So you want to hire an interactive admissions person...

This post is directed specifically at all the Directors of Admissions out there, who are considering the creation of an e-admissions person.  I've heard a number of titles for it: My former one was Interactive Recruitment Manager; another popular one is Electronic Communications Coordinator.  What you call it is really immaterial.  What's really important is finding the right person with the right blend of experience, and then treating the position as it should be within the context of the office.  

80% Admissions/ 20% Web: I always thought that the main reason I was successful in this type of position was the fact that I had previous experience as an admissions counselor.  I had worked directly with the students and their families and so understood their needs at all stages, done the recruiting events, and knew the cycle of the admissions process.  This type of position is primarily a marketing position and understanding the point of view of your audience is really key to developing any marketing program. This position should be pegged, at minimum, as an associate level position since you should only be putting someone with at least three years of admissions experience in it.  It's that experience that will make or break the person's success in the position. 

That being said, if you hire someone that doesn't have web experience you are doing nothing but setting them up for failure.  Typically, this position is responsible the admissions web presence and you can't maintain a proper web presence if you have no previous web experience.  Having a MySpace and a Facebook profile do not count as web experience.  The web is not magic - things don't just appear from nowhere.  They have to be built.  You wouldn't hire someone to paint your portrait if they had no painting experience and the same goes here.  If you insist on not heading this advice, be prepared to dedicate some bucks to professional development to teach the person what they need to know to be successful.  

This position is NOT a counselor position!  Yes, this person should have previous admissions experience but that does not mean that you should make them your go-to person when you need someone to do a college fair, work an open house or do prospect interviews.  Give the person in this position the respect they deserve so that they can focus on the task at hand.  Believe me, in the first two years of the position when the program is being built from scratch, there will be more than enough for the person to do without you overburdening them with "other duties as assigned." 

Pay them what they're worth: If you're lucky enough to find a person that meets these qualifications, fight for a salary that lines up with them.  When I originally started my former position, my salary was pegged at $36,000/year.  That was far too low.  I fought it and got it brought up to $42,000/year, which is still too low in my opinion given the unique skillset required.  The incredible thing is that I know others who currently have this type of position and they are making significantly less than I was.  That's not OK. I get that it's higher ed and that no one is going to get rich doing it...but I still work in higher ed now doing a very similar job and make significantly more. So yes, it is possible. 

Building a program takes time and involvement: If you are starting a position from scratch, be aware that it will take one to two years to get a program build and running efficiently.  These things take time and you have to give the person in it the latitude they need to get things in order.  One thing that will help them is to include them in all counselor-related meetings and trainings: getting them involved in the day-to-day office activities will allow the person to assess where your gaps are and how they can work to fill them. Just because they aren't a counselor doesn't mean they should be cut off from the counseling staff, a mistake I've hard of some offices making with this type of position.  It's not helpful and it just pisses the person in it off.    

Trust the person you hire: This may be the hardest part for most Directors - if you are creating this type of position you are doing it, at least partly, because you don't know how to do it.  That's ok.  Admit it.  It's OK not to know everything.  Now, hire a person that DOES understand it and trust them to do a good job.  When they give you a recommendation that you don't agree with, give them the benefit of the doubt - they are doing it for a reason.  There are nuances and best practices to this that fly directly in the face of many common admissions tactics.  Because of that, the person in the position is going to tell you that you can't do things that you want to do.  Trust them and then work with them to come up with an alternative solution. 

Key Takeaways: 

1. The person you hire should have at least three years of admissions counseling experience.  At the same time, you should never use them as a stand-in for admissions counselors - the position is completely different.
2. The person you hire should have previous experience building and working on websites. 
3. Trust the person in the position when they tell you things you don't want to hear. 
4. Pay them what they're worth. 
5. Give them the time they need to build a program. 

Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies (eduWeb 2007)

I was surfing the web looking for a something I wrote for my MBA and randomly came across the PowerPoint slides for the presentation I did at eduWeb in 2007 titled Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies.  I still think a lot of the points are very relevant to admissions offices so I thought I would throw them up here in case someone found it useful.

Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Failures can be more interesting than successes

I was talking to my boss about blogging last week and she suggested that I include posts about failures in here.  Everyone has failures so I'm not ashamed of admitting mine.  It's about reflecting on them and learning what you can.  So here goes: 

Two years ago I put together a strategy for the last school I worked at to include video on our website.  The original point was that it would be shot by current students and be really true to their experience.  It was purposefully going to have an amateurish quality to it, since I think that adds authenticity.  I got approved to get a ton of video equipment, final cut and an iMac but it took a while to get it ordered and delivered so I didn't actually get my hands until Spring 2007.  I had been toying with the idea of having a student do a video blog for a while and I recruited a kid that I had known for years to be my guinea pig.  He shot video for about a month and then came to ask if he could take the camera on his trip to London.  I said sure, not seeing any real downside to the situation.  Unfortunately said student thought it would be a good idea to ignore signs at Westminster Abbey that warned him against any photographic devices and had all of his tapes confiscated.  He lost everything.  

So Summer comes and I had nothing to work with.  Plus there were very few students on campus at this point so really there was nothing to shoot.  But I was lucky to have a very industrious student interning for me named Geoff Ankuda.  Now hear this: if you ever get the opportunity to hire Geoff, do it.  Even as a student, I viewed (and treated) him like a professional and he lived up to every expectation I had. 

I gave Geoff a lot of freedom that summer to work on projects he wanted to and one of them was video.  The college had a great summer program for high school students that recruited a lot of students for the school so Geoff decided to take on shooting video of the camp and edit it as one of his projects.  I was thrilled.  Not only would this be great recruiting material for the camp, but it would also be great for former campers to really show pride on their social networking profiles about what they had done over the summer by posting the videos (we were just going to use Google video to host the files).

Geoff spent weeks laboring over this - when the summer camp was running, he was out there every day shooting.  In between, he was sitting in my office editing.  He ended up creating dozens of short video clips about this camp, which not only included some of the interesting activities they did but also really candid interviews with the campers.  The end product was exactly what I had envisioned it being.

But I wasn't the one who had final approval on it.  The people running the camp did.  And they didn't like it. It was a bit too real it seemed, and lacked the sort of marketing fluff and dramatic music in the background that are typical of recruiting materials.  So well I put it up on Google video anyway (where I'm positive you can find it to this day), it never made its way to the main site like I had originally intended.  Both Geoff and I were disappointed.  I felt terrible that he had put so much work into something only to be told no.  While it's a harsh reality that you have to deal with in the real world, I was hoping to shield him from that while he was a student and still gaining confidence in his abilities.  

