Marketing Archives - Page 2 of 26 - Ruffalo Noel Levitz Blog: Higher Education Enrollment, Student Retention, and Student Success

Creating a student-driven college enrollment experience

November 30, 2017 by Patricia Maben, Senior Vice President for Product Strategy, RNL Leave a Comment

In our previous blog, we wrote about how changes in communication and student expectations have made traditional college communication plans obsolete. What institutions need to do is create a student-driven college enrollment experience where prospective students can pull the information they need, when they need it.

Naturally, such a shift creates a lot of questions. What does it look like to not orient around that traditional plan? What’s the core now?

It becomes about crafting an experience where each student builds his or her personal “core plan.” The experience they have in doing so—online, on their device, in their home, and on your campus— will make or break their choice to further engage and explore. Daunting, yes: but much more effective—and exciting.

Consider the concept of micromoments, as defined by Google: “Critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends…they’re the moments we turn to a device—often a smartphone—to take action on whatever we need or want right now. These I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-buy, and I-want-to-do moments are loaded with intent, context, and immediacy.”

How does this translate to college student recruitment? Students are already experiencing micromoments with your institution—the question is, how are they faring? Is the content meeting their specific needs and expectations at each of these particular moments?

To embrace these moments, it’s critical to “be there, be useful, and be quick”—in other words, anticipate needs, provide relevant content, and eliminate unnecessary steps to get to the answer. Further, it requires connecting the dots across their entire experience, not just from one screen or at one point in time but across those points.

The web is where they live, of course, but your website is just one part of how they experience your institution—and understanding what’s relevant to them requires more than just measuring their website interaction. It demands an understanding of how they answer key questions; what they click on, open, forward, share; why they’re exploring; and how you can meet their needs and shape their experience.

[Read more…]

3 stories of college marketing and recruitment success

November 29, 2017 by Ruffalo Noel Levitz Leave a Comment

A strong college marketing and recruitment plan is critical to an institution’s long-term success. Each year, Ruffalo Noel Levitz awards top honors to three campuses at our National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Retention for their innovative strategies.

And this year, we also honored one of our own by renaming the award as the Peter S. Bryant Marketing and Recruitment Excellence Award. Peter Bryant is one of the nation’s most respected enrollment managers. During his career at RNL, he has connected with more than 750 institutions to diagnose enrollment opportunities, making a lasting impact on campus and at RNL.

Three award-winning programs for college marketing and recruitment success

This year’s winners received the award at the 2017 National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Retention, convened by Ruffalo Noel Levitz in Denver, Colorado.

Goshen College (Indiana): Declining enrollment and staff turnover had left Goshen in disarray. The college turned to RNL to build a comprehensive strategy that addressed challenges such as student recruitment and search. Most notably, the initiatives helped Goshen achieve a 56 percent increase in admitted first-year students and a 34 percent increase in enrolled first-year students from 2014-17. This year, Goshen enrolled their largest incoming class in eight years, and they continue on the path to success. Read the case study.
Hawkeye Community College (Iowa): Hawkeye partnered with RNL for strategic enrollment planning to combat enrollment challenges sparked by demographic changes and new state guidelines. Launching an intercollegiate athletics program and implementing other long-range projects helped the college stop an enrollment decline and grow student headcount by 5 percent in two years. Read the case study.
Southern Utah University: Southern Utah University reversed turbulent enrollment trends, partnering with RNL for enrollment solutions and embracing new ideas. By sourcing ideas from across campus, the university funded 14 new initiatives that led to a 40 percent increase in total freshman applications and a 51 percent increase in new freshman enrollment over two years. Read the case study.

These campus successes highlight how institutions are proactively adjusting to change and creating holistic solutions that focus on enrollment and student experience.

Read the full success stories and ask for a guided tour of our enrollment solutions

See the case studies for Goshen College, Southern Utah University, and Hawkeye Community College for details on how they achieved their goals. And if you want to see how you can achieve enrollment success now and in the long term, ask for a guided tour of RNL Complete Enrollment. Our strategists can talk with you about your goals, challenges, and strategies.

