Read Part I

Part II: Converting Adult Students

The key to converting students is to understand how their mindset has changed from being a prospect to being an active inquirer. As a prospect, more often than not, you are competing against students simply not making a decision. When a student becomes an inquirer, however, you are dealing with a student who is increasingly trying to choose between two or more competing programs.

Recognizing this reality, you need to transition from a high tech approach to a high touch approach.*

The key touchstones involve demonstrating that you:

• Can meet their educational (program) goals
• Can meet their financial aid needs
• Value them as individuals
• Want to actively partner with them as they strive to meet their goals (largely educational but often social)

At this point, you need to make another transition from being institutional centric to audience centric. In other words, messages and programs are created with the audience (students) in mind, and not you. It is less about what you want to say and do and more about what students want to hear and do.

Create Personas

One great strategy is to break your prospect and inquiry pools down into a half-dozen personas or segments and then develop a personalized, even customized strategy for each segment.

Historically, segmentation strategies have been limited by academic programs (you treat adults interested in an M.A. in education different from adults interested in an M.Div.).

While this limited segmentation is of value, it is even more powerful when coupled with data around your specific student types. For example, a conversion strategy directed at adults interested in education would be more robust if it was directed at adults interested in education who also happened to be newly minted alumni of your undergraduate education program, or adults interested in education who were mid-year, mid-career teachers.

Other Decision Criteria

We know, too, that adults who are trying to decide between programs often compare programs on the following:

1. What is the total time requirement?
2. Which programs have cohorts? (This is especially important to students who are unsure of their academic abilities.)
3. What is the total cost?
4. Which will be least disruptive to my home life? Work life?
5. Which program is more convenient in terms of drive time or online accessibility?

If yours is a branded program, adults will also consider:

1. Which program has more cachet (prestige) in the marketplace?

Making sure adult students clearly understand how you are different from your competitors on those variables of most interest is a solid strategy.

Peer-to-Peer Conversations

At this point students are tire kicking. They are making active comparisons. And they crave inside information.

At this point you have chance to pull ahead of your competitors: Let them talk to students who are currently enrolled or recently enrolled in the program they are considering.

This strategy is amazingly powerful yet a little scary because you can’t really script these conversations. In fact, what you are doing at this point is relying on the overall experience of your current students to “sell” the prospect. This means, of course, that you delivered an outstanding student experience.

If you missed Part I of this blog series, you can find it here.

¹One of the great ironies is that you will often use technology to help you be more personal.

 

For this reason, I am going to approach this topic in two blogs. This blog will address reaching prospective adult students. The second companion blog will take a look at converting adult students.

Part I − Reaching Adult Students

Successful marketing and recruiting strategies invariably begin with using research to ask and answer a handful of questions:

1. How are you defining your target audience?
2. What communication channels do they use?
3. What are their motivations for returning to or continuing with college?
4. What barriers are they likely to encounter?
5. What selection criteria are they likely to use?

I’m going to walk you through these questions and give you some guidelines and, where appropriate, provide insight based on the 2017 Stamats Adult StudentsTALK™ study. However, it is critically important that you conduct research that reflects your specific audience, program type, and institutional context.

How are you defining your target audience?

Specificity is critical. Even the term adult students is too vague. For example, what age range describes your typical student? What educational backgrounds? What kind of demographic or psychographic profiles? Previous history with the college or university? What do adult students want to study?

The more you know about the adults you are targeting the better. In fact, to make it easier, create a profile of existing, persisting adults; the kinds of adults you want to recruit. This helps you more completely visualize your target.

What communication channels do they use?

The 2017 Stamats Adult StudentsTALK™ study affirmed, not surprisingly, that the college’s website is the primary communication channel and other websites are the next most popular source.

While this finding is clear, there are some other issues lurking in the background that need to be acknowledged. For example:

1. How are you driving traffic to your site? Pay-per-click? Social media? Lead gen/demand gen strategies that include specific landing pages?
2. How are you supporting the website with other media (Live chat? Telecounseling? Special events? Peer-to-peer?
3. How are you adjusting these channels as a student moves from pre-inquiry (think branding) through inquiry, to application, and beyond?

There is little to be gained through the creation of a great website if people never spend any time on it.

What are their motivations for returning to or continuing with college?

Understanding what drives students allows you to customize your messaging and programs. 

Developing a brand and message strategy around these issues will dramatically improve response. Understanding how to use these drivers is essential.

What barriers are they likely to encounter?

Next, you need to be aware of the real and imagined barriers confronting prospective adults. From the Stamats study we know that adult students often struggle with:

• Cost
• Time commitment
• Securing financial aid
• Childcare
• Credit transfer
• Concerns about academic preparedness
• Transportation
• Concerns about the ability to keep up with technology

The goal, of course, is to show how students of similar backgrounds have overcome these barriers. At the same time, make sure you debunk misperceptions. For example, if prospects believe your program takes 24 months but it only takes 18, you need to communicate that information.

What selection criteria are they likely to use?

The last big “bucket” of information is clarity around the college-choice variables of most interest to the students you desire to recruit.