This project for me was like a comedy of errors and there were definitely times throughout it when I looked up to the sky and, with my palms turned out, said "why????"  Every time something started to go right, something else would happen that would blow everything off track.  By the time I left this school in the fall, we had used some video on the site, but were certainly not at the level I had hoped for.  

What did I learn and what would I do differently: 

1. Manage expectations.  I think the primary reason the video never got used was the fact that people didn't really understand what YouTube style video meant.  They thought it was going to be professional quality recruiting style video, when that was never the point.  Next time I would make sure everyone understood and had viewed and approved an example of the type of video I was talking about.
   
2. Set ground rules.  I'm known to be pretty lax with student workers.  I think if you trust them (and play a major Catholic guilt trip on them), they will usually rise to the occasion.  In the name of authenticity, I basically gave a student a video camera and said "don't break it and don't film anything that could get you expelled or arrested....go!"  It never occurred to me that the student would lose a month's worth of footage by bringing it somewhere he shouldn't.  If I ever do this again, I am definitely going to come up with a few common sense guidelines.
3. Time management.  I'll be the first to say it - I am HORRIBLE when it comes to taking way too much stuff on.  I know it sounds like one of those fake answers you give when you're interviewing and they ask what you're weakness is, but its true.  Looking back, this video thing was huge and I just didn't have time (along with everything else going on) to deal with it.  I also didn't want to stand up to my former employers and tell them that, because it just wasn't something that was done in the culture of that office.  I wanted to be able to do it all...and that's good...you want employees that are excited about their jobs and have high goals...but sometimes you just can't achieve it all. 
4. Some things are just out of your control.  Well it's important to reflect on the things you could have done differently, its also important to say that some things are just out of your control.  I couldn't control the fact that the director of this camp has a vendetta against Geoff for not being a cadet at the school and therefore wasn't inclined to use something he produced.  I couldn't control that they decided showing students use a wooden (fake) knife in survival training was just too scary a scene for prospects and parents when they didn't have a problem with us filming it in the first place.  You're always going to have things in a project that you just have no control of mitigating and for your own sanity, its important to acknowledge them.   

Have you had any projects that were colossal failures?  Share them in the comments, along with what you learned!

Twitter: The next Second Life Syndrome?

Yesterday I started pondering my use of Twitter.  Of course, I use it to promote my blogs, but its more than that.  It's almost a way to break up my day.  I'm the type of person that needs to skip around from project to project and in between, I check twitter to see what everyone else is saying/doing.  My usage typically increases when (a) I don't really have a lot going on at work or (b) ironically, when I have too much going on and am completely stressed out.  I would think that the first situation is true of many people that use twitter (in regards to the latter, I just have an odd working style...).

I would suspect the same is true of most working professionals.  Statistics show that Twitter is overwhelmingly used during the week and the primary uses are as a networking tool or the promotion of content.  All this made me realize that it's probably a misguided venture for colleges to start using Twitter to recruit students.  Many know that teenagers, for the most part, don't use Twitter but they all assume that they will gravitate over to it eventually.  I was the same way.  When I first found out about Twitter at SXSW 2007, I immediately went home and registered a username for the last place I worked at so that I could get the URL I wanted.  I wasn't sure how I was going to use it yet, but I figured it would be better safe than sorry.  But now I'm not so sure of its potential.  I think that assumption that teenagers will eventually come around is kind of like adults in the 17th century assuming that children were just smaller versions of adults and thus fundamentally dismisses what its like to be a teenager.  

One teenager, 17-year-old Will Johnson, has identified quite clearly what he thinks the problems are with Twitter's adoption by teenagers and has developed his own tool based on the concept to appeal to his age group.  As he writes in his blog: 

To examine why Twitter has seen such little adoption among teenagers, one has to be familiar with social structure of an average teenager’s life. A teenager keeps a tight knit group of friends, perhaps more so than any other age group, and has little reason to communicate outside of this group. Tools such as Facebook have seen such success because their founders realized that teenagers want to communicate with their friends and only their friends, not the entire world.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter was built by adults in Silicon Valley, for adults in Silicon Valley. The combined effects of the more open “social graph” of an adult, with contacts spread throughout business and personal life, and the highly open culture of the Valley led to a tool with an ultimate focus on complete openness...

For a communication tool such as Twitter to become truly popular among teenagers, it must be built from the ground up with them and their concerns in mind. It must be entirely focused on small groups of friends, allowing constant and smooth communication between them while keeping outsiders safely out of reach

I feel like we've gotten to the point in higher ed where every technology is viewed as "the next big thing", if not the next killer app, simply because of its existence and because we, as somewhat geeky adults think its cool.  That completely misses the point of why technology is adopted in the first place - it meets a need.  Back in the day, MySpace met a need for teenagers.  Now Facebook does.  I'm not so sure Twitter does now or ever will since they seemed more concerned with getting infrastructure in place than coming up with any sort of business model.  In a lot of respects, Twitter has yet to define what it is and if the tool itself is that far behind the curve, then why would we expect widespread adoption of it? 

This reminds me a lot of Second Life.  A little over a year ago, Second Life was the "next big thing" in college admissions.  I did a presentation at eduWeb on technology and recruiting where I dubbed that the "Second Life Syndrome".  Second Life didn't meet a need and was thus never adopted by the audience that recruiters hoped it would be.  A lot of schools spend a lot of time and money building elaborate Second Life virtual tours, which was proved a waste when no students showed up.  

This stuff really doesn't take a lot of work or research to figure out.  I had an intern that summer and I asked him what project he would want to do if he could do anything.  He said he wanted to build a Second Life campus.  I said "Ok...but before you get started, I want you to do some research on the demographics and Second Life and then come let me know if you think its still a good use of time."  By the end of the day, he had come back to me and said he changed his mind - teenagers wouldn't use it and we moved on to the next item on his list.  

The moral of the story is this: a little research into motivations and demographics can go a long way.  Just because a technology is there and people use it doesn't mean its around for the long haul or is an appropriate medium for a mass audience.  Maybe I'm wrong - maybe teenagers will be flocking to Twitter to talk to colleges over the next few years.  But I really doubt it. 

Numbers mean nothing without context

I have an interesting exchange on Twitter yesterday and it brought up several good points about basic marketing strategy that I thought would make for a good blog.  It all started when Brad Ward posted stats from his website...

