Student

The fifth of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #5 Someone must close the deal. It is not enough to let our good work speak for itself. Someone must make the sale and ask for a commitment and the money.

This post will consider how this fits into the processes of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: Prospective students are asked to make at least five commitments to your institution. These commitment points generate what is known as the admissions funnel.

The admissions funnel begins with a large pool of students that are typically labeled prospects. These include any student that could benefit from the education offered by your institution. Generally the institution knows very little about these students beyond their name and address. The institution might also know admission test scores if the names have been bought from ETS, ACT, or a prospective marketing firm. The first commitment that these individuals are asked to make is give the institution an indication of interest and request additional information. At this point, these individuals are usually labeled inquiries.

The next step of the commitment process is having the inquiries complete an application. For all institutions, this will also involve a time commitment on the part of the prospective student because college applications may be lengthy and involved. For those institutions that charge an application fee this will also involve a monetary commitment.

At this point of the process, the institution makes a commitment to some of the applicants by accepting them and offering them admission. Accepted students are then asked to make another commitment by accepting the offer of admission and submitting a deposit to secure a place in the entering class. Finally, deposited students are asked to make the commitment of enrolling.

Each institution will establish a track record in terms of converting individuals from one stage in the commitment process to the next. In the absence of damaging news, very positive events on  campus, or significant changes in how an institution works with or communicates with these individuals,  the conversion rates are fairly consistent from year to year. Judicious use of these conversion rates will permit institutions to manage their enrollments from year to year.

Retention: Each successive semester involves a re-commitment on the part of continuing students to the institution and their specific programs. These reaffirmations do not just happen. The institution must take an active interest in students to insure their continual commitment to the institution. Academic advisers, resident counselors, faculty, and retention officers must be reaching out to students, encouraging students to maintain their commitment to their education and to the institution.

We know there are numerous reasons why students will attrit and not continue. The number one stated reason is finances. If an institution will scratch the surface and dig deeper into the thinking processes of those students who leave, it will find a myriad of reasons for attrition. These include dissatisfaction with a student’s academic performance or the academic life on campus, dissatisfaction with the social life on campus, time, family and health pressures, and a general “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” syndrome.

Alumni: Alumni have already made many commitments to the institution. If their experiences have been positive, they will completely understand the need for continual commitment. However, that commitment will not just happen. The institution must reach out to the alumni. In doing so, it must use its full arsenal of weapons to encourage continual commitment on the part of alumni. This arsenal will include faculty, career officers, student life professionals, alumni officers, and the advancement office.

The fourth of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #4: People only give to people. People do not typically give to causes. They may think about giving to grand ideas, impressive buildings or heroic organizations. However, in the end, people give to people who are changing lives, making a difference, and changing the world.

This post will consider how this fits into the processes of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: Parents of prospective students want the best education possible for their children.  Prospective students and their parents will devour electronic and printed materials about colleges and universities, looking for the perfect institution. Thus, colleges must make sure their materials are high quality and easily available. The college must make sure that the materials accurately and completely portray the institution. Students want to be able to picture themselves as part of the campus life. Therefore, the pictures and descriptions must be real. Prospective students can easily see past “smoke and mirrors.”

However, no matter how good an institution’s material is, prospective students will really only use the recruiting material to eliminate some options. They will not make their final choice based solely on electronic or printed material. The second point of elimination is a campus visit. Institutions must make campus visits show the reality of campus life. Prospective students and their parents can tell a “snow job” when they see it, and will run in another direction.

After gaining a prospective student’s interest, it is up to real people to complete the sale. Prospective students only respond to real people. They need a name, a face and a voice that they can identify as their contact with the campus.

Retention:  Once a student enrolls, the job is still not done. Continuing students need to know that they are “at home.” They want to be part of a family. They want to be surrounded by people that know their name, know their story, and with whom they have developed a rapport. Continuing students want to be able to talk with someone who cares for them and will service their needs. Automated systems may provide convenience and be helpful in certain campus situations. However, convenience only goes so far. A personal touch is an absolute necessity and will be greatly appreciated.

Alumni:  We have repeatedly made the point that people relate to people. To keep alumni engaged and active, it is necessary that they can relate to specific individuals. It is ideal, if these contacts were also part of the support team for the alumni when the alumni were students. These contacts can be former classmates, faculty, advisers, coaches, resident counselors, professional office staff, or various non-professional staff, including dining service, housekeeping or maintenance personnel. This means that every one at an institution is not only responsible for an assigned job. They are also part of and working for the admissions, retention and alumni offices.