Typically, these include the following for master’s degree/graduate students:

Your job is to create a dynamic verbal and visual communication strategy that conveys this information in ways that students find compelling.

Using data, rather than intuition or hope, to answer questions such as these is critically important and will have a dramatic and almost immediate impact on helping you reach prospective adult students.

Continue with Part II

Too often, they’ve inherited an organization chart that was built for a different time in the institution’s history, with position descriptions and reporting relationships that may have made sense for the conditions of 20 or 30 years ago but are no longer a good fit with the current reality.

Worse yet, many new CMOs find that their department’s structure simply grew like Topsy, without much in the way of intention. In these unplanned departments, jobs are organized around individual interests or skills and reporting relationships are based on convenience or seniority, rather than on what’s required for the department to succeed in the increasingly complex and politicized realm of higher education marketing.

In the May 2017 issue of Stamats Insights, Dr. Robert Sevier outlined the four essential ingredients for a truly great marketing department: clear direction, political support, talent, and resources. Bob concluded his article by observing once these key ingredients are in place, then organizational structure should be considered next. Bob’s approach is similar to the process I’ve followed to realign jobs and reporting relationships at several points in my career.

I recently used it to help a colleague at another institution restructure her department. This vice president was a newcomer to higher education—but not to marketing. When she arrived she found that her department was full of jobs that were tailored to the needs and interests of individuals. Key functions like social media, web design and production, and news media relations were shared haphazardly across a number of positions, with multiple individuals handling parts of a function. Lines of responsibility were blurred, and the VP felt that she couldn’t refill one of those jobs because it would require her to find a “unicorn.”

I recommended she start by writing a marketing plan for her college, identifying the institution’s key business goals and the marketing strategies necessary to support those goals, as well as identifying the core messages and priority audiences that needed to be reached. The new VP did this and then obtained the support of the president and other senior leaders.

Next, she drew up a new organization chart that showed the positions necessary to deliver the strategies identified in the plan. I encouraged her to make this a “blank slate” exercise—creating the ideal set of jobs and reporting relationships that made the most sense. She passed this by the Human Resources director and received support. Then we set out thinking carefully about how to match the strengths and talents of each employee to the new positions that she’d envisioned.

The VP made some adjustments to tailor one or two roles to fit key individuals, but resisted the temptation to replicate the “unicorn” approach she’d inherited. Faced with changes, one person decided to retire, and the VP eliminated three more roles and started searches to fill the new positions she’d developed. For the staff who remained, the new structure provided opportunities to learn new skills and grow in their careers.

Today, six months after we began the process, the VP has successfully restructured and re-staffed her department with new job functions and clear areas of responsibility. The new skill set she brought on aligns with institutional priorities, and for the first time marketing goals and actionable strategies are being implemented to achieve these goals. Operationalizing the new vision requires ongoing change management to help transition her department from being tactical to strategic marketers, but it has invigorated them to experiment with new ideas.

While there are many similarities among institutions of higher education, no two are exactly alike or face the exact same conditions, and that’s why one size will not fit all when it comes to organizing the marketing department. You need to find the structure that works for you, and that comes from first crafting a strategy and gaining support, then building the structure that best delivers your strategy, and only then slotting in people.

Thus concludes the introduction to Malcolm Gladwell’s 2015 book about overcoming seeming obstacles and disadvantages. And it got me thinking about how, sometimes, resource challenged colleges and universities seem unable to gain marketing traction against the well-funded marketing machines with outsized media budgets, large staffs, and deep connections with influential friends.

Small Colleges Must be Nimble

Fortunately, if you’re a David of the higher ed marketing world, the tables have turned for you, as they did for the biblical David so many centuries ago. The “sticks” of digital and content marketing are becoming the great equalizers, giving institutions with a small marketing budget the ability to be more nimble, more responsive, and ultimately more effective than their better resourced competitors.

Most well-heeled higher ed marketing departments are still enamored with traditional media – the big campaign, top-notch production values, “reach and frequency.” Nobody stops to think about the time it takes to plan these campaigns, their episodic nature, and the requirement to commit to weeks, if not months, of media buys.

And that’s not to mention that the rules of engagement have changed and no one under the age of 20 is consuming mass media anymore! Like Goliath’s head-to-toe armor, big media can prevent institutions from responding quickly to changing conditions on the marketing battlefield.

A Sharper Strategy will Defeat a Bigger Bludgeon

With digital and content marketing as your rocks and slingshots, your Davidian institution can now challenge the giants to reach, engage, and convert prospective students in new and effective ways. Take for example, the practice of micro-marketing. Using innovative techniques such as geo-fencing, IP-addressing, retargeting, and long-tail search, you can now take your message directly to those who will be most interested in it, quickly and cost-effectively.

And if it doesn’t produce the results you want, you can change your medium and messaging on the fly. Using these tools and techniques will also give you the ability to market 24×7, 12 months out of the year. The days of trying to time your campaigns to recruitment cycles (junior search/senior search) are long gone. It doesn’t take more money, it just takes more smarts.

