But ...

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2004 may become the recruiter’s tool of the year for 2005. The blog is going to be big.

Short for weblog, a blog is an online journal that is frequently updated and generally informal in style. It features comments and reflections of the writer, invites feedback from the reader, and often includes links to other websites.

“Think of it as an always-on e-newsletter,” advises Debbie Weil, publisher of WordBiz Report and a huge advocate of blogging. And think of what it can mean as a way to communicate with prospective students.

Spring Arbor University has already thought of it, taking a leadership position in the quickly expanding blogosphere. Spring Arbor invites students to experience “The ...

“Rather than pumping more money into viewbooks, brochures, CD-ROMs, college fairs and high school visits, institutions of higher education should focus on improving their websites,” writes reporter Alana Klein in the current issue of University Business.

The article, headlined “Look to the web to increase recruitment,” includes a sidebar by TargetX CEO Brian Wm Niles. He asks four questions that are key to a successful admissions website:

Is it easy to find you?
Make sure visitors can get to the admissions site with just one click. Ease of navigation is critical. Don’t make them search through layers of website to get answers to their questions on admissions and financial aid.

Do you efficiently answer ...

It’s the urban legend of college marketing: Teenagers laugh at the sight of plain copy, thirsting instead for movement, sound, animation and quick cuts of images at MTV speed. Anything less, so the story goes, and students will see your school as stodgy, unappealing and incapable of preparing them for an electronic world.

Experts have consistently dismissed it as a myth. The most important element of your website and email, they insist, is content. And the most effective form of content is copy.

“Copy is where the rubber meets the road,” writes internationally respected online guru Jeanne Jennings in a recent ClickZ column. “It engages readers and entices them to click a link….I’ve seen fabulous copy in a not-so-great design succeed; ...

Call it the IT plague, says marketer Bryan Eisenberg. “Powerful, intelligent people turn into quivering Jell-O heads around the tech-savvy and oh-so-knowledgeable IT departments.”

It’s particularly debilitating when it strikes enrollment and marketing officers.

“Playing off the technological ineptitude of department heads, IT makes decisions that directly influence customer behavior,” writes the founder of Future Now Inc. in a recent ClickZ article.

“The IT department, resisting change (or perhaps trying to stay within its comfort zone), offers a litany of technical reasons why a plan cannot be implemented. Sometimes, it’ll quietly deliver something different from the original plan.”

If that sounds familiar, protect yourself. Learn some IT basics. Pick up a few books about the systems and software your college uses. Learn about ...

The web is tightening its hold on college recruiting and admissions.

A recent New York Times article cited “overlapping social trends” for the increasing influence of the Internet — the fluency of teenagers in using the web and the competitive frenzy among colleges to recruit students and among students to get into the best colleges.

“As more high school students apply to college, including an estimated 1.7 million in the coming months, navigating the admissions process has become more difficult,” writes Times reporter Anne Field.

“With the average ratio of guidance counselors to students in public schools at 477 to 1 compared with the 250 to 1 recommended by the American School Counselor Association, most students must fend for themselves. Filling that ...

Veteran education reporter Susan Snyder was surprised as she walked through the recent National College Fair in Philadelphia.

Fourteen-year-old Alysha was there, looking for colleges that will prepare her for a career in computer animation. Fifteen-year-old Anthony was there, anxious to get his college search underway.

“High school juniors and seniors aren’t the only ones thinking seriously about college these days,” Snyder wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Younger students said they wanted to start early so they would have enough time to make a good choice.”

That comes as no surprise to GDA Integrated Services. A study by the Connecticut company found that more than 55 percent of college bound students start their search before their junior year.

The message is clear. The ...

It’s a question that nips at the heels of email marketers like a small dog. Should they be using plain text, fancy HTML or rich media for their email broadcasts?

The WebAdvantage.net newsletter recently looked at conflicting research results and concluded there is no clear answer. Plain ASCII text and web-page-like HTML emails have advantages and disadvantages that make it hard to identify a winner, according to the editors.

But there is a winner, says TargetX CEO Brian Wm. Niles. He takes the best qualities of both — the direct, to-the-point appeal of text and the colorful branding of HTML.

By adding a “letterhead” graphic — the school’s logo or logotype, for example — he dresses up the email without detracting from ...

Forget “free.” Don’t “guarantee.” And refrain from references to “adult” programs.

Writing a good email message is hard enough without worrying about filters preventing its delivery because you included too many words favored by spammers. But that’s the challenge today as more and more Internet Service Providers and other gatekeepers attempt to control junk email by using content to block messages.

So here’s a way to see if you’re about to use words or phrases that will increase the likelihood your message gets filtered:

Go to www.SiteSell.com and scroll down the page until you see SpamCheck. This service allows you to send a draft of your email newsletter or message — in HTML or plain-text formats. You can submit it via a ...

I wonder,” asks a cynical Jason O’Connor, “if some people create websites for the sole purpose of tormenting their visitors.”

O’Connor, the president of Oak Web Works, isn’t talking about careless marketers making simple mistakes. He’s referring to people who over-design, over-write and over-hype, thinking they’re creating must-see websites.