Basic point number 1: Know your audience

There is a huge difference between what your POTENTIAL audience is and what your TARGET audience is.  Obviously, anything on the web has the potential (though not very likely) of being viewed by anyone on the Web.  But that's not Brad's target audience.  He works in admission, so his target is prospective students and their families.  I work in development so mine is alumni and anyone else that wants to donate money.  By identifying and focusing on your target audience, you can really hone in on their needs and how to appeal to them. 

Also, I want to make sure that everyone understands what I'm talking about when I ask how many kids are in his funnel.  This is an admissions funnel:  

I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but it is basically an illustration of the admissions process and the fact that you start out with a really big inquiry base but as you move through the cycle, kids drop out along the way.  

The conversation continued...

Basic Point Number 2: The numbers are never too hard to extrapolate and if you don't do it, you have no basis for assessment.

All I was looking for here was a basic context for the original numbers I was seeing, and for that the numbers are extremely easy to look at, which I expound on below.  In fact, they are vital to the assessment process.  What does it tell me that 51,000 people looked at his blogs?  That is just factual information but not an assessment of good or bad.  It is what it is.  You can only assess good or bad when you see it in relation to other numbers.  

Basic Point Number 3: Your competitors numbers aren't an indication of your success.  Do you and your competitor have the EXACT same target audience?  Do you have the EXACT same marketing strategy?  Do you have the EXACT same goals?  I doubt it.  And therefore, they are not a measure for your success or failure.  To me, it's only distantly relative what a competitor does - I'm more interested in if my strategies match up against my goals for success.  Brad even said it himself - Ball State is larger but they have a similar applicant pool, which means that Ball State probably has a higher rate of admission and is therefore targeting a different type of student.  Also, if they have a similar applicant pool then the ultimate size of the school in relation to views of blogs geared at PROSPECTIVE students is irrelevant.  

And it continues...

Now here is where we start to get into some specifics.  I threw a basic example out there that I use as an indicator regarding if an idea is sticking with an audience.  Now I want to be clear, but numbers I asked for do not really give me a valid indication of whether the blog was successful or not - just an indication. I have no idea if Brad's numbers were unique or total views or how many of the views where comprised of return visitors or how many of them where from prospective students/families, current students, alumni or other misc. readers that our outside of Brad's target audience.  So comparing his numbers to his total prospective audience may not be the most valid method that something is working.  I do think, however, that it is a VERY valid way to tell if something is not working.  If Brad had an audience of 500k and only 51k views, he would have a problem.  

But at least now I can make my indicator calculation: With 51K views and 52K in his funnel, and we make the (poor) assumption that all those views came from prospective students, most of them have seen the blogs at least once.  Is this good?  We'll get back to that in a sec...

Basic Point Number 4: If you've got a worthwhile tool, market the hell out of it: Brad also gave me a piece of info I didn't ask for - that there had been a large email blast of 19K marketing the blogs.  My question is, with 52K in his funnel, then why is the largest email blast to less than half of that?  I don't want to get into an email discussion here, but stuff like this just begs to be consistently marketed to a mass audience.  These blogs are not just appropriate for one stage in the funnel - they are relevant to ALL stages.  They are a cultivating tool for younger classes and a decision making tool for accepts.  Email, as a rule, should have one call-to-action per message.  I wonder how many views he could have if there had been more than one large blast of 19K?

Now here's where Debra pops in and brings up some great points as well.  

I think I've already covered the first few twits in this group, so I'm going to skip down.

Basic Point Number 5: Measurements of Success Depend on YOUR BUSINESS GOALS.

If there's any key point to take out of this blog, I think its that one.  Success doesn't depend on what your competitors are doing and the numbers mean nothing if they are not brought back around to help meet the business goals of your institution (I suppose one exception to this is if your business goal is to get more market share than your competitor, but I think any college that strives for that needs a new set of managers.  A better goal is to meet a certain number for enrollment, based on the total operating cost of the institution and the size of the community you want to maintain).  So yes, success metrics would have to differ from school to school because another school does not have your business goals. 

Ok, so lets get back to Brad's blogs for a second.  What was the original goal of the blogs and how did that tie back overall goals of the institution?  Maybe views aren't the right success metric.  What if the goal of the blogs was to ENGAGE prospective students?  You don't get that through views - you can get that through comments.  At that point, the total views of a blog mean nothing, unless you are talking about them in relation to the comments.    

All of this really goes back to a basic framework for building a marketing strategy that I blogged about a while ago: 

• Plan what you'll do
  
• Do It
  
• Evaluate what you just did
  

Planning involves coming up with higher level strategy that aligns with business goals and setting goals for what you want to implement.  Doing it is the execution of the strategy.  Evaluating involves crunching the numbers against the business goals you set in the planning stage.  We all tend to be very good at the execution stages, but not so good at the other two, but it doesn't make them any less important in the whole process.  

Finally, I want to be clear that I'm not picking on Brad in this blog - I'm just using this as an example.  I have no idea how much work Brad has done on this that he didn't Twit about, since its hard to express everything you do in 140 characters.  

Key Takeaways: 

1. Know your Audience
   
2. Without context, numbers mean nothing
   
3. Your competitors strategy is not a measurement for your success
   
4. If you have a worthwhile tool, market the hell out of it
   
5. Measurement of your success depends on the business goals of your institution. 
   

Princeton's Admissions page: Ohhhhh, pretty

It's not often I'm struck by a higher ed web page of any sort, but Princeton's admissions page got me at hello. I found it as I was browsing the 2008 CASE award winners for Web Sites, where they rightfully got a mention. The main images changes each time you refresh, as do the faculty and student profiles in the lower left promos. All of the images are super striking and make me want to click around to learn more. See for yourself: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/

An e-learning college will not accept an emailed letter of recommendation?

So you would think that an online graduate program would accept an e-mailed letter of recommendation for one of their applicants right? Clearly an ONLINE program understands the power of the web and harnessing it as a business function of their institution right? They would know that having an emailed letter of recommendation saves both time and paper....right? Wrong.

A friend of mine is applying to Drexel's Masters of Science in Higher Education program. It's a completely online program and apparently one that has a pretty good reputation behind it. She asked me to write her a letter of recommendation and of course I said yes. Now, this really was her first mistake as anyone that knows me knows I am a complete slacker when it comes to writing letters of recommendation. Not that I won't do it - you'll just have to bug me until I break down and get it done. So finally the other day, she emails me and said that I HAD to do it because it was the last thing missing from her file. I say OK and emailed Drexel to see if they would accept an e-mailed PDF of the letter to speed things up.

