Enrollment Funnel Failure 18 Sep 2007
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Part 4 of 5
Finger in the Dam
In an attempt to salvage the familiar and to squeeze reality into the enrollment funnel, many experts have promoted remedies that address the problems listed above. Unfortunately, these fixes rarely work.
For example, attempts to push students through the stages often leads to short-term trade-offs that seriously imperil enrollment objectives. When faced with this situation, common sense would tell us to re-examine our desire to push students through stages. But experts instead tell us to use predictive modeling to better align our initial purchases.
In other words, if we originally purchased 10,000 students with the characteristics we want but only 100 exited the funnel, and we want 200 students next year, then we should increase next year’s purchase to 20,000 students. That way, even if we make the same bad decisions, we are still left with the class we want.
Or, if prospects no longer appear interested in your institution, rather than find out what they want and what you can offer them, maybe you just need a new image, a new name or logo, or a mission statement. In other words, there is no need to change what you say, just how you say it. Branding initiatives fall into this category. Basically, their suggestion is to exert a lot of time and energy focusing on things that are only tangentially related to recruitment.
Another expert suggestion for when students ignore your message is to change its frequency. For example, our search vendor sent out 15 e-mails to each name we purchased, until they either responded or told us to never speak to them again. When we raised some concerns about the frequency, we were told politely that we were not the experts, that as long as a single student responded to the 15th e-mail, the frequency was justified. They said students who responded to the last few e-mails were just as likely to enroll as the earlier responders.
Of course, when we performed our own analysis, we found that was not at all true. This vendor spammed our prospective students and used response rates as a justification. It was not malicious; they simply never stopped believing that we judged their value to us in terms of quantity, as opposed to the quality of the inquiry and how the student felt about us. They operated as if the conversion from prospect to inquiry were the finish line, not the start of a very important conversation. So we fired them.
Ultimately, there is no reason to laud a record-breaking search campaign if a large portion of the responders do not match your institution’s enrollment objectives.
The moral of the story is that no one else can recruit on your behalf because no one else understands your institution or can make the personal connection required to attract quality students. Luckily, when you stop using the enrollment funnel, you get rid of the very same problems that made you look for outside help in the first place.