TargetX: Helping colleges recruit
By Mike Armstrong, Business Columnist / Philadelphia Inquirer
Brian Niles runs a small business that’s striving to become a big firm on campus.
TargetX Inc., of Conshohocken, started out helping colleges and universities use e-mail marketing in the late ’90s, when dial-up Internet service was the norm.
Now, tens of thousands of high school students still get e-mail messages with the TargetX logo at the bottom, but the company does far more to help institutions keep track of prospects throughout the college-search process.
Anyone with a son or daughter considering colleges soon sees familiar patterns. The brochures all look the same. The presentations by recruiters at open houses often follow similar scripts.
“I don’t think many colleges are doing themselves a good service here. They’re not differentiating themselves enough in their marketplace,” Niles said.
At first glance, it may not seem as if the nation’s 4,400 colleges have much of a problem. Even as tuition costs continue to rise faster than inflation, demand for a college education remains high. A recent report by the Arlington, Va.-based National Association for College Admission Counseling showed a large majority of colleges, 73 percent, reported a rise in applications for fall 2010 compared with fall 2009.
But that same report shows what keeps college recruiters awake at night. After growing steadily for more than a decade, the number of high school graduates in the United States peaked at 3.33 million in the 2008-09 school year. The decline is expected to continue through 2014-15 and remain below that 2009 level through 2021.
“The wonderful thing about this industry: You know 18 years ahead of time what’s going to happen,” Niles said.
It’s as competitive for students trying to get into their college of choice as it is for universities battling one another to find, entice, and admit students they select.
Niles knows all about that competition: In the late 1990s, he was working in enrollment and marketing at La Salle University, trying to figure out a better way to reach prospective M.B.A. students. Direct mail wasn’t cutting it, so he began collecting e-mail addresses from open houses with an idea toward sending personalized messages.
In 1998, Niles talked over his idea with Mike Crusi, a college friend working in the area as an engineer. What they came up with is the now-common strategy of e-mail marketing that fills in-boxes every day.
By 2000, with the dot-com sector in full bubble, Niles and Crusi left their jobs to make a go of the company they named TargetX and housed in an attic in Wyncote.
Over the years, TargetX has grown organically, having bootstrapped its way without outside institutional investment. It now employs 25 people – four in Atlanta and the rest in sleek offices in a postindustrial Conshohocken office park home to other companies with Web-based business strategies.
With annual sales of about $5 million and about 400 higher-education clients, TargetX remains a small business competing with companies typically much larger. Niles considers 11 companies to be competitors for its services, including Cincinnati-based Hobsons Inc., which acquired rival Intelliworks in December.
In his bio on TargetX’s website, the 43-year-old Niles, who grew up in Malvern, is as apt to quote Ben Franklin (“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished”) as cite Lloyd Dobler, a character from the 1989 movie Say Anything (“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career”).
Niles self-published a 2010 book called Overthrowing Dead Culture, aimed at shaking up how colleges recruit, and he continues to push admissions offices to change with the times.
And he said he believed the times were calling for colleges to use a “customer relationship management” system, or CRM. It is a technology widely used by businesses of all sizes to help their salespeople stay in close contact with clients and generate more sales.
As Niles explained, the customer for higher ed is a prospective student, and the sale is a student who has accepted an offer of admission.
Read more about what TargetX clients are doing on their campuses.
CRM had made few inroads in higher ed until the recent recession created new cost pressures on colleges. Such systems must be integrated into the massive enterprise-resource-planning systems that run many colleges and universities, supplied by big vendors, including Wayne-based SunGard Data Systems Inc.’s former Higher Education business, which merged with Fairfax, Va.-based Datatel Inc. last year.
TargetX built its Student Recruitment Manager system after CRM giant Salesforce.com Inc. opened up its technology platform to software developers in 2007. The cloud-based system manages e-mail communication, online chats, and event management, including campus tours and open houses.
It also helps colleges track how their advertising and promotion dollars are being spent on publications, websites, and social networks and determine the effectiveness of each.
Among the institutions using TargetX’s Student Recruitment Manager (SRM) system are St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia; Kettering University in Flint, Mich.; and La Salle.
Michael Payne, La Salle’s assistant vice president for enrollment services, said that the university was in its third year of using TargetX’s CRM tool and that it had increased the efficiency of recruiting and enrollment operations.
“It’s a very powerful tool, and I think we’re only scratching the surface with it,” he said.
One way La Salle used the system was to centralize the admissions process for 20 programs it has in graduate and adult education. Previously, each program operated almost independently and required documents to be moved from office to office, Payne said.
Now, he said, a student application record is entered into the TargetX SRM, and all paper documents related to that applicant are scanned in, attached to the electronic record, and available to the graduate director who ultimately makes the decision on admission.
That’s the kind of problem TargetX tries to solve, Niles said: Making it possible for admissions officers to stop pushing paper around and get back to the business of recruiting students.
One sign TargetX is onto something with its SRM system: The company is expected to announce this week that it will become the exclusive CRM for Jenzabar Inc., a Boston company with more than 600 clients for its enterprise-resource-planning system in the higher-ed sector.