THE BOX MODEL

Part 1 of 5

I first heard of the funnel approximately six years ago when I began to develop web-based applications for the college admissions office at a highly selective university in southern California.  As a developer, the enrollment funnel provided me with context for each project by helping to identify the target audience (admitted students, for example) and what the goal of the project should be (converting admitted students to enrolling students).

Websites soon led to e-mails, which led eventually to letters and publications.  By the time I became responsible for all communications in the admissions office at another private university, I had come to depend on the enrollment funnel immensely.  The funnel became the start of every letter, every event.  It drove our communication plan and recruitment initiatives, and I relied upon it to gain insight into student behavior, to recruit ever higher-quality students to the university.

Over time, however, problems arose, and the funnel became less and less helpful.  Student behavior began to diverge substantially from what the funnel predicted, so I became focused on short-term strategies to push students through proscribed stages, unable to imagine a world outside the funnel’s narrow boundaries, locked into traditional recruitment approaches.  As more problems arose, we turned to outside vendors for enrollment expertise, to tell us how to recruit students to our own university.  But these vendors were even more bound to the model than we were, and they could not deliver students who matched our enrollment objectives.

Eventually, the problems with the enrollment funnel grew to outweigh the benefits.  When asked to develop a new communication plan, I threw away the enrollment funnel and searched for an alternative model that could better meet our needs.  I looked for a model that could explain the shifts in student behavior I had seen in my six years in admissions, a model that would tell us how better to recruit and to communicate with prospective students.

In the end, I created a new model for college enrollment.  I took from the funnel what worked and threw out what did not.  I tried to view the enrollment process from the student perspective and to find where our institution fit in.  I developed transition points between stages that forced me to rethink our recruitment initiatives.  As the new model developed, it became clear to me that we had been doing many things wrong.  And that we were not alone.

Continued…