March 2008 Lawlor Focus

Online Strategies to Engage Admitted Students

Most colleges and universities are now, or soon will be, in the midst of the yield phase of their admission processes, which means that encouraging admitted students to enroll is a top priority. While the tried-and-true personal connections made by admission counselors can't be beat, one of the most efficient ways to reach many students at once with meaningful contact is to engage admitted students in an online forum. The two principle ways of doing this are (1) to create a password-protected microsite, hosted within the institution's web site, that functions as a special community for admitted students, and (2) to dedicate space within an outside social network, such as Facebook, for admitted students to connect with each other.

An example from the former category is Lewis & Clark College's (Portland, Oregon) "Inside L&C" microsite, which has twice received a "Circle of Excellence" award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Mike Sexton, dean of admissions, says, "Inside L&C has allowed our admissions staff to keep the most important enrollment information right at the fingertips of students as they make their college choice. It provides admitted students from around the world with a place to get to know each other and L&C at a more personal and informal level." Here are some more glimpses of the strategic thinking that goes into the creation of microsites for admitted students:

• Xavier University's (Cincinnati, Ohio) "The Road to Xavier"
  From the CASE 2007 "Circle of Excellence" award judges: "... Xavier offers a rather more edgy experience to its visitors. The goal for the site is to inform accepted students and to move them to accept Xavier's offer of admission by providing a fun and interactive way to allow them to interact with each other and other members of the Xavier community. The site offers many features common to Web 2.0 sites such as a profile; ability to contact others through IM, email, etc.; blogs; a YouTube-like video site (called BlueTube—and would you guess that blue is an XU color?); and personalized information on financial aid and other admission-related matters. The university does a good job of infusing 'The Road to Xavier' with messages about campus life and culture—while none of the judges were familiar with Xavier, we had a real sense of what being there might be like from this site. The university exceeded its goal for the site: 66 percent of students said the site positively influenced their decision to enroll and the enrollment of the class exceeded the goal by 20 students."
• University of Colorado at Boulder's "Choose CU"
  From the CASE 2007 "Circle of Excellence" award judges: "This is a portal for admitted students and there are personalized and customized links with all the information an admitted student needs before he or she arrives on campus. These students are making a connection with Boulder, conducting business, and still getting a few marketing messages to help them make their decisions. There is a lot of content on this site, but it's all well-organized and it's all well-written—and it's easy to get around the site. While the mind boggles at the number of internal stakeholders represented by this comprehensive resource, what the visitor experiences is a uniform whole. Plus UC Boulder has evaluated 'Choose CU,' which was used by 72 percent of the students who entered in Fall 2006, and the site was used repeatedly. At the time of the confirmation deadline (May), around 300 students were logging in a day to use the site. Early in the 2007 cycle [late February], 23 percent of admitted students and 74 percent of confirming students had already used the site."
• University of Nebraska at Lincoln's "ClubRed"
  From a blog posting by Seth Meranda, assistant director for interactive media in UNL's Office of Admissions: "Sometime last spring (April or May), the decision was made to move forward with a Social Network for our admitted students. Based on research that our prospective students were checking their email less frequently and responding more to social networks (mostly MySpace and Facebook), the decision was simple. A vendor was selected (time and developer resources were limited, otherwise Ning or a solution similar would have been more seriously examined) and the work began last summer. The idea was to create a tool where admitted future freshmen could meet other prospective students, share experiences, join discussions, communicate with current students, and receive a personalized checklist of their next steps to become a Husker (data points based on the student's funnel process). The major separation between ClubRed and a regular social network is the tie-in to our CRM software. It was important for us to utilize the current communication, tracking and reporting tool that fit into our student relationship model. The vendor acted accordingly and has setup real-time data flows between the social network and our CRM."

EduStyle, a web design gallery dedicated to higher education web sites, maintains a list of links to institutions' web presences within social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and YouTube. Sam Jackson, a first-year student at Yale University who chronicled his college search process, discussed on Collegewebeditor.com the differences that emerged between Yale's admitted student microsite and Yale's presence on Facebook:

"Both sites initially served the same purpose: as places for us to express our amazement and happiness with our acceptances. The experiences have diverged significantly. The adult-free Facebook thereafter became a place to develop a more complete picture of the early admitted students, while the admitted students site became a place to mine for information about Yale. ... There are two kinds of information that applicants are looking for: information about the school—programs, dorms, restaurants and the like—and information about each other. Facebook has largely supplanted the official site for the latter function, but the development team brilliantly added something which gives it special cachet over Facebook: targeted access to current students. Through its blogs and 'interest matchmaking' function, the site connects admitted students with current students. With a few clicks I can find someone to contact if I have any questions about, for instance, the Yale Political Union, that may not have been specifically answered in the forum threads or blog posts. It's this additional 'layer' of information that Yale has taken the trouble to add which brings value to its site."

Lawlor Recommends

The rise of online social networking represents a paradigm shift that colleges and universities must embrace in order to thrive in today's marketplace. The phenomenon of people gathering online to obtain from each other the information they're seeking about a company or an organization has been described by Charlene Li, an analyst at the market research company Forrester, as "the groundswell." She says that, despite a general reluctance to enter or create social spaces for prospective students (a reluctance lamented by an admission counselor at Butler University and debated by people who posted comments), colleges and universities can indeed harness the power of that groundswell to meet enrollment goals. A full-length interview with Li will appear in our Spring 2008 issue of The Lawlor Review (free subscription available).

In the news

While those of us in higher education enrollment management know all about the student loan crisis, a sure sign that it has hit mainstream awareness was this month's NBC Nightly News segment, which focused on how student loans are becoming "more expensive and harder to find." With a few major lenders already exiting the federally guaranteed student loan program, rushing to fill the vacuum is Fynanz, a new online service described by TechCrunch as a peer-to-peer lending site where, instead of borrowing from a bank, students can be matched to individual lenders who will provide them with qualified educational loans.

Did you know?

Online teens have an expectation that posted videos and photos will start a conversation. To teens, posting content is as much about interacting with others as it is about sharing with them. For example, only 10 percent of teens who post photos online say that people "never" comment on what they've posted, according to a report authored by Amanda Lenhart—who, by the way, is a confirmed speaker for the upcoming Summer Seminar June 12-13 in Minneapolis

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project (.pdf)