Their reply? Of course not. Why on EARTH would an online program accept an online letter of recommendation for one of their applicants???? (Ok, not really their reply: they said they would take it but it wouldn't count because it didn't have my real signature on it.)

Folks, this is RIDICULOUS. I have both worked in admissions and went through an online graduate program for my masters degree and neither would have turned away an emailed letter of recommendation that came across their desk. I have to wonder if Drexel accepts anything by fax, since obviously you don't have the original signature there either.

Please Drexel, I IMPLORE you to make better use of the web in dealing with your potential customers. Making people jump through hoops doesn't make for happy customers (or letter of recommendation writers that now have to make an unscheduled trip to the post office!).

Building an admissions email marketing plan: Part 2 - When, Why, What and Calls to Action

This is the second in a series of posts on creating an 

effective email marketing plan for your admissions office. 

If you missed the first, read it here.

In my last post in this series, I offered some guiding principals for setting up an admissions email marketing program. From here on out, I'm going to get into the nitty-gritty. When I first started doing email marketing many years back, I was always looking for that step-by-step "how to" guide. Of course, most colleges weren't doing serious email marketing to prospective students back then so no such guide existed. I'm really hoping this blog will be a resource for at least a few people who want to get into this type of communication with their prospectives but really don't know where to begin.

So why should I bother? Email is soooooo 2003.
I bring this section up only because there are still a startling number of schools out there that are doing little to no email marketing. If you ask people to come to your website and do something, they will. Want your prospects to apply online? Then send them an email and ask them too! Ok, maybe not everyone you send it to but on average you can expect to get a 30-40% open rate and a 3-5% click through rate for your messages. The more personal and timely you make your messages, the better your rates will be. It will never be 100% (though I've had emails as high as 80% open and 60% click through) but its certainly better than the 0% you'll get by not doing email at all!

Where do I start?
A good primer for this is a previous post I did: So you need to create a marketing plan....

I'll bring it one step further with this post. Start off with the easy, no-brainer stuff. Every time there is an event, a deadline or any other important date, there should be an email to the primary audience it impacts with some sort of call to action. This may or may not require you to create a landing page with a response mechanism (be smart about when you are creating these things so you can reuse them time and time again).

So with this basic framework, let's start to build out an email calendar. These are just sample dates/events to get the ball rolling:

Notice a pattern with the online RSVP? EVERY event should have one. Even college fairs. I put a * next to college fairs because they are a little bit different. You'll only get a handful of online RSVPs for every national event you do but say you know an applicant is going to be there - why not have you representative find out the status of their application (any missing items, if they've been accepted, etc) and update them in person at the fair? Or have a pre-made packet of information for every inquiry you know is going to be there, including a pre-printed application with all the fields you know of filled in and their fee waived. These personal little touches mean a lot to kids and cost you nothing in terms of time and resources.

Next, you have to figure out the timing of your messages. This should vary based on a few factors:

1) What type of event is it? The type of event dictates the timing. Families need time to plan to attend open houses on campus, but events in their area are an easier decision. Easier still are live chats, where all you need is the luck of them being on the Internet when they occur.

2) Is there a corresponding print mailing? Emails should ALWAYS follow up a print mailing. Directors like to do what I call a preemptive strike: They want you to send out an email BEFORE the print invitation to let students know that a print invitation is coming. Does that sound a bit bizarre to anyone? Plus they never work. It's your job to take the bullet and say "NO!"  (can you tell this is a pet peeve?) Instead, send an email that follows to the students receipt of the print piece.  Follow-ups are great because they act as a reminder in between the day the student receives your print invite and the day of the event. Inevitably, a good number of your audience will have tossed aside the invite and have forgotten to RSVP but your email will jar their memory.

With these two things in mind, we can start to assign our dates.  These are not arbitrary for examples sake.  Instead, I looked at the type of event and whether or not there was a print invitation to look for a good day for a followup.  

Now, of course these dates need to be flexible to accommodate days of the week and other email communications to the same audience. As a general rule, avoid emailing on Saturday or Sunday but other than that, its fair game. However, if you take anything out of this section, take this: There is no magic day of the week or time of the day that works in all circumstances. More important than day of the week is that the message is coordinated with other types of communication your audience is receiving.

Note: When I made these tables, I forgot to put live chats on here. Chats, in my opinion, are mostly a waste of time because they only appeal to the students you've largely won over (which is find during the summer when you're trying to prevent sugar off, but not so much during the year). However, they are what they are and if you do them you need to market for them. Send out an email half and hour before your chat is scheduled to start and it will bring in 75% of your audience. Also, if you send out an announcement earlier in the week, give the students a way to RSVP online. That way if they don't show up the night of, you can call them under the pretext of checking to see if they could log on OK to remind them to get their butts online.

Additional ideas for subject areas

Events are no-brainers. They are easily scheduled and basically write themselves. But don't rest on your laurels there. What are the subject areas that matter to your prospective students? I'll give you a hint: Quality academic programs (that are going to get them jobs after graduation) and kicking ass outside the classroom (athletics, community service organizations, greek life for those you like that sort of thing, etc).  Also, tying emails into the business goals of the organization are never a bad idea.  Here are some ideas:

-Application fee waivers: A primary call to action of any admissions office is getting your kids to apply. Offer them special codes that they can put in their online application to waive the fee in your email messages throughout the fall, culminating with a "holiday" gift if they apply before the new year.

-Regular emails talking about the cool/fun/useful/impressive things going on in your academic programs. It's near impossible to do these things on a monthly basis (because of silly things like summer vacation) but there's usually interesting things going on that prospective students want to hear about like class projects or job placements or research publications by students.

-Athletic previews (discussed further in the call to action section)

-Triggered emails: There are no better times to email your applicants than right after they've submitted their application or right after they've been accepted. Consider doing emails written by your faculty members or students in individual programs to prospects who applied or been accepted to them.

-Admissions updates: Applicants have a very specific set of needs. Regular emails updating them on key dates or aspects of the admissions process can go along way in alleviating their concerns.

When you're coming up with the content of your messages, be sure to make the mental distinction between emails meant to cultivate an audience over time and emails that are meant to push the user to take the next step in moving through the admissions funnel.  News updates are for ongoing cultivation of your prospects, some of whom inquired as early as their freshman year in high school.  It keeps the name of your school and your brand in their mind.  Pushes to apply or deposit online are next steps.  You don't do these until they are at a stage where they are mentally ready to make that decision.