Some of his least favorite online experiences:

Animation. “Sites that include showy Flash, animated gifs, or words that fly around are merely annoying to most people these days. They take away from the content and distract the visitors from achieving their goals.”

Heavy Scrolling. “Once I scroll down a full screen’s worth, my eyes start to blur, my head spins and my interest wanes. If a page requires two full ...

Last week’s five email copywriting rules just scratched the surface, according to two of the leading figures in electronic recruiting.

Bob Johnson, the legendary editor of “Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter,” offered one of his favorite tips for writing an effective email message:

“Make the first paragraph a single smashing sentence that builds from the subject line — especially so that people with email readers that allow peeking before opening get the point as quickly as possible…and can’t wait to open and read more.”

Brian Niles, the foremost authority on email recruiting, provided a few of his favorite do’s and don’ts:

• Write it like you say it. We tend to talk in short sentences, using short words. That’s the way your emails should ...

Email has emerged as a powerful communications tool with its own set of copywriting rules. MarketingSherpa’s Kristin Zhivago recently offered five writing tips to increase response:

• Pick a single theme for each email campaign and stick to it. It’s tempting to toss every feature and benefit into an email message, but that overwhelms the reader. So focus on one thing at a time — like financial aid opportunities — and include links to relevant landing pages and forms.
• Keep the copy lively and active. Use lots of verbs. Break up informational paragraphs with bullets.
• Avoid exclamation marks. “They make you look loud and desperate,” Zhivago writes. And they can trigger spam content filters.
• Test your copy against content filters to see which words ...

Hold a conversation with an admissions officer these days and you’re almost certain to hear about branding or Millennials. Maybe both.

MarketingProfs.com tied the two together in a recent article on “Brands, Millennials and Universities.” Writer Joseph Benson covered the benefits of a clear, strong brand and offered some tips on institutional brand building.

Brands are extremely important to the generation born after 1981. They provide reassurance that what Millennials choose will be accepted and embraced by peers, and they simplify complex purchasing decisions — “particularly expensive, life-critical decisions such as choosing a university,” writes Benson.

“A university will not be chosen by a Millennial unless it is a choice,” Benson adds, “and brands create choice.”

The tools for brand building have changed. ...

See if any of these sound familiar:

• At least 40 different versions of its logo are scattered throughout a college’s website.
• On the homepage of another school is a large graphic encouraging visitors to apply online. But when they try, they’re told it’s now too late. No one has thought to remove the graphic.
• A university promotes courses for working professionals, but there is no way to apply for them. The content appears to have been directly translated from print without any thought for how it can be made to work on the web.
• A college has a section about planning the first year. There are three links — one gives a “page not found” error. The next informs visitors that they are ...

If you’re looking for some hard numbers to use in your battle to shift marketing from offline to online, look at these results from North Carolina State University.

Faced with steep budget cuts and increasingly ambitious enrollment goals for its nontraditional programs, marketers at NC State decided to abandon the old ways — TV, radio and print ads. Instead, they launched an all-Internet marketing campaign.

“The results,” according to Nontraditonal Students Report, “were astounding.”

For one-third the cost of advertising in traditional media, the university achieved a 250 percent increase in the number of leads generated. Then for the next semester, marketers increased the use of email broadcasting, reducing overall costs another 30 percent while boosting the number of leads an additional ...

If you’re struggling with the move from offline to online, take heart. So are a lot of the nation’s top direct marketers.

“Moving offline communications to the Internet is a difficult task that few direct marketers do well,” Terry Jukes told the Direct Marketing Association at a conference in Orlando.

“There’s a lot of talk, a lot of information, but very, very few companies that I see are doing it right,” said the CEO of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence.

His comments ring true for many colleges and universities. He gets most frustrated when he sees marketers shifting some efforts to the Internet without knowing what worked in the offline world.

“Unless you truly understand your offlline operations,” he said, ” mistakes will be ...

College admission counselors are entering a world once dominated by high-schoolers: the virtual world of instant messaging.

That’s the conclusion of education writer Jen Haberkorn of the Washington Times. She reports that colleges are discovering the power of IM, which last week’s Email Minute hailed as the fastest growing application on the web.

Boston University counselors are online all day, she writes, fielding questions from prospective students about everything from campus life to the status of their application. “It’s the way they communicate with each other and the best way to communicate with us,” explains BU’s Micha Sabovik.

To NACAC’s Dave Hawkins, the increasing appeal of IM and other interactive tools is a sign that “colleges are realizing that the Internet is ...

AOL gave the online world a jolt this week with news that instant messaging has gone mainstream and is growing faster than anyone imagined.

No longer the plaything of pre-teens, IM is attracting three out of five Internet users, including an amazing 48 percent of respondents age 55 and older.

The key numbers for college recruiters are these: 90 percent of those between the ages of 13 and 21 use one or more IM services, as do 71 percent of those aged 22 to 34.

The message is clear. You should be taking advantage of this enormous communication channel to build a stronger relationship with prospective students.

Set up an instant messaging account, if you haven’t already, then give your IM address to ...