How to Improve Yield with Social Media

Posted by Tammy Young on February 23, 2012

As spring break rolls around it is time to start thinking about our yield activities. I know most of you already have activities in place, but are you using social media to help with your engagement with admitted and deposited students? If not you should be. Here are some quick tips to help you get started with your incoming class.

1) Choose Your Tools

Select your social tool of choice, I like Facebook Groups, include your social site in all of your admissions and orientation program materials. Begin promoting it via your main website, admissions counselors and other staff members. Don’t spend time stressing about the site too much. I don’t know of any students who declined admission because of the college’s social media strategy. The point is to get started and tweak your strategy as you learn.

2) Be Fun!

The 80/20 rule applies: 80% of the time the postings should be fun and casual to engage student and 20% should be institutional information. Too much institutional information will not help engage, and possibly disengage your students.

3) Dedicate a Responder

Use designated responders to help communicate your messages. Find people who are comfortable communicating with student in the social arena. I suggest using staff from all incoming touch points if you can find them, admissions, financial aid, housing, academic advising, orientation, and faculty. The key here is to respond to a posting within 24 hours.

4) Make Friends

Use the site to encourage your admits to meet the incoming class and make friends. Send this message immediately following their acceptance (and if it is too late this year, use the financial aid award packaging notification). You can do this via email and calls to action in your admitted student portal and the sites on your website that incoming students frequently visit.

5) Be Relevant to Students

Create your discussions around common topics that incoming students think about, housing choices, roommates, orientation, etc. Again, the key here is to establish your social site as a hub of activity and resource for students looking for campus engagement. Promote off-line events to create face to face relationships.

6) Have Student’s Facilitate

Recruit current students to help facilitate the discussions. It is best not to have staff dominate the discussions. Empower your students to drive the comments and interactions. View this as a social opportunity not just another communication channel. Let your students try to talk to each other first and answer each other’s questions. My rule of thumb is to try and wait 24 hours before jumping in with official information. By allowing the students to answer, you are enabling them to bond and make friends.

I hope these few tips help you create a casual and comfortable online community engagement for your students. Best wishes for a successful Class of 2016 and begin working on 2017!

[INFOGRAPHIC] Why Higher Education Can’t Ignore G+

Posted by Talmadge Boyd on February 21, 2012

Plugging the Holes in Your Admission Funnel

Posted by Amanda Randolph on February 16, 2012

As enrollment leaders are we plugging our own admission funnel? College admissions offices spend generous human capital and resource investment to aggressively recruit students with the full gamut of integrated print and social marketing.

But when it comes to the final step of showing students overall affordability, the gloss turns flat. Instead of sending out high quality financial aid materials, many schools are using the big bertha printer down the hall to churn out award packets stuffed with random pamphlets of supplemental regulations and fine print. To make it fancy, you can throw it on colored paper. What does a family do when they receive this discombobulated mess requesting tax information? They probably put it right where all of their other hard to understand personal financial statements go, in a pile, on the counter, to quickly be covered by tomorrow’s mail.

Well then, why are some financial aid administrators sending out information in such a fashion? I thought that my financial aid office had nice wraps? Well, for the most part, financial aid wraps used to be printed by lenders and provided to the college free of charge. These full color 8 ½” by 11”, four page wraps, matched the college marketing materials and made it easy for the family to understand the financial aid process.

Then came the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), with formal July 1, 2010 enforcement, which cracked down hard lenders [HEOA § 487(a)(250)]. Cases where college and university officials were engaged in financial aid fraud through receiving vacations and even lender stocks in trade for placing the lender on the college’s preferred lender list gave rise to the issue at the federal level. These actions brought lender incentives for colleges to a halt. Lenders today are wary of even giving colleges pens or sticky notes for fear or providing illegal incentives.

As a former financial aid director, I completely understand the need for stronger regulation over fraudulent lending practices—but where did these increased regulations leave financial aid offices? Especially for small colleges, it left the financial aid office without a printing budget and back to the aforementioned, big bertha printer with colored paper. Consider the return on investment of your enrollment marketing before you brush off financial aid to just forms and regulations. My charge to you is this: unplug your admissions funnel by marketing to the student completely through the enrollment process—from inquiry to enrollment.

3 Ways to Meet Your Transfer Student Enrollment Goals

Posted by MichelleLockhart on February 14, 2012

Do you want to recruit more transfer students? Whether you are looking for new ideas or reworking your current recruitment plans, consider these three strategies. Not only will they help you meet your goals but they can also provide some great professional development opportunities for staff along the way.

Purchase transfer student names. Phi Theta Kappa, known to community college students everywhere as PTK, sells transfer student lists. Better yet, PTK is an honor society for two year colleges so you will connect with top students. The website www.CollegeFish.org is your key to choosing list purchases based on your own criteria. You can also purchase a list of PTK Advisors and their contact information each year so that you can keep them up to date on your transfer information.

In addition to the College Fish service, PTK hosts regional and national state conferences that allow college sponsors and recruiters. Check out www.ptk.org for more information. This is a great place to share your PTK scholarship and other transfer scholarship opportunities with students.

Personalized application campaigns. For most transfer students, the recruitment cycle is shorter than that of a freshman. Often, they apply only the semester before they plan to enroll in your college. Help them speed up the process and get them in your communication flow sooner, by offering personalized application campaigns that will make it easier to apply with prepopulated information on your online application. Also, consider having this available for students visiting campus on your transfer visit days.

Publications for Transfers. If you don’t have a publication just for transfer students, start working on one today! While transfers like to hear about traditional campus life, they also like information that is relevant to them. In addition to the information you give high school students, transfer students may be interested in a checklist for new students, off campus living and financial aid processes. How often have you heard the question as a transfer counselor or financial aid officer, “Will my financial aid transfer?” Explain the process keeping in mind that each institution does it a little differently.

While the number of publications needed may vary by the size of your institution, the possibilities are endless. Seem overwhelming? Set the goal of adding one new transfer piece a year or continue customizing your communications flow internally by adding letters and emails directly related to this population.

Why Higher Education Can’t Afford to Ignore Mobile and Tablets [INFOGRAPHIC]

Monthly Archives: February 2012