Or take user-generated content. It doesn’t take more money, or require expensive, time consuming video shoots. It just takes someone with the creativity, discipline, and insight to generate it, curate it, and promote it through inexpensive channels.

Gladstone quotes former Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, “David fought Goliath by… knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger.”

Let’s chat more about how modern enrollment marketing methods can make your institution a stronger competitor. Email us to schedule a free consultation today.

While these considerations are important, I suspect that the institution’s alumni participation rate as donors is considered more by prospective students than many institutions believe.

When my youngest daughter poured over the dozens of marketing pieces sent by colleges all over the country, she was convinced that most schools were going to have good academic programs. So, comparing schools on their academic merits would not make her choice any clearer and easier. Then, she examined a school’s residential life and social culture to determine if she could live there while attending classes. She had to look at other factors such as rural vs. urban settings, athletic and arts programs, social clubs, and local entertainment attractions. There were simply too many decision points. She had to come up with a method to compare colleges that she felt could differentiate them easier from each other.

In the end, she settled on two institutional statistics—the retention rates of first-year students and the alumni participation rates. If students came back for their second year in high or low numbers, then that told her plenty about how well the academic and social experiences were at the school. The alumni participation rates quantified how alumni value their overall college experience and how it set them up for success after graduating.

It is important to note that she looked at alumni participation rate and not total amount given. Some schools have wealthier alumni than others, so focusing only on dollars contributed can be unfair. However, looking at the percentage of alumni who contribute puts all institutions on the same playing field as similar-sized or types (private vs. public) of peer institutions.

Why You Should Strengthen Your Alumni Participation Rate?

There is a reason why the U.S. News & World Report includes an institution’s alumni participation rate as one of seven key ranking criteria for their annual college and university rankings. Stronger colleges and universities enjoy a deep and generous commitment by their alumni to their giving programs. Even though the alumni participation rate only has a five percent factor in the ranking, it is understood that most institutions with a high percentage of alumni who give each year also tend to have high rankings in their academic reputations, student retention and graduation rates, and financial resources—all factors also considered by the U.S. News & World Report when compiling their annual college and university rankings.

Alumni participation rates, along with college/university board giving, are also greatly considered by corporate and private foundations when they decide who will receive their precious annual grants. They feel that if the two external constituent groups closest to an institution are generous, then the school is worthy of their support. Conversely, if a school struggles to get a respectable percentage of their alumni and board members to give each year, corporations and foundations see that as a red flag for their grants consideration, and they will look at supporting one of the gazillion other proposals submitted by grant-seekers.

In general, alumni participation rates have been on a decades-long downslide. Eduventures recently published sobering news about alumni giving. In 2001, the average alumni giving rate was 13.8 percent. In 2013, that rate dropped to a minuscule 8.7 percent. The best performing college or university in 2014 was Princeton University which enjoyed a 62.5 percent alumni giving rate. Unfortunately, U.S. News and World Report reported that 250 institutions, mostly large public universities, have alumni giving rates below 5 percent.

Although most of the country’s colleges and universities have seen their alumni giving rates decrease in recent decades, schools can still raise their alumni participation rates by knowing what to do and then funding those initiatives. They can turn around this nasty trend.

So, how does a college or university reverse this trend and raise its alumni participation rate?

Five Suggestions to Raise Your Alumni Participation Rate

1. Set a very ambitious goal of doubling your alumni giving rate. Raising the rate incrementally will not inspire your alumni to climb aboard your fast-moving train.
2. Seek an alumnus/na to offer a matching gift that would be distributed in portions when certain campaign benchmarks are attained, such as raising the alumni giving rate 25, 50, 75, and 100 percent.
3. Set up an alumni-to-alumni network of volunteers. As hired fundraisers, staff are seen as being paid to ask for money, which becomes less compelling to alumni than if the request comes from a classmate. It is harder to say no to a friend. Also, let’s face it, snail mail letters signed by a college staff/faculty members are expensive and generally ineffective. A four percent response rate is considered great for a mailing. Phonathons are on their way out, because fewer people are answering their home phones anymore, and that’s if they even own one. Millennials are talking less on their smart phones, so the problem will only get worse.
4. Stop equipping volunteers with Excel spreadsheets! Technology has made it possible to provide volunteers with scalable ways to contact their alumni friends and ask for contributions. Find those ways that work for you and are affordable.
5. Ask and keep asking until alumni contribute. Start with a special gift request on gift anniversary dates to see who gives at the same time each year. Sometimes, however, it is a matter of asking at the right time. Rather than guess at when that right time is, keep asking until the annual campaign is over. Persistence will pay off if done by the right person with the right message.
6. Start the conversation early. Consider offering first-year freshmen an opportunity to engage with the school’s alumni program at orientation. Offer memberships for school and activity discounts, ways to pay-it-forward for their class graduation, and alumni volunteer opportunities.

If you are interested in learning more about how market research and analysis from Stamats can help your institution make more informed strategy decisions that can raise your alumni participation rate, please contact us or view or research solutions to learn more.