So what do I write?

You've figured out when you want to send your emails and what subjects they should be about. Now what do you say?

I can't tell you specifically what to say in your emails but can say that studies show content to be 40% more effective if it speaks directly to the reader using a conversational tone rather than using a business-like, formulaic one. I don't know for sure but I would bet all the money in my pocket that this is especially true when you're trying to reach teenagers. I always thought of it as writing a blog. Speak to them simply, easily and directly and they'll respond.

I do, however, have one cardinal rule of email content:

ALWAYS have a Call To Action

I can't emphasize this point enough. If you don't have something for them to do, you should be thinking twice about hitting that send key. Even if you're doing a purely informational email, relate it back to the user and give them a call to action based on that relation. For example, at my last job I did athletic preview emails that went out to all students who had inquired to a particular sport right before the season started. They were basically just an overview of the team and what the coach expected of them during the season. The call to action at the end of the email was to go on the team's website and fill out a "prospective athlete questionnaire" to let the coach know you're interested in playing. Kids LOVED these emails. Not only did a lot of them fill out the form, but they would also reply with their various stats and clips, which we'd then forward on to the coach for them. Having a simple call to action and creating a few forms on the website allowed us to take what would traditionally just be an informational email and make it into something that students could interact with.

Key Takeaways:
1) Anything that requires a print invitation requires an email (and probably some web work)
2) Don't worry so much about what specific day of the week you're emailing. Worry about coordinating it with other mailings and communication.
3) Don't be too formal. You'll only turn people off.
4) Always give your users something to do.

The basics aren't sexy but that doesn't mean you can skip them!

A friend of mine recently pointed to me to the website of a school who shall remain nameless. Their bloggers are front and center on the school's homepage. If I click over to the "future students" link, there they are again, alongside the school's link to their YouTube account and the area to "ask a question". I also know they are active their their students on Facebook and are passionate about utilizing social networking in their admissions process.

But you know what was conspicuously missing from all of this? The ability for an interested student to fill out a form to get on the school's mailing list. I kid you not. And even for two people that are rather experienced with admissions websites, it took my friend and I both a minute to track down the link, which was buried in the third level of the site.

In an era when admissions offices are lamenting the increase stealth applications (or applications that come from students who have never inquired) in inhibiting their ability to project enrollment, why would you want to make it HARDER for a student to get on your mailing list?

On her blog Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra describes the "kick ass" curve. The basic premise is that users pursue activities because they eventually want to achieve "kick ass" status, but will only put up with sucking at something so much before they give up and move on to something else. I want to adapt this idea to what I see a lot in younger (and dare I say idealistic) admissions web professionals:



Admissions web people want to do the stuff that turns them on because that is what they define as "kicking ass". In their pursuit of the kick ass stuff, they often overlook the boring but necessary stuff which they view as mundane (only obtaining them "suck" status). As boring as this stuff may be though, the basic functionality is what speaks most directly to the business goals of your institution and cannot be overlooked. Skip over it at your own peril.  

It's great to be passionate about what you do. But you can't let that passion blind you to the basics that keep the lights on. Key calls to action in any admissions office are getting your students to inquire, then later apply, and ultimately enroll. These are the steps that push them through the admissions funnel. I love blogs and video and social networks as much as the next person but they are not key calls to action. They are the things that should be done once all your base functionality is there. Otherwise, you've missed the entire point.

Key Takeaways:
1) Your audience has different desires at different stages in the admissions funnel
2) The basics may not be sexy but that doesn't mean you can ignore them entirely, as they are what some of your audience members are looking for
3) Don't do the cool stuff if you don't have the basics in place

P.S.: Just so you don't think I'm completely against social networks and community building, I'm scheming on a plan that will take the treadless approach and apply it to college fundraising.  Totally kick ass :-) (but in the meantime, I've implemented tactics that keep the lights on for my audience)

Building an admissions email marketing plan: Part 1 - The Five Commandments

This is the first in a series of posts on creating an effective 
email marketing plan for your admissions office. 


The news of emails death has been greatly exaggerated: Technology pundits have been proclaiming the death of email as a tool to reach your teenage audience for well over a year at this point. I maintain that the pundits aren't happy unless they are proclaiming the death of something. The fact is, for the type of communication a college would be doing with any prospective students, email is still extremely relevant. Remember, you're not their friend. You're more of a business contact. For their friends, in-person communication, text messaging or social networks reign supreme as their communications mediums of choice but their "business" contacts are relegated to a second-class email status. A lot of your prospective students will have created separate email accounts (that their parents have access to) for their college search process so to a real extent, they are expecting you to communicate with them through the medium. Plus its so cheap to do it will almost instantly garner a huge ROI.

Ok so it's still useful...but what do I do with it?

Before you jump into it, you need to come up with an over-arching plan or philosophy.  Here are my commandments for effective admissions email marketing:



Make it timely, relevant and personal: One of the benefits of doing email marketing is that it is very easy to customize it to the individual user. A great place to look for inspiration are political emails because these guys get it. If you can, hit the user when they are most open to it, like right after they've submitted an application or have been accepted. Statistics show that emails that are sent based on a user's action are up to nine times more effective than ones that are sent whenever. Also, make sure your content is relevant to what the user has told you they are interested in. Big news in your school's biology program is not relevant to a student who's applying as an English major! By only sending out relevant content, you create a promise with your students that you will only email them when its directly applicable to their interests, which will result in higher open and click rates in the long run.

Target the type and quantity of emails to the specific audience: The more excited your students get about your institution, the more you can get away with emailing them. This excitement usually goes by high school graduation year and then admissions status:



You should always include all audiences in your plan - a freshman or a sophomore wouldn't have inquired if they weren't interested and open to being cultivated. At the same time, be mindful of what stage they are at in their life to avoid turning them off with too much communication. The communication is meant to build off of each other. You may only be able to get away with emailing a sophomore inquiry once a month but you can add more relevant communication as they move through the admissions tunnel.

E-newsletters suck...but can be salvaged (to a certain extent): E-newsletters are probably the most ineffective type of email marketing you can engage in but for some reason, directors of admissions think they are the greatest thing ever. If you find yourself forced into the position of doing one, there are ways to salvage it to make ultra-relevant to your user. Think about merging in the following fields: name, major, high school graduation year (if they're an inquiry), phone number (and ask them to update it or add a cell number to their file), admissions status (inquired, applied, accepted, etc...), any missing items from their application if they've applied, their counselors name, phone number, email and IM screenname. And, yes, I'm taking about merging it all into the same newsletter. You'll have a huge spreadsheet like you've never seen before but it is very doable.

