Higher EdInsight

a blog of thoughts for higher education

Azorus a premier sponsor at CASE Europe Annual Conference August 31 – September 3, Glasgow, Scotland

We are thrilled to be sup­port­ing this con­fer­ence for our sixth year. Please join us for our pre­sen­ta­tion, ‘Listening to what mat­ters most – a new way of think­ing’. There is a stag­ger­ing amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able to us all, yet the only thing we are told about social media and the web is that we should be out there push­ing our mes­sage, get­ting our voices heard. In real­ity, lis­ten­ing intel­li­gently can help to make sense of all the chat­ter. Richard Taylor from the University of Leicester, UK, will also be part of our dis­cus­sion and pre­sen­ta­tion on Social Media Intelligence and Management Dashboards. It is a chance to exchange thoughts on how to make sense of all of the infor­ma­tion that is before us. 

Richard Taylor is the Director of Marketing & Communications at Leicester and a mem­ber of the University’s senior man­age­ment team. He leads an inte­grated team cov­er­ing press and PR, stu­dent recruit­ment, widen­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion, admis­sions, inter­na­tional oper­a­tions, mar­ket research, devel­op­ment and alumni rela­tions, and cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Leading the dis­cus­sion is Shawn Carver, Director of Innovation. Shawn’s 13 years’ expe­ri­ence in computer-​based train­ing, tele­com, wire­less mobil­ity and CRM, and expert research skills, ensure Azorus is at the fore­front of the tech­no­log­i­cal changes in the mar­ket and their impact on higher edu­ca­tion. Shawn was instru­men­tal in bring­ing Social Media Intelligence to Azorus’ higher edu­ca­tion clients and he will share this inno­v­a­tive “lis­ten­ing” capa­bil­ity in the session.

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Antidotes for a University Recruiter’s Headache

I recently had lunch with a Recruitment Officer cur­rently work­ing at my alma mater. Obviously, recruit­ment in higher ed was a hot topic of con­ver­sa­tion, as we both are involved with this, although in a dif­fer­ent capacity.

It was a very enlight­en­ing – and long – lunch (as you can tell by the length of this blog!) as we dis­cussed recruit­ment in depth. I dis­cov­ered that even though each Recruitment/​Admissions office has its unique meth­ods, they do share the same basic fun­da­men­tals. And these fun­da­men­tals result in some com­mon­al­i­ties when dis­cussing the cause of ‘headaches’ for Recruitment Officers…Let me be the Aspirin to your headache as we take a look at spe­cific pains and pro­vide the Azorus antidote.

Pain #1: Data entry after col­lege fairs/​high school vis­its is too cum­ber­some and time con­sum­ing.
Aspirin: Azorus Digital Recruit prompts prospects to enter their infor­ma­tion in a Netbook instead of on an infor­ma­tion card. From there, the data is uploaded to the prospec­tive stu­dent data­base and an ini­tial, per­son­al­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tion is trig­gered and sent. This leaves recruiters more time to do what they do best: talk and con­nect with prospec­tive stu­dents in person.

Pain #2: Trying to reach a mas­sive amount of stu­dents while being per­son­able.
Aspirin: Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sys­tem to fil­ter your stu­dent data­base so you can have mul­ti­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tions tracks – as detailed or basic as you require – for dif­fer­ent groups of stu­dents. The com­mu­ni­ca­tions are tai­lored to meet the spe­cific and rel­e­vant needs of each audi­ence or group. Read More »

5 Misconceptions of CRM for Higher Education

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Higher Education. Yes, Mr./Mrs. Higher Ed pro­fes­sional – I know you just got the chills. We are well aware that CRM, in gen­eral, may not be the most appeal­ing acronym due to its rep­u­ta­tion in the cor­po­rate world. So let’s clear up some of those mis­con­cep­tions as they relate to CRM for Higher Education…

5 Misconceptions of CRM for Higher Education

1. CRM is only an elab­o­rate email man­ager: Yes, CRM has the abil­ity to pro­duce tar­geted, auto­mated com­mu­ni­ca­tion tracks via email. However, that is only one frac­tion of its capa­bil­i­ties. CRM is a well-​oiled machine con­sist­ing of tar­geted, multi-​channel com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies, auto­mated data­base man­age­ment, sophis­ti­cated report­ing and con­tact man­age­ment. The bot­tom line is, with a solu­tion like this your admin staff can oper­ate at a highly effi­cient pace while work­ing towards meet­ing impor­tant recruit­ment goals.

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Cutting Through the Social Media Clutter

So, every­one is telling you to imple­ment social media for stu­dent recruit­ment! Now you are think­ing “Yes, I get the point Facebook, Twitter…. but now what?’ Getting a fan page and twit­ter account is the first step; how­ever, it is impor­tant to know your tar­get mar­ket and have a strat­egy or you will go nowhere. From what I have noticed, there are dif­fer­ent social media chan­nels you can use to attract dif­fer­ent markets.

To cut through all the social media clut­ter; here is a run­down of the three most popular/​successful sights used by Higher Ed insti­tu­tions today. 

