http://missoulian.com/news/local/um-revamps-recruitment-looks-ahead-to-fall-enrollment/article_1bb5c88b-643d-58be-b896-4f61ff8bc1a7.html
UM revamps recruitment, looks ahead to 2016 fall enrollment
KEILA SZPALLER
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If you're a high school student sharing a ZIP code with an REI store, maybe one in California or Vermont, chances are the University of Montana may come knocking.
It'll pay 40 cents to buy your name from the SAT or ACT, which run college placement tests.
Here's another way UM is recruiting: Recently, a student debated on Twitter about whether she should go to school at UM or head to Alaska.
UM recruiters track mentions of the school on social media, and Sharon O'Hare, associate vice president for enrollment and student success, sent the student who was on the fence a T-shirt from UM.
Just this week, faculty from the College of Humanities and Sciences made direct calls to students who had been accepted into their programs. The reason? Data show more students who talk with a professor end up enrolling.
A couple of years ago, UM overhauled its recruitment communication strategies, and the students who enroll in the fall 2016 will be the first who have been through an entire round of the revamped effort, from snazzy print brochures touting ceramics and welding to targeted emails written to inform students about financial aid – and also make them laugh.
One reads: "Would you like to save yourself the cost of additional college tuition and the social awkwardness of explaining what a 'Super Senior' is to your relatives?"
Enrollment has been in decline at UM since 2009, but this year, the number of freshman applications has jumped. UM officials are not counting their chickens, but the increase is sizable, O'Hare said.
"We're significantly up over where we were last year," she said.
She would not share the amount of the increase, and she also said there's no guarantee the bump in applications will translate into higher enrollment because UM cannot control external factors. For instance, Washington state has been a feeder for UM, and it's dropping tuition to four-year public institutions 15 percent, which could affect the Missoula campus.
Nonetheless, UM is just a few months away from seeing the results of its recruitment redesign. In recent weeks, O'Hare has been sharing "The Recruitment Roadmap" with the campus, and Tuesday, she said the strategy has one overarching theme.
"We are the university of real people, and it's that personal contact that will help a student be successful," she said.
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UM had contracted with an outside company, RuffaloCODY, for some $750,000 plus $300,000 in printing and mailing for its fall 2014 entering class and part of its 2015 recruitment, but the effort didn't pay the dividends UM needed.
The university opted to pull recruiting communications and management back in house, with part of the theory being that building a stronger bridge between recruitment and academic units would bring in more students.
Here are some of the actions UM has taken in bringing the effort in house:
•It's spending $450,000 on customized printed materials, and doubling the amount of new print pieces. O'Hare said the invoices come from Missoula now, not from a company out of state, and UM's Mario Schulzke and his marketing team are doing superior work that reflects UM and Missoula – and doesn't look like the cookie cutter mailings from many other universities contracting with outside firms.
•It is targeting individual students, such as the Twitter user who debated about attending UM. (No word yet on her decision.)
•It is using data analytics in its marketing. For instance, UM knows which email subject lines work best because it tracks the open rates. It knows whose emails get opened. Dean Larry Gianchetta of the School of Business Administration has an open rate of 77 percent, "phenomenal" compared to industry standards, O'Hare said.
•It's ramping up one-on-one conversations between prospective students and faculty. The percent of accepted students who actually enroll is called the "yield." O'Hare said data show the yield rate in 2015 for entering freshmen who talked with a faculty member on the phone was 52 percent compared with 22 percent for students who only heard a voicemail. "The faculty are calling about their programs and their departments. They're doing something that Admissions can't do. These faculty can talk about the opportunity for undergraduate research. They can connect with the students. 'You'll be in my freshman class in psychology.' It's very personal. They don't have a script." Admissions staff talk with students as well, but the topics are different and include things like student orientation. Faculty talk about academics. "We've done that before, but we have a much more invigorated effort."
•UM is recruiting at the 50,000-foot level. For instance, O'Hare said Larry Abramson, dean of the UM School of Journalism, teaches journalism in high school. Music professors routinely adjudicate festivals that aren't in Montana. UM is reaching out to high school counselors, who with parents have a significant influence on where a student goes to college. "We're really reclaiming that ground with them and focusing on that relationship," O'Hare said.
•UM makes 420 visits to high schools and community colleges in Montana each year, going to every high school in the state twice. It goes to 270 high schools and colleges outside Montana each year.
•It has automated its outreach management using sophisticated tracking, and it is ensuring a personalized approach at the same time.
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As part of her presentation around campus, O'Hare shares a detailed flow chart of all the actions UM takes in the outreach process. It includes finding high school students who are beginning to consider college and could come to Missoula – think state high school students, those in the REI ZIP codes, and ones enrolled in feeder schools, for instance – to talking about financial aid and a commitment to graduate in four years.
In one of the early contacts, UM sends students a "UTube," an 18-inch tube filled with posters depicting students who are skiing, rock climbing, heading up Mount Sentinel or attending a concert, all listing the approximate distance between the activity and campus - it's zero feet for a concert at Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
The students featured in those posters look white and athletic, but O'Hare said that mailing is just one slice of the entire bundle. Others show more diversity, and a glossy booklet about academics that comes right after the UTube has several students, including a darker-skinned woman, standing in water with a net, possibly doing specimen collection.
"It has to be judged in its entirety," O'Hare said. "There are some print pieces and emails that will resonate with one person but not another, which is why you need to have a lot of them."
The students go from getting the materials featuring outdoors activities and concerts to an overview of the campus and community to detailed information about academic programs on the main campus and at Missoula College. The mailings include emails interspersed with postcard testimonials from students with interesting experiences.
O'Hare herself sends a personalized email to the families of accepted students, empathizing with the overwhelming process of choosing a college: "I recall my son's senior year – the college application year – was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying for both of us. It all ended well, he graduated in four years, is a fine young man and gainfully employed. Makes a mom proud."
She's had parents tell her the note brought them to tears, and she responds personally to follow-up emails.
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The big push comes once students are accepted because UM wants to turn the acceptance into an admission. Students are weighing their options, wondering how the experience they'll have at UM compares with the one they'll have elsewhere, and at this juncture, UM brings its faculty in for the one-on-one connection.
"That's the value proposition," O'Hare said. "We know we're a public university. We know we're limited in what we can spend on scholarships and tuition waivers, but it's the strength of our programs that meet that value proposition."
Another way she puts it: "This is when faculty and deans and academic programs become the secret sauce."
According to a recruitment report from Ruffalo Noel-Levitz (RuffaloCODY merged), four-year public institutions spent a median $457 per student to recruit new undergraduates in the 2012-13 school year. O'Hare said UM is in the midst of calculating its recruitment costs, which include staff time.
With a new platform, Hobsons, UM tracks recruitment information and allows recruiters to use data analytics to make improvements to outreach in real time. At last report, the program had recorded 151,000 names in its database for a single class; 280,000 print mailings for the first phase of recruitment in the flow chart; and 1.6 million emails, also for that first phase.