Also, think about incorporating student profiles into your newsletters and then segment your newsletters based on major or gender or whatever so that the user can see "students like me" in the newsletter. This will re-enforce that your school is a good place for them.

Then after you've done all this personalized stuff, put all the regular mass news that they probably won't read anyway. They may read the first two articles but readers will trail off as it starts getting longer so make sure to put your most exciting stuff at the top.

Keep it simple: Email templates should be ultra simple - a tables based layout with a simple header and a simple footer. Keep it to 600px width max. Always assume your images will be turned off when they first open it. The less distractions you give them to the call-to-action the better. Test the template before you send it if you've never used it before. Campaign Monitor provides a great service that you can use to test it in a ton of email clients for $10.

Use an external provider: Higher education institutions are simply not equipped with the resources necessary to support sending email in-house. The deliverability issues alone should make it a moot point. There are a ton of great email service providers out there, some higher ed specific and some not. If you're looking for a higher ed specific one, I really like FireEngineRed and James Tower. However, don't completely discount providers that aren't specifically higher ed oriented! A lot of colleges have gone with providers like Exact Target, What Counts, Silverpop, Real Magnet or Emma. There is no one best service provider out there - make sure you do a bunch of demos to find the one that is right for your organization.

Key Takeaways:
1) Email is still a very effective way to communicate with prospective students.
2) The more personal you get to your specific user, the more effective your campaigns will be.
3) Design for usability, not for flash.
4) You're only asking for trouble if you send emails in-house.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week!

It's your job to be "in the know"

It's a very slow week for me so I'm not really finding a lot of inspiration for blogs in my job at the moment. So I'm going to reach into my back pocket and pull out an idea from my last job in admissions (though it could be applied to any area of higher ed really).

If you take anything away from this blog, I hope it's the idea that we can't get tunneled visioned on the web because the web is not the end-all be-all experience that our users have with our institutions. 

As web professionals, we tend to get so caught up in what we're doing and all the cool possibilities that all we see is this:



To be truly effective at our jobs, we need to pull back and get the 40,000 foot view of everything that's going on:



These touch points do not exist in a vacuum to our users and they aren't differentiating them as coming from different parts of the university. Whether you're targeting prospective students or alumni, they expect us to all be talking to each other and coordinating our communications efforts.  It should be seamless and the medium should never call attention to itself.  They should be taking the call to action without having time to even think about it.  

Unfortunately, higher education is less than conducive to the type of communication required to keep things seamless for the users.  Too many egos.  Too many people obsessed with being "the director" and thus being "the decider" ;-) That means that its up to you to be proactive and find out what other areas are up to because even when you ask, its hard to weasel information out of people. Start with the base assumption that any time ANY event happens on campus that affects a significant external audience, there will be a print piece and its your job to get your hands on it BEFORE it hits the mailboxes of its audience. I'll illustrate why through an actual example from my last job surrounding an open house invitation:

I had sent out an email to everyone responsible for any sort of print piece to prospective students asking them to show me any print piece that was going to go to prospects before it was sent so I could make sure there was a web component to it. I knew there was an open house invitation in the works but didn't know when its drop date was and had hoped that when it was produced, a copy would make its way across my desk. Rather predictably however, no one paid attention to my original email.

Below, I've mocked up a sample open house invitation that went out (obviously this is to illustrate a point and is not an exact replica...but its pretty damn close):



Now, had I seen the open house invitation before it hit the streets, this is how my mind would have worked:



Unfortunately I didn't see the invitation before it went out. The website was already set up and was pretty solid based on previous years and I had just assumed that when the invitation was ready, a copy would be circulated. Instead, here is how I found out the invitation went out:



It turned out the invite had gone out a week or so beforehand.  Even though there hadn't been a call to action on the web, I think I had "trained" the prospective students at the time to expect some form of online RSVP so for them, it was still a viable option to log on for more information.  It's actually a good thing there wasn't a push to sign up online because since I had never seen the print invitation, little did I know that the information it asked for was different than had been used in previous year and the online form did not match up. By the time the mistake was caught, over 70 students had registered online for the event and now we needed to track down all of them and say "Oops, our bad that we didn't ask you for the right information in the first place." Here's the plan that was put in place:

1) Open house form revised with new fields
2) New form created that collected information from students who had already submitted the original form
3) Email sent out to all students who had RSVPed online, sending them to the new form to collect additional information.

It also took about a day of my time to assess the problem and fix it that could have been spent working on other things.

Now by itself, aside from being a complete pain in the ass, this whole fiasco wasn't a hugh deal. But if its representative of a larger problem and your users are consistently being needlessly inconvenienced because of your lack of planning or your institution's lack of buy-in then I would begin to qualify it as a problem. After a while, your users are going to look at you as amateurs. Consider, for a second, that the prospective students this invitation was targeted at were actually prospective donors with the ability to make a $35,000/year contribution to your institution. Would you treat them like this? If so, I don't think you would have a job for very long.

Key Takeaways (new feature on karlynmorissette.com :-) ):
1) A user's experience does not exist in a vacuum and should be seamless across mediums
2) If you know what the other marketing touch points are, you can better hone your web presence for effectiveness.
3) People obsessed with being a director are usually tools.

Financial aid calculators - there are better ways to illustrate your institution's story

On uwebd, there was a post yesterday by someone who was looking for quick and simple source code to do a financial aid calculator on their website.  Another member responded that he would only point her to the code if she promised that it wasn't because she read in a report that 83% of students wanted it.  I thought to myself "well, there are certainly worse reasons for wanting to implement something on your website than meeting the needs/expectations of a user."  

I always said that one of the reasons I felt I had been successful as the interactive recruitment manager at my last job was because I had done the one-the-road recruiting/admissions counselor thing before it.  That was 80% of it in my eyes.  It's hard for those who haven't seen that side of the house to understand it but when you do college fair after college fair and end up getting asked the same questions over and over and over again, you find out pretty quickly what is ACTUALLY important to students (and it isn't a school having a social network for them!).  Here's the deal: 
-PARENTS are interested primarily in the location of the school.  If you've ever heard the term black hawk, you understand - they don't want us pulling their precious son or daughter 3000 miles away from them when they aren't necessarily ready to cut the cord just yet.  
-PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS, ironically, are primarily interested in finances.  They want to know how much your school costs and how much debt they are going to be in upon graduation. Don't get me wrong, parents are also very interested in this and are likely to be more vocal about it than their students, but it doesn't top their list of concerns.  Students, like all the studies say, are more covert about it but if you talk to them at fairs or in interviews or do testing with them on your website, you'll see where they gravitate to.  

