Search Comes Home (Part 1 of 2) : The Box Model

Search Comes Home (Part 1 of 2) 16 Jul 2008

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Dan

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My institution relied on an external search vendor for over a decade. We gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars, trusted them to purchase the best names from the 4 major list sources, let them completely run our first point of contact with students, and asked almost no questions along the way.

Eventually, thank God, that changed.

But it wasn’t easy. Here are 5 tough battles we fought with this particular vendor:

Battle #1: Purchase Criteria

My boss fired the first shot when he told them he wanted to determine the search purchase criteria. Despite over 20 years of experience at a more selective institution, our vendor told him his involvement would be a bad idea. They reminded him that they were the experts. When he pushed, they pushed back. It took some dire threats before they would let us participate in this very important (and basic) part of the admissions process.

Battle #2: Getting Answers

At the end of each year’s campaign, our vendor would send us a pretty binder full of colorful pie charts and data tables. These were meant to show us how great, effective, and necessary they were to us. Taken alone, the data certainly seemed to suggest progress: numbers always went up.

But we wanted to know more:

Where were the data behind these graphs?
Can we get information for non-responders, too?
How many students unsubscribed? (I.e., How many bridges did you burn in our name?)
Which e-mail did each student respond to? The first, the third, the tenth?
Which messages were most effective in generating responses?
How do you ensure electronic delivery? How many e-mails were marked as spam?

We never got any straight answers. Ever.

Battle #3: Data Availability

Although we paid the company to purchase over 400,000 student names, we were only given responder data.

When I asked for our non-responders, they:

refused: "prospects won’t apply; we recommend you focus on responders"
avoided: "our system can’t do that; we can only provide responder data"
up-sold: "what do you want to know/do with that information? — we can answer/do it for you"

It took me 2 years of fighting before they sent us non-responders.

Battle #4: Message

The e-mails this vendor developed were straight out of the spammer’s guide to generating responses:

Subject: "Betty and Sue Want You…"
First Sentence: "To learn more about XYZ University!"

One e-mail had the words "drugs" and "party" in it (when referring to pharmaceutical research and student life).

Another e-mail was called, "Six Degrees of XYZ University," and was based on the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The e-mail spent 4 paragraphs linking the University to Kevin Bacon. The postscript mentioned some of our Nobel Prize-winners. The postscript!

And when we pushed back on the number of e-mails (thirteen), we were told, "Students who respond to the last e-mail are just as likely to apply as students who respond to the first." Oh, really? In what universe?

Finally, we told them to scrap all the e-mails they’d written, and we wrote 6 new ones from scratch. So really, what were we paying them for?

Battle #5: Strategy

Despite their assertions to the contrary, we’d begun to suspect that search responders (inquiries) weren’t any more valuable than non-responders (prospects). We began to see high response counts lead to a diluted inquiry pool and less effective recruitment.

So we brought the vendor to campus to explain this simple idea. I told them, "We don’t care about numbers. Who cares if you give us 100,000 responders? If they aren’t responding because they care about our institution, then we don’t want them. We want 10,000 awesome responders who love us."

Unfortunately, it was like talking to a blank wall. Despite all their rhetoric and assertions to the contrary, they clearly believed value came from quantity, not quality.