Facebook Higher Ed Fan Page

  • Generally attracts prospec­tive students
  • Venue for you to tell his­tory, story of the school
  • Great place for prospec­tive stu­dents to con­nect with each other
  • Call to action’ area abil­ity to pro­mote your blog and PR, post videos , pro­mote Higher Ed Facebook Applications

Tip: there are mul­ti­ple set­tings for a Fan page; you can mod­er­ate who can ‘Like’ the page, mod­er­ate what is being dis­played on the fan page wall (abil­ity to delete fan’s posts) - it’s impor­tant to mon­i­tor the chat­ter closely, you never know what fans are going to talk about. Read More »

Get the scoop – prospective student feedback is important

One of the key mar­ket­ing indi­ca­tors for any cor­po­ra­tion, small or big, higher edu­ca­tion to retail, is con­sumer per­cep­tion. How much do you know about your cur­rent and prospec­tive stu­dents (your tar­get mar­ket) and the thoughts they share with each other?

It was once said to me by a higher ed pro­fes­sional, “the opin­ion of our peers is much more pow­er­ful than that of an out­side party”. I would pro­pose that the thoughts, con­ver­sa­tions and opin­ions of their cus­tomers (their stu­dents) might be con­sid­ered equally as powerful.

Let me ask you this: how are you cur­rently gath­er­ing this valu­able mar­ket research? You may say you do this through stu­dent sur­veys, yes? These pro­vide great infor­ma­tion. However, through my expe­ri­ence, this focus gives only the opin­ions of cur­rent stu­dents, and their stu­dent expe­ri­ence likes and dis­likes. How valu­able would it be to receive the opin­ion of a prospec­tive stu­dent who is or was con­sid­er­ing your insti­tu­tion to start their edu­ca­tional path? Read More »

Email Open Rates Dropping – But NOT Dead Yet

email marketing open rates

Fact: In 2 years open rates have declined 2.8% and are still trend­ing down. 

As a uni­ver­sity recruiter your first thought is most likely:

Why are email stats in gen­eral steadily trend­ing down?”

  • Prospective stu­dents are receiv­ing a large num­ber of emails each day. Everything from online shop­ping spam to emails from your Higher Ed competitors
  • More and more prospec­tive stu­dent are using their smart phone to read email…when your emails are not mobile friendly, they do not click on links or often ignore them.
  • Prospects are receiv­ing their desired /​rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from other online medi­ums such as var­i­ous social net­works (forums, blogs, Facebook, etc.).

However let’s not get dis­cour­aged here. When it comes specif­i­cally to Higher Ed insti­tu­tions and the recruit­ment process, a Teen Talk Survey devel­oped by STAMATS this year states that 40% of prospec­tive stu­dents pre­fer to receive com­mu­ni­ca­tions via email. Read More »

REWIND — Top 5 Higher Ed website tips

Social Media Guru, here – a few weeks ago I preached to you about how Higher Ed should start get­ting their feet wet in the Social Media sphere, more specif­i­cally, Facebook, Twitter and Blogging. Now the goal of Social Media and stu­dent recruit­ment is to estab­lish a mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship with your prospec­tive stu­dents who, as a result, will even­tu­ally apply to your insti­tu­tion. Here is an impor­tant fact, the bridge from you social media chan­nels to the appli­ca­tion process is your WEBSITE.

So is your web­site up to snuff? If not… all your social media efforts are fruitless…

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Student Voice

Improving admin­is­tra­tive processes and enroll­ment strate­gies are very impor­tant… but some­time we need to take a step back and remind our­selves why we are in the Higher Ed space…the stu­dents of course. The best way to improve the stu­dent expe­ri­ence is hear­ing from the stu­dents them­selves. This series will be fea­tur­ing un-​biased and real stu­dent expe­ri­ences like; admis­sions process, they’re finan­cial strug­gle; jug­gling they’re school life along with work, ect and just about any­thing the student’s want us to know about. If you have any spe­cific ques­tion for stu­dents feel free to let us know and we will pass them along.

Dear Higher Ed Institutions: Admissions Processes Matter!

Like thou­sands of typ­i­cal Canadian twen­tysome­things, I recently applied to sev­eral schools’ MBA pro­grams in hopes of even­tu­ally increas­ing my mar­ketabil­ity. Unlike with my under­grad degree, I decided to avoid the inevitable “safety schools” and only applied to three schools that I really wanted to attend. The admis­sions processes for each school went some­thing like this:

School A School B School C
Applied online Applied online Applied online
Three weeks later I received an answer via snail mail One week later I received an email indi­cat­ing that I would have an interview Six weeks later I received an email stat­ing that I would have an inter­view the next day
Two weeks I had the interview At the inter­view I was told I would receive an answer within three weeks
Two more weeks later I received an answer via snail mail I received an answer in just over two months via snail mail
Time Elapsed: 3 weeks Time Elapsed: 4 weeks Time Elapsed: 16 weeks

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Addressing the High Volume of Prospects in Higher Ed

It is obvi­ous that higher Ed insti­tu­tions all across the US, and North America for that mat­ter, have expe­ri­enced excel­lent enroll­ments this year. Now, this was mostly due to the ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult finan­cial times that we are now work­ing our way out of. While this is good news, it is unfor­tu­nately on the heels of yet another chal­lenge. It is said that the num­ber of high school grad­u­ates will have hit its peak this year; mean­ing we are on the cusp of a demo­graphic shift and an increas­ingly com­pet­i­tive marketplace.

How do you stay out in front?

Through my expe­ri­ence, the num­ber one chal­lenge faced by higher edu­ca­tion recruit­ment and admis­sions depart­ments is their inter­nal processes and the amount of work it takes to con­sis­tently com­mu­ni­cate with and keep track of their prospec­tive stu­dent audi­ence. It is absolutely imper­a­tive that these offices are able to “do more with less”, with decreas­ing bud­gets and a more com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place, it truly is the only way.

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