The third of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #3: Effective fundraising is a result from telling your story. Positive results only come from telling your story. However, telling your story once is not enough. You must retell it many times, in many different ways. In addition, the story you tell must be the real story, not a pie in the sky fairy tale, that has no basis in reality.

This post will consider how this fits into the processes of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: Effective recruitment is the result of effectively telling your story. You must convince prospective students that they will fit into the campus environment. The prospective students must see themselves as an integral part of the campus. Many prospective students want to see other individuals on campus that look like and act them. The institution must show students similar students, or be prepared to convince students that they can still fit into the campus setting. To do this, you must tell your campus story both in pictures and words.

In today’s world, static pictures may not be enough. You may need “moving pictures.”  To reach today’s active, visual students, you may need to resort to active, video modes of story telling. However, in any video, the base story line is still of great importance. You must have a good, realistic story to tell. You can’t be successful in recruiting enough students by using smoke and mirrors. However, just a great story is not enough. You must tell it well by using an excellent video.

If prospective students do not feel comfortable before they apply, it is highly unlikely that they will complete the application process. However, the application is not the end of the process. It is only a milepost along the path. The institution must continue to convince the student that this institution is the college for them. The institution must listen to the new questions, and answer them promptly, properly, and effectively.

Retention: Effective retention is the result of effectively retelling, and telling your story anew. The institution must remind the student what it has done for the student in the past. It must keep the good experiences front and center in the minds of students. But, it must also point to the future, and let the students know what’s coming next. Students are people. Most people are more comfortable with the familiar. The only surprises that are welcomed are good surprises.

One other point needs to be emphasized here. If you stretched the truth in your story telling to prospective students, it will come back to bite you here. If students believe that you “lied” to them once, it is much more difficult to regain their trust. In addition, if students leave your institution with a bad taste in their mouths, they will tell that story to others. Overriding that type of publicity is extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible.

Alumni Development: Just because alumni were part of the institutional at one time and knew part of the institutional story, the institution can’t assume that they know everything about the institution. No one person can know the whole story. In addition, if an institution is alive, it is always changing. The story is new each day and each year. the institution must keep telling its evolving story.

Alumni are people. People like to be proud of their accomplishments and the accomplishments of their group. Institutions need to keep alumni informed of the good things that have happened at their Alma Mater. Pump up the alumni and they will help the institution tell its story.

The second of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #2: Fundraising is a conversation. The organization must initiate the conversation with the funder, and then keep it going. The organization must cultivate an interest in the organization on the part of the giver. However, a conversation is a two-way street. The organization must listen to the prospective donors and be accountable to them.

This post will consider how this fits into the processes of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: Admissions recruitment is definitely a conversation. The typical student is not sold by one contact. It is not unusual for a student to make eight to ten contacts before submitting an application. Love at first sight is a fantasy. Infatuation at first sight is possible. Commitment in a relationship takes time and repeated contacts.

The conversations must be purposeful and timely. Prospective students want to know about academic programming. They want to know about student life and co-curricular programming. If the students want to reside on campus, they want to know about residential life programming and food services. If the students want to commute, they want to know how that will work. For Christian colleges, students want to know about spiritual life programming. Some students want to know about athletics; others want to know about the arts programming. Dumping all this information on students in one fell swoop would not constitute effective communications and would result in information overload. The information must be spread out and processed in an order that makes sense to the prospective students.

The communications must also be in modes and media that are acceptable to the prospective students. If they want digital communications, the institution must use digital means. If they want printed communications, the communications must be in print form.

Recruitment of prospective students (prior to submission of application by the student and the acceptance of the student by the institution) is different from recruitment of accepted students. Accepted students need much more specific information. Answers to their questions must be tailored to the students’ questions. The institution must answer the questions that the accepted students asked, not what the institution thinks they were going to ask.

One area in which accepted students become very interested is financial aid and how they are going to pay for their education. This area must be an ongoing conversation between the institution and the accepted students, and generally with the families of dependent students.

Retention:   Retention is also a conversation. It is actually many conversations. Students want to fit in. It is very much like the lyrics from the theme song from the television show “Cheers,” which said, “You want to go, where everyone knows your name.”

