The Details:
*Inspiration*
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo supported a campus wide, student-centered approach to the recruitment & admission endeavor. Imbedded in this vision is the utilization of the various technologies available to us to support this effort. A college team built performance management strategies based on sound business rules that allow them to serve over 90% of their constituency electronically as they utilize process innovation technologies to evaluate key efforts.
*Key Players*
Their primary objective is simple – provide the capability for all campus departments such as the president, provost, college deans, department chairs, Student Affairs directors, student clubs, and the Admissions, Recruitment and Financial Aid Office to communicate directly with prospective students and applicants in a highly personalized fashion.
*Technology Choice/Project Design*
They found that e-mail and the web is the medium most students prefer when communicating with a higher education institution. The university team made a calculated and well thought-out decision to enhance their recruitment effort by adopting this premise.
The Results:
The Cal poly, San Luis Obispo University participated in a national research survey to gauge how well their efforts met the recruitment needs of their incoming students compared to peer institutions in higher education. Cal Poly scored higher than the peer group and the entire study average in almost all areas, including frequency of visits to our VIP web pages, relevance of our admission web site information, personalization of e-mails, the influence of e-mails on decisions to enroll, and appropriateness of the frequency of our e-mail communications. In addition 77 percent of Cal Poly’s new students had visited the university’s web site more than 11 times compared with only 31 percent of all those surveyed. Over 60% of these students indicated they would have never applied nor attended Cal Poly if it wasn't for the e-marketing effort.
The university gained considerably on their competition from identifying prospective students and then communicating with them through various e-mail schemes. All prospective student names are imported from all prospecting sources and automatically create a dynamic VIP web page for each individual prospect based on their individual attributes, which can then be updated on demand. Prospective students are sent an e-mail that includes their user name and password with which they can sign on to see their own dynamic information 24 hours a day; seven days a week.
Recruiting through Email
At any point time in the recruitment cycle, prospective students can be sent various e-mail communications from the campus community promoting the university and increasing Cal Poly’s visibility. This allows the university to expand the pool of qualified prospects. As a result, e-mail messages are sent through a prescribed flow of communication to potential, prospective and accepted students and their parents from our faculty along with other messages important to the university at each phase of the recruitment cycle.
Recruitment filters and supporting flash campaigns are readily customized and utilized to reach target markets. As an example, high quality prospects can be identified by key attributes and invited by the campus to consider Cal Poly’s Early Decision program.
Partner Outreach
In addition, their Partner Outreach programs now work with tenth graders setting up e-mail accounts, VIP web pages and a CSU Mentor planner. Targeted strategies are currently being used and have been further developed to support college or even individual department e-mail recruitment campaigns.
University staff also has access to data that is utilized to make a definite distinction between truly interested prospects and those prospects still sitting on the fence, thus reducing costs and saving staff time and energy. This begins long before a student actually starts the college application process. Because this interactive communication plan continues throughout the recruitment cycle, newly admitted students are more likely, when making a final decision, to pick a school that has shown interest in helping them to personally achieve their goals.
Communication with Parents
This effort is also driving communication between the campus communities and the parents of prospective students. Survey results indicate that parents today are increasingly involved in the college decision-making process. As a result, Cal Poly officials have customized individual VIP web pages that focus on parental concerns. They found that parents are most concerned about the outcome of the college experience, cost, and of course, the safety of our environment.
In addition, customized VIP pages for counselors were developed. Again, this allows university staff to best address the needs and desires of this market segment in a highly personalized fashion for a fraction of the cost of any other traditional outreach effort.
Because prospect sources are qualified into a number of different recruitment campaigns and provide the opportunity for each academic program to communicate with students interested in learning more about their majors, this allows university staff to track recruitment sources that are generating inquiries from students who are highly likely to gain admission. It also allows the university to refocus travel itineraries and recruit targeted populations with the greatest likelihood of gaining admission. For the last ten years, Cal Poly has been participating in a number of student search programs aimed at attracting high quality and diverse populations to the campus. The gains made with the quality and diversity of the applicant pool are directly linked to these efforts.
Last year alone, the admissions unit had direct contact with over 100,000 prospective students before they ever filed an application through over 300 individual touch points of contact. In fact, since 1994, this unit has had direct contact with over one million prospective students through tracked recruitment actions. (Over 95% of Cal Poly’s new students had prior contact with the campus before filing an application.)
Summary
In summary, since 1993, there has been a 130% increase in new undergraduate applicants with steady increases in the overall quality, ethnicity, and geographic diversity of the applicant pool.
*Surprises*
Because of the advantages derived from this technology, university administrators have been able to free up staff to support and expand their efforts with campus volunteers and also better collaborate with a number of groups across campus including the academic colleges, student clubs, University Advancement, and the Alumni Relations Office to support the recruitment endeavor.
As an example, thanks to the Alumni Reps program and other admissions volunteers, university personnel participated in a record number of college fair programs (415) this year. Over the last five years, Cal Poly’s participation in these events has tripled. The university also hosted over 4,500 prospective students through the campus tour program. In addition, last year alone, the admissions officers presented over 150 Admissions Information Workshops for on-campus visitors.
In reflection of the success of these endeavors, over fifty higher educational institutions who were interested in adopting similar approaches for their recruitment and admission initiatives have been hosted on campus.
*Next Steps*
University leaders are continuing to develop various technologies (recently the university released a Digital Viewbook) and will continue to look at new technologies to further link Cal Poly’s campus to their constituencies.
*Advice*
It very important to continue to understand the needs of your different audiences ---this is one reason why this writer strongly recommends using focus groups of prospective students, parents and counselors to help you refine your efforts. University staff built a survey tool set into their solution to assist them with this endeavor, and will continue to use results from these actions to drive future enhancements.
Related Links and References:
For more information from the author, e-mail him at jmaravig@calpoly.edu.
Here are links to a case study highlighting this initiative. It includes a number of examples of the various e-mail messages used as part of this project:
http://emt.hobsons.com/customers/calpolyslo.html
https://www.act.org/midwest/epc.html
This article was previously printed in 8/1/2005 Issue of Campus Technology. The author allowed for a modified version to be included in this edition of the iJournal.
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