So how do school best meet this need on the web?  I'm not a huge fan of financial aid calculators because anyone that has worked in admissions will tell you that the financial aid process is usually far more complicated because of the competing priorities of the institution - things like major, gender, geographic region and ethnicity may receive more financial aid than others depending on the type of student body your higher-ups are looking to attain.  A simple, down and dirty, financial aid calculator can hardly be expected to take those outside variables into consideration since the financial aid package any student ultimately receives will come at the end of a very large and complicated algorithm.  

I've always liked MIT's way of illustrating their financial aid story (and I don't know for sure that MIT started this but I first saw it in a mailing they did in 2005 so I'll credit them).  They tell the stories of their students, some of whom come from wealthy families and some of whom don't, to show that anyone can afford an MIT education: 



You can read more stories on their website.  They then go one step further and offer a detailed look at sample financial aid packages to illustrate that they will always cover a student's demonstrated need, while also listing examples of extenuating circumstances that also may affect the overall package:

You can visit the full website here: http://web.mit.edu/sfs/afford/sample_aid_packages.html

Here the rub: Stuff like this isn't sexy and its hard to quantify.  Although I would put money on the fact that this is one of their most visited admissions/financial aid pages, you will never be able to say a student applied or enrolled as a result of a page like this but that doesn't make it any less vital to their decision making process.  It's also not a snazzy piece of technology that you developed or implemented that would look good on a resume.  Now for schools like MIT, I don't think it matters as much - they're going to get students regardless.  But say you work at a tier three school that costs just as much as MIT that is trying to attract future engineers through stellar financial aid packages.  If you don't demonstrate up front that you're going to cover these students financially, they're going to move on to another school that has a better brand name than your school or has shown they will cover full need and then some to get the student there.

Ultimately, students and their families want to be able to know they are going to be able to afford your school without being up to their ears in debt before they invest too much time/energy/money in including it in their college search process.  This is one of the basic questions that needs to be answered before they'll give you the time of day.  Once you show them they can, it becomes easier for the black hawks to cut the cord and explore the opportunity with their child.  

So you need to create a marketing plan...

I had a great phone call with Nick from Campbell University today. What originally started out as a reference check for an email provider that he uses (and that I'm thinking about going with) turned into an hour long chat about the struggles of being the resident interactive marketing person in admissions. One of the things we talked about was his struggle in creating a marketing plan, which is not an uncommon problem at all. I've seen it happen a lot when people kind of randomly land in admissions jobs (or in this case, a "e-admissions" job) and maybe they haven't had experience in marketing before. If you find yourself in this position, here are my tips:

There is no "right way": The largest hurdle seems to be that they get wrapped up in what a marketing plan should look like. Let me be clear: There is NO one-size-fits-all approach for creating a marketing plan! This is primarily a document to help you so your workflow and style needs to be an integral part of it if you want it to be valuable.

Get a 40,000 foot view: What I mean by that is that it's important that your interactive plan is integrated with everything else that is going on in your office. What worked for me was having a master calendar that I created in Visio:



If you're doing a lot of collaborative work, you might want to consider a web-based solution like Basecamp. Regardless of the specific program you use, it's just helpful to have a full view of a month at a time. I usually created my calendars in the summer (I considered the start of the interactive recruiting season to be September 1) and would start by inputting any important events or dates. From there, I would back out my schedule. For example, if there was an Open House on March 22, I would find out when the print invitations would be sent for that and then schedule the announcement email campaign to go a week after the print invites, and the followup email campaign to go a few weeks before the event. Here are some things that should be on your calendar:

• Major recruitment events such as open houses or specialty showcases
• Any specialty academic programs your college runs that could be targeted towards prospective students (i.e. academic summer camps)
• Major college fairs your recruiters are attending, with a geographically segmented email component
• Any regularly scheduled email newsletters you do for your prospects
• Any scheduled live chats
• Any type of triggered email
• Any type of special date-specific emails (like a holiday email that gives them the give of a waived application fee if they apply by the end of the year or a FAFSA reminder on January 2 that they can submit their financial aid)

This is the base of your marketing plan. Now, parts of this will be tricky because you're going to have to rely on others in your organization to give you information about their schedules if you want it truly integrated, and they are not always going to be inclined to do that. It's your job to illustrate to them the importance of making sure your interactive plan is fully integrated with traditional communications.

Continue to build out and refine: Now that you've got your base plan, you can continue to build off of it. For example:

• What emails are going to require segmentation? I always found it very worthwhile to segment emails by high school graduation year, even if the content wasn't different, do see how different audiences reacted to different messages easily.
• What are the landing pages you are going to push the students to and is there any correlating web work that needs to be accomplished? For major events, its very helpful to have the print invitations to make sure your online RSVP form matches with the print RSVP form.
• If you do email newsletters, what content will you need to go into those newsletters and is it something that you can get and setup in advance? If you need to coordinate the delivery of this content with other staff members, make it due at least a week ahead of when you ACTUALLY need it because they rarely will get it to you on the deadline you give them.

And so on, and so forth.

Do you have additional web-based features? I'm thinking things like a page on MySpace or Facebook or your own social network, a Flickr account, student blogs etc... You need to work these things into your email plan to keep them robust and effective. What can you do on your website or through email to promote them? For example, does an acceptance of an applicant trigger an email for them to join your homegrown social network? Do you have a link to your Facebook group at the end of every email newsletter? Do you have your student blogs linked throughout your school's website, particularly in places where the content is relevant (i.e. a biology major blogging is linked off of the biology website)? Ensure complete integration is the only way to get your best results.

Keep if flexible: I typically tried to do my plans a year out, but with the caveat that everything should always remain flexible. Your college might win some huge sporting event or something else that you just can't predict that might need to be built into the plan at a moments notice.