New nationwide college student satisfaction report shows areas where college students feel their experiences could be improved

November 10, 2017 by Julie Bryant, Associate Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL Leave a Comment

Our new college student satisfaction report—the 2017 National Student Satisfaction and Priorities Report—shows what colleges students identified as their top priorities for improvement.

This report contains data from the Ruffalo Noel Levitz satisfaction and priorities surveys, which institutions use to help prioritize institutional changes. In turn, RNL regularly reports the collective findings from across the nation to identify trends in college student satisfaction. Here are some of the findings from this year’s college student satisfaction report.

Students’ calls for improvements—a sampling

Across higher education, students are concerned about their ability to register for the classes they need without conflicts.
At four-year private institutions, students prioritized their concerns about the availability of financial aid and their perception that tuition may not be a worthwhile investment.
Students at four-year public institutions indicated concerns with their perception that faculty may not be fair and unbiased in their treatment of individual students.
At community colleges, students were concerned about academic advisors’ knowledge and the timeliness of faculty feedback.
Students at career and private schools placed a priority on the equipment in the lab facilities being kept up to date.
Adult learners indicated concerns with receiving timely feedback and avoiding the campus “run-around.”
Online learners identified concerns with their perception of the quality of online instruction and their perception that student assignments may not be defined clearly enough.

These are just a sampling of the issues identified by more than 600,000 traditional and nontraditional students at 970 institutions across the country who completed the RNL Student Satisfaction Inventory™, the RNL Adult Student Priorities Survey™ or the RNL Priorities Survey for Online Learners™ over three academic years: 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17.

At a glance: How satisfied are today’s college students?

Overall, college student satisfaction for the following six data sets has remained steady in recent years, with nontraditional learners continuing to reflect higher overall satisfaction scores:

As shown above, the majority of today’s college students are satisfied with their college experiences, but there is room for improvement. To move the needle on student satisfaction, RNL recommends that institutions drill down into the specific survey items measured on the RNL surveys and to intentionally respond to identified challenges.

Gathering student satisfaction data and responding to student priorities are key ways to improve student success. Studies reflect a link between overall satisfaction scores and individual student retention at four-year institutions (Schreiner, 2009) and at community colleges (Miller, 2015). Institutions with higher student satisfaction also have higher institutional graduation rates (Bryant and Bodfish, 2014). In addition to supporting retention efforts, the satisfaction data provide the student voice in strategic planning activities, document institutional improvements for accreditation purposes, and identify positive experiences for recruitment messaging.

Do you know how satisfied your students are? I encourage you to assess student satisfaction on your campus regularly, and to compare your students’ perceptions with national data on student satisfaction and priorities for your institution type.

Download the full college student satisfaction report to see all the areas of high and low satisfaction

Download the 2017 National Student Satisfaction and Priorities Report to see all of the top challenges identified by students as well as the student-identified strengths for each institution type, highlighting what is working on college campuses.

Call 800.876.1117 or email me to learn more about RNL Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys or the 2017 college student satisfaction report. I will be happy to discuss how campuses are using satisfaction data to make positive changes that matter to their students.

4 reasons your college communication plan is broken

November 8, 2017 by Patricia Maben, Senior Vice President for Product Strategy, RNL 1 Comment

The college communication plan has been the foundation for student recruitment for decades. It forms the basis of how colleges and universities tell prospective students about their admissions requirements, programs of study, financial aid, campus life, and many other details. This model revolved around pushing out information to students.

But that has changed because the audience—the prospective students you are trying to reach—has changed how they seek information.

The rise of social media, connected communication, and engagement marketing have fundamentally shifted how students approach the college search process. Simply realigning your current enrollment strategy and communication plan to your new target populations isn’t the answer: it’s a surefire way to fail to meet their expectations of an engaging college search. Instead, you need to take an entirely different approach that is grounded in the reality of how students seek information and make decisions today.

