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Communicating with students

Will the Admissions Packet ever Die?

It has been estimated that the average SAT taker will match with 60 schools and thus become a prospect in 60 recruiting systems. It is further estimated that each prospect will get three pieces of mail from being matched. That's 180 pieces of mail times the 1.5 million students who took the SAT test last year - That's a lot of paper. Add to that the 1.3 million students who took the ACT test and you get a sense that America's youth are being drowned in printed view books and brochures.

How many of these contacts were admissions packets is not clear, but colleges and universities are still holding onto the practice of mass distribution of admissions packets. It is believed that this practice is becoming increasingly ineffective for a number of reasons, including:

• Students want to search for schools online, look at school web sites and apply online
• Students are more environmentally conscious and view packets as a "waste of paper"
• Students want the right information at the right time

To explore this further, I'll reference a several year old session called Interactive Student Recruiting that I presented at a number of conferences. In it, I describe how the admissions packet was initially designed to be the entire school's presentation. It included pieces designed for different phases of the college search process and was thought to be referred to multiple times throughout the process (which now takes well over a year). It was this multiple-times referral that made the packet powerful in the past. Everything from the initial branding through the mundane processing forms was included and it was cost-effective to put all those communications in one package.

To fully understand why the packet is the wrong presentation to today's audience, we should look at the phases of the student's college search process:

• First is awareness, building what is often a first impression. Students are in data collection, gathering mode. They are drawn to image and awareness type of advertising and begin to filter what interests them.
• Then begins a discovery phase when the first impressions get investigated further and comparison is made between schools that passed the first impression test. Pressure mounts and the process moves to a more selective second pass where the student's interest has been refined and a school profile develops and a "short list" of schools emerges.
• The short list filters further down into a list of schools in which the student will apply and the process of formal application begins.
• Further documentation and processing is required as applications need forms such as transcripts, test scores, letters of recommendation, examples of work, etc.
• Relating this to the old packet, you will see that there was marketing material and documents for each phase of the search process included in the packet, included with the belief that the applicant and their parents would continue to refer back to the packet as the process moved forward.

Well, those days are gone. We have short attention span children and parents who use the web to influence and manage many of their purchases. Busy lives and disparate families mean that the pile of packets on the dining room table doesn't quite have the power it once had. Today, the customers want to be guided through the process, having each step of the process presented at the right time and in the highly competitive and time limited process of a college search, minor mistakes can cost much more than wasted paper, they cost you students.

While other schools are offering web videos, virtual tours and highly targeted marketing messages, do you want to be distributing forms for financial aid or detailed instructions regarding transcript requirements? To be effective, the right message needs to be delivered at the right time to the right audience. It means integrating your messages, knowing your prospects and developing a personalized dialog that rivals the best ecommerce web sites.

It is estimated that nearly one quarter of this year's college applications were the first official contact made with the admissions department. Certainly these students had visited the web site, came to campus and formed an opinion – without being directly solicited. Imagine how many got away!

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Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a comon theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.

Mark Shay is the founder of EDU a leading academic advertising provider, part of EducationDynamics, a leader in student lead generation and enrollment management services.