Faculty and staff must be retention-minded. Everyone employee of the institution must make retention a prime responsibility. It is incumbent on each employee to get know as many students as possible by name. Employees must address students by their names and get to know their interests, desires and problems. Employees must be willing to help students meet their needs and solve their problems. This can only be done through conversations. Many times it will be faculty members or coaches that are the glue that keep students stuck to the institution. At other times, it may be a maintenance worker, a dining service worker or a housekeeper that touches the student when he or she is most in need and makes the difference in retaining the student or seeing the student drop out or transfer.

Alumni: To maintain alumni as part of the “we-crowd,” the institution must continually communicate with them. These communications must be two-way conversations. The institution must set up opportunities to receive input from alumni. It is not enough to just listen to alumni. The institution must also appropriately respond to that input.

The first of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #1: Law of the Nonexistent “They”. Donors are generally not standing in line waiting to give to your institution. You have to go out and beat the bushes to find them. There are people who have the resources to give and would give, if you make the effort to find them. They are not going to “beat a path to your door” without first receiving an invitation from you.

This post will consider how this fits into the processes of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: Unless your institution is one of the few very top elites or one of the momentarily “hot” schools, most of the millions of high school students thinking about college know very little about your institution. There are at most 100 institutions that can be classified as truly elite. At any given time, there may be another 50 that are “trending.” This leaves roughly another 3000 regionally accredited institutions in the nondescript middle or lower categories of colleges and universities.

If you are one of these nondescript institutions, you must find effective means for telling your story to enough prospective students in order to enroll a sufficient number of students to survive, if not thrive. If you are one of the elite or momentarily “hot” institutions, you still need to tell your story. You want to be able to define yourself as you want to be defined. Otherwise you will be defined by someone else, and you have no control over those definitions. It is obviously to your advantage to control how you are defined. This will permit you to enroll the students that you want to enroll. You want to be able to pick and choose your students. You are not in an advantageous position, if you have to take the “left over” students.

Retention: Just because a student enrolls in your institution, your job of selling your institution is not done. For years, there has been a national concentration of increasing access to college. However, recently there has been an additional push to put as much, if not more, emphasis on completion. We now have reached the point where more than 50% of high school graduates enter higher education immediately after high school. However, until very recently less than 50% of those students graduated. That meant that more than 50% were attriting, which meant that nationally just slightly over 25% of high school students were graduating from college within six years of finishing high school, pushing us far down the list of highly developed countries in this statistic.

Graduation rates in colleges and universities vary from 98% to less than 10%. This scene has created a great deal of hand-wringing and debate. We have a huge population of individuals who are left with a mountain of student debt and no credential or education to show for their expended time or money. Research over the years has shown that the fewer legitimate connections students have made, the more likely they will attrit. Institutions need to be sure every employee, faculty, staff, or administration is reaching out to students. You don’t want to have students get lost in the shuffle, or feel as if they are not important. They can very easily go somewhere else where they will feel important. Students need to be part of the in-group and not part of the undefined “they.” Students want to go where they will be part of the in-crowd, or as the theme song of the popular television show Cheers said: “go where everyone knows your name.”

Alumni Development: When alumni were students, they were or should have been part of the in-group, the “we” of the institution. If we allow them to fall back into and remain part of the amorphous “they,” these alumni will not provide financial and other important aspects of support like new student referrals, and services to current students such as internship placements, and job or professional counseling.

Although I don’t have any hard data to back up the following assertion, “it is harder to bring a fallen “we” back from “they-land” than attracting a total stranger to “we-land.” I base my claim upon years of work with alumni. A fallen “we” usually has left the fold for specific reasons. To return to the fold these fallen comrades want to know that their specific problems have been resolved. Generally, the fallen “we” will not reach out to the institution on their own volition. The institution has to reach out to these alumni, addressing their specific concerns. This requires individualized communications directed to these alumni. As part of alumni development, is your institution helping alumni with their current needs, such as job postings, placement files, life-long learning opportunities, and directory services to locate other alumni?

In addition to addressing past problems alumni may have encountered, is your institution helping alumni move forward in their lives and careers? Is it providing alumni services such as job postings, placement files, life-long learning opportunities, and alumni directories so that alumni can maintain contact with their fellow alumni? Institutions must continually answer the question from alumni, “What have you done for us lately?”