I hope some find this helpful. Since I don't work in admissions anymore, I don't feel like I have to hold on to any secrets for the sake of winning the competition for students ;-)

Show Me The Money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My last job wasn't in the hard-line budget of the university when it was first created and I knew there was a high probability that the day would come when I would have to show that they made the right decision in funding it to be able to keep my job. I literally had a folder in my documents called "Justifying My Existence" and in it contained all of my bragging material that showed the impact of the position as they DIRECTLY RELATED to the business goals of the university. That last part is the hardest - while some things are easily quantifiable, some just aren't even though you know in your gut that they have an impact.

Nonetheless, come budget time you're going to have to justify your projects to your higher ups to get funding for it and you don't necessarily speak the same language they do. I'm as guilty of any of using the "but it would be so cool!" argument, but that doesn't always cut it. Money and resources are always tight in higher ed, especially when it pertains the web because so few senior people in any organization really understand it (not that they aren't very smart people....it's mostly a generational thing). So how do you get them to see things your way? Give them numbers. I'll give you some real world examples of things they gravitate to:

You think your school's/department's website sucks and want to do a redesign.

How is this redesign going to enhance the bottom line? The primary business function of any college is educating its students. The majority of this money (I'll make a broad estimate of 65% at your average school) comes from tuition dollars, which most directly comes from admission. Another 25-30% come from fundraising/development/alumni relations. The rest of miscellaneous sources. How will your redesign enhance those areas? Will it even? If not, I would take the next step argument of saying that it will enhance current student engagement with your area and here's some testimonials from current students saying how much easier/better it would make their life.

You want to convince your boss to let you dedicate more time or money to email marketing.

A good email system can track any statistic you could ever want and even a half-hearted email marketing plan will give you results. In admissions, show how many prospective students go directly from receiving an email to fill out an online application (you can later use these results to show what percentage of these students ended up enrolling). Make a graph that compares online applications to paper applications and their change in popularity over time. In development, show them how many users went from receiving an e-mail to making an online gift (you can really easily do this with Google Analytics). With the total value of gifts derived directly from your email campaign, use the American Marketing Association's ROI Calculator to show the value these emails bring to the organization.

You hate making phone calls and want to move towards relying more heavily on IM with prospective students.

Instant messaging is nothing new in admissions and has certainly gained traction over the past five years. Yet phone call after phone call remain. You need to show IM are just as valuable, if not moreso, than that phone call. First, you have to find a way to track IM conversations, which should be as simple as utilizing an existing CRM (whatever you use to track phone calls/events/etc...if you don't have something, you have larger problems to worry about). Then you can run lists that show students you've had IM conversations with based on outcome (reject, enroll, accepted but did not attend, etc...). My past experiences tell me that the students who are going to contact you over IM are the super-excited students and the vast majority will either end up getting rejected or enrolling. Why wouldn't the university WANT to offer students that are already inclined to enroll an opportunity to communicate over their medium of choice?

You want to expand your web presence into the social network dejour.

Saying "because everyone else is doing it" is not a good enough answer. Find a way to relate this directly to the business process (i.e. $$$$$$$$$$). For example, I blogged a while ago about social ads on Facebook. Since we instrumented our ads with Google Analytics, we were able to show that, although we only got a hand full of leads from it, those leads were far more inclined than your average visitor to make a donation. It was very cheap for us to test the waters (about $80 or so for a full month of ads) but the return opened the door for future involvement on the site. Social networks, and student blogs to a certain extent, are tricky ones because they are really about engagement rather than hard numbers. You can have a group on Facebook that has 500 people in it but no one ever posts or you can have a group of a dozen or so really dedicated members that are on there 10 times a day. Which is a greater success? This is going to require some time to massage your manager into the idea of looking past the hard numbers to see the true value that can be attained, but it is worth the effort.


I hope you're seeing a pattern: Everything comes back to money.

Better website => more applications/donations => more $$$
-or-
Better website => more current student engagement => less transfers/more excited alumni => more tuition/more donations after graduation => more $$$

More email marketing => more applications/donations => more $$$

More use of IM => better recruitment of excited students on their medium of choice => higher enrollments => more $$$

More use of social networks => better leads once they are driven to your website => more applications/donations => more $$$


The last one is a bit of a stretch, but you'll have that. In addition to the numbers, many managers just want to know that you're actually THINKING about this stuff and if you show them you are, they will have more confidence in your abilities to make solid recommendations in the future. More-so, any manager worth their salt will translate that confidence like this:

More confidence in you => higher likelihood that they'll want to keep you happy as an employee so you don't get lured away to another organization (on average it costs an organization about $40,000 to fully train the employee that would replace you) => they give you a raise => more $$$ for you :-)

See, it works out for all involved.

Why let students visit you in their mall when you can build your own across town!

So I was talking with a friend about a new product that just came out that allows schools to build social networks for their prospects. My friend, apparently feeling a bit punchy today, sent them an email asking them why he couldn't just use MySpace or Facebook. Here is the reply:

Good question! The idea behind it is to engage in the conversation in your own space (or on your own turf!).

In a lot of ways, having your own social network versus using Facebook or Myspace is the internet equivalent of inviting students to campus to chat with you versus hanging out at the mall.

It's not that it can't be done, but there is a perception among Millenial students that those networks are, in fact, their space, and you don't necessarily belong there.

Not that they don't want to talk to you; they just don't always want to do it in that arena.

Also, technically speaking, both Facebook and Myspace have some distinct institutional disadvantages. Facebook, which is a little more institution friendly, is also very Spartan: there is not a lot of branding opportunity available. Myspace, which is much more brandable, is not very institution friendly. So we're covering the middle-ground design-wise by giving you a cleanly transitioning, customized design (based on your existing web brand).

In the end, the goal is not to drive students away from other social networks on to yours or to keep them from talking about you on other networks (the fact is, they'll always be having side conversations about your school). The goal is to provide an opportunity for you to greet students at your front door, rather than the places they hang out.

My question is why would you want to force a student to take an extra step to contact you by creating yet another social networking account (like they don't have enough already!) when they are already on MySpace and Facebook?  I mean, we have to acknowledge that there is a huge difference between renting a store in the mall and opening it up to everyone and accosting mall shoppers against their will and forcing information upon them.  When I was in admissions, I found that students were more than open to talking with admissions staff on either site....as long as you kept your distance and allowed them to come to you.  If they aren't going to come into your store to shop in their usual mall, why the heck would they bother trudging across town to visit another mall to shop in your store there?  

I don't know....I think this venture is misguided on the part of the company.  Don't get me wrong - I think they'll make money off it.  I just think schools that pay for it would be better off spending that money elsewhere.