Why your college communication plan will not work with students today

Students have different questions than in the past. They are more diverse, more first generation, higher need, and more pragmatic. Expect questions on the process, the college experience, cost, and whether it’s worth their investment.
The enrollment decision is more often a family conversation. It’s no longer helicopter parents steering—it’s now a real discussion about college as a family investment and, for first-generation students and their families, an exploration of the college experience itself.
Students seek an experience, not a transaction. Born into a world where Amazon and Netflix just “get” them and their interests, message merges simply aren’t going to cut it with today’s students. They expect you to learn about them before sending information.
Students control the process. They do not want to wait for information from you. Today’s students want to get their answers when and how they want. Whether looking to find something or to explore, they seek instant response and feedback.

Educated in flipped classrooms, interacting through gamified experiences both online and off, and hash-tagging through social media, the students you’re recruiting today are driving precisely how, when, and why they engage—with everything from friends, to brands, to colleges.

Most colleges and universities have not adapted to this new reality, and even those that have don’t realize how rapidly it continues to change. They have scrambled to “meet students where they are” and become more tech-oriented in pushing out their marketing messages across multiple channels—a form of hybrid “digitized” recruitment marketing that Millennials may have tolerated. But that won’t work for today’s Generation Z, because Generation Z doesn’t care about your marketing plan.

No college communication plan can be made sophisticated enough for today’s students

That communication plan—the “master plan” of who gets what, when—is typically the backbone of your strategy, driving everything you do. What once upon a time was a simple document is now likely a much more complex flow chart or spreadsheet. You may have built many options and reminders and custom campaigns to try to personalize the process the way students want. You have spent hundreds of thousands in dollars in support of this plan with an advanced CRM if you are lucky. But your college communication plan likely is still falling short because it remains rooted in that old “enrollment funnel” view of the world —and you are wasting money.

Current enrollment management approaches, focused on pushing information out—regardless of how sophisticated their ways of doing so—no longer work. What happens next?

Removing any one tactic feels like a risk—as does changing anything that might jeopardize your potential to make projections. Your numbers have real ramifications on jobs, on budgets, rankings, profile, competitiveness—and, in the worst cases, on institutional survival. But the real risk is in not reconsidering your plan in a big way.

How first-generation prospective students want to hear from you [Infographic]

October 6, 2017 by Dr. Raquel Bermejo, Associate Vice President for Market Research, RNL Leave a Comment

Use multiple channels for your initial contact with first-generation students

New research from RNL, highlighted below, shows how students want to hear from colleges and universities. In examining the results by subpopulation, we can see how first-generation students want to connect with prospective institutions.

First-generation college students infographic

Click for the full infographic

Half of first-generation students said they wanted first contact to come through email, while one-third said direct mail. But 15 percent preferred a phone call via cell or landline, and one in five first-generation seniors said they preferred a phone call as the first contact. These results show that campuses need to reach out to first-generation students across multiple channels so they can connect with as many students as possible.

What do first-generation prospective students want to do after an initial contact?

When it comes to calls to action, 50 percent of first-generation students said they wanted to go to an institution’s website, and 44 percent wanted to conduct research online on their own. This finding has two key implications.

First, make sure your website is accessible to first-generation students and points them to the resources they need on price, affordability, programs of study, and information on the application process.

Second, make sure to check how your institution performs in online rankings. Are you the first result on searches for your campus? Listed on influential college planning sites? Showing up for your key programs of study?

Try to think the way a first-generation student would, someone who may be researching on their own and not have the guidance of parents or guardians who attended college. Make sure they have multiple ways to connect with you and learn more about why they should attend your institution.

For more insights, read our post from interviews with high school guidance counselors on recruiting first-generation students and watch for our forthcoming 2017 report on college student perceptions later this fall.

Will you succeed in a new competitive environment?
Attend our Enrollment Management Leadership Summit, Nov. 28-29, 2017

Join enrollment managers and RNL experts in Las Vegas this fall as we discuss how to engage diverse populations, succeed in a more competitive environment, and embrace a new paradigm of recruitment marketing. Learn more and register.