If you’ve been in the world of enrollment management for more than, well, about five minutes, you’re probably aware that texting is a key communications platform for prospective students. It’s also the channel that universities tend to be the least-confident about using for engagement, as enrollment and marketing teams try to determine how and when…Read more
Tag: Enrollment Management
Unpacking the Campus Visit (Part I)
A few things you should know before you read this: I began my career in enrollment management as a visit and event coordinator. Those events were critical to the success of our efforts and I was put in charge because I’m…let’s just say details matter to me. A lot. I’m observant and I’ve learned over…Read more
Bringing Clarity to Higher Education Brand Architecture
During presentations about brand architecture, I often pose a couple of questions to attendees. How many aspire for their institution to be a branded house (leveraging a single master brand or parent brand across an entire organization and the organization’s multiple offerings)? Nearly every hand goes up. Next, how many of their institutions actually operate…Read more
The Case For and Against Generalization in Higher Ed Marketing
For much of my early career, I was engaged by clients to research and consult on the best way to communicate with millennials. Typically, this meant identifying a set of characteristics and preferences that afforded our clients the opportunity to better communicate with this target audience. It started with Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising, and then…Read more
Sales vs. Marketing: Why colleges and universities need both, and how they’re different.
Two hot-potato terms that higher ed leaders would just as soon not handle are “sales” and “marketing.” Many colleges and universities avoid them all together, doing their best to disassociate with anything from the world of business. In days still available to recent memory, it was possible to not engage those terms at all. Higher…Read more
What to Expect When You’re Expecting…Slate
Congratulations, you’re getting Slate! You’ve read about it in forums, heard counselors gush over it at fairs, and quietly side-eyed that college down the road as they launched a new app and weirdly celebrated with a Slate-themed cake. Can it really be THAT good? If you’re good to to your Slate instance, the answer from…Read more
Getting Real About Population Decline, Part 2
A few weeks ago we posted an insight about the projections for high school graduation population decline inspired by Nathan Grawe’s book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. By the way, Nathan, thanks for the work you did on that tome. It’s been helpful and terrifying, and we’re grateful for the thoughtful analysis you’ve…Read more
Best Practices for Slate Campaigns: New Edition
Earlier this year, Alex Williams offered advice on how to best leverage Slate’s campaign features. His guidance is worth revisiting as institutions assess opportunities to improve their communications tactics, processes and strategies, especially as they move into a new recruitment cycle. One quality of Technolutions is that it’s constantly changing and evolving. New functionalities roll…Read more
Getting Real About Population Decline
You’ve likely read Nathan Grawe’s Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). If you’re an RHB client and part of the RHB book club, you should have read your copy by now. You perhaps have lost a few nights’ sleep over the data he presents. For some, the reality of…Read more
Holding On During the Summer
The summer is flying by. Besides hoping those deposited students show up at registration or orientation, what are you doing to ensure they all show up this fall? Realizing the overdone-ness of this analogy, I intend to use it to make a point. Don’t rule me out yet. The process of recruitment has load of similarity…Read more