THE BOX MODEL

Removing Distractions

Note: For context, you should read the posts in the "Enrollment Funnel Failure" series before reading this article.

A better model would acknowledge that institutions fit into the student decision-making process, not the other way around.  The stages, therefore, would exist from the student’s viewpoint.  But in order to be useful to institutions, the transitions between stages must be identifiable using criteria we can measure.  That would allow us to identify where in the process the student exists so we can craft messages and recruitment initiatives that provide real value.

Let us build this better model step by step.

We already identified the boundary between prospect and inquiry as a false distinction that provides no real value to recruiters.  Everyone is a prospect until they apply.  This matches how a student views the college search process: he does not start the search by deciding which schools he will attend; he is focused instead on determining which schools he will (or will not) apply to.  He would never label himself an inquiry and would be the first to tell you that his list of schools could change at any time.  Our model should remove the inquiry stage entirely, even as it acknowledges that not all prospects are equally committed to an institution.

The new model discards the inquiry stage entirely and instead segments prospects into three cohorts based on their relationship with an institution. As with all our stages, the three prospect stages exist from the student perspective.

The lowest cohort encompasses the traditional definition of prospects, responders, and early inquiries.  Basically, it is the set of students who have not yet made a firm commitment to your institution.  This includes students not traditionally considered prospects, such as search responders.  These students may have met with a representative of your institution in their hometown or even interviewed.  But, since contact does not indicate interest, you have not yet seen any clear indication that your institution has been placed on the students’ so-called “shortlist” of schools to which they may apply.  Think of it as purgatory–your school faces the very real possibility of being either kept for further consideration or discarded entirely.  Understanding your position this way will drastically change how you communicate with this cohort.

The medium cohort contains students who have not yet decided to apply to your school but like what they have seen so far.  They have demonstrated some measurable indication that your school ranks favorably on their list.  This stage is the rough equivalent of the traditional definition of inquiry.  Most institutions like to pretend that all their prospects exist in this stage.

The highest cohort contains prospects who have decided to apply to your institution as soon as the chance is offered.  They may be seniors, juniors, or sophomores; their age is completely irrelevant as long as the decision has been made.  Still, until they apply, they will continue to require your occasional focus and attention.  These students have made a not-inconsequential emotional commitment to your institution that requires a different communication approach than you would use for either the low or medium cohorts.

We must not fall back into the erroneous belief that we can push students through stages that only have meaning for us; these three cohorts exist from the student perspective.  But, in order to make our message and recruitment activities meaningful, we do need to be able to identify when students have made the transitions between the three cohorts themselves.

Next: Prospect Transitions

Part 5 of 5
The Enrollment Funnel, Summarized

Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The problems with the enrollment funnel, again, are:

• Students who do not progress to the next stage of the funnel are often ignored or discarded as institutions concentrate their resources on those who demonstrate the greatest perceived interest.
• A desire to push students through specific stages of the funnel (the focus on high response and conversion rates between stages) can lead to an incoming class that does not reflect the institution’s original enrollment goals.
• The focus on well-understood funnel stages and historical response and conversion rates limits an institution’s willingness to look beyond its previous approaches–deviation from the funnel is seen as costly and dangerous.
• Over time, the funnel has become less and less accurate; it is no longer useful as a model.

These problems exist because the funnel is predicated on two incorrect beliefs: that institutions control student decision making because they control communications, and the best way to measure interest is through contact.

Next Time: A New Recruitment Model

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Part 4 of 5
Finger in the Dam

 Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

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.

Continued…

Part 3 of 5
Why the Enrollment Funnel Fails

 Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The reason the enrollment funnel fails is because it is predicated on two erroneous beliefs: that we control the information students use to make their decisions, and that contact is a good measure of interest.

The enrollment funnel assumes that colleges and universities control the information students use to make decisions, but this is no longer true.  Having grown up surrounded by advertising, students no longer make decisions by relying on a single source of information.  Instead, they rely on networks, real and virtual, to help make their decisions.  Students give more credence to the guidance of family members, teachers, and even their doctors, than they give to institutions.  Online college-bound communities and “independent” publications take a lesser, but still contributive, role when gathering information on potential schools.  As tough as it is to hear, what your institution says about itself has less credibility than it used to.

But even today, many admissions websites still push students to “join the mailing list,” either out of habit or from a genuine belief that placing prospective students within their communication plans affords them more control over the college search process.

Letters, e-mails, and publications will always have a place in recruitment.  The trick is providing real value to students at their current stage in the process, not trying to push them to another stage.  Put another way: you cannot manage people; you can only manage their motivations.  Because we do not control student behavior, a communication plan or recruitment strategy focused on moving students through the funnel can only ever have tangential, happenstance success.

The second incorrect belief underlying the enrollment funnel is that contact is a good measure of interest in an institution.  Although it is true that contact can demonstrate interest and help a counselor determine whether or not a student would be a good fit, if measured incorrectly, it can also potentially harm your institution.

Take phone calls, for example.  Most schools probably measure this point of contact and take it as a positive indicator of interest when reviewing applications or pushing students through the funnel.  Let us pretend a phone call adds a point to a student’s “enrollment potential” score.  There are 3 reasons why relying on this type of contact to indicate interest is misleading at best and harmful at worst.

First, a student who does not call is not necessarily less interested in the school.  It could simply be the case that he already has the information he needs to make his selection (perhaps from relatives or teachers).  Adding a point to the students who call is like subtracting a point from students who do not.  You are left with interest scores that do not match up to reality.

Second, even if a student calls 50 times, every conversation was positive, and the counselor believes strongly that her institution is the student’s first choice, that could all change the next day.  Maybe the student is moderately religious and suddenly discovers that your college does not have a chapel.  It could be enough of a deal-breaker to devalue completely those fifty points she had accrued.

Finally, if a student calls your institution 50 times, chances are good she is also calling every other institution on her list 50 times.  This is the cardinal rule of spam: the more contact you get, the more indiscriminate it is likely to be.  Even many first generation families know that contact counts in their favor and make their best efforts to respond accordingly.

That becomes a serious issue.  After we moved our admissions website toward a personalized and student-driven account system, we began to receive calls from nervous parents who no longer knew how to “join the mailing list.”  Without a way to “prove” their interest in our institution by requesting publications, they felt their son or daughter could be at a disadvantage when it came time to be reviewed for admission.

Even in the early stages of the college search process, savvy families know our expectations and very much do not want to disappoint us.  So, when students do follow the enrollment funnel, it is more likely to humor us than because we have control.  The irony is tremendous: since all schools measure interest the same way, savvy families know how to show it to us; but, because they are simply gaming the system, admissions offices are left without a fair, accurate, and institution-specific way to gauge student interest.

And institutions are not the only losers.  Families who are not so savvy–such as first generation or underrepresented minorities–seem to lag behind.  Because they do not know the rules of the game, they appear to have less interest and to move through the funnel more slowly than their counterparts.  They do not necessarily have less interest, of course.  Many of these students want very much to attend college; they simply do not demonstrate their interest in ways we recognize and measure.  We can try to compensate when reviewing applications, but a good model would not put us in this situation to begin with.

Basically, when contact is used as a measure of interest, you end up with an inflated pool of inquiries receiving undue attention and a devalued pool of prospects who have as much (if not more) real interest in your institution.  I will suggest some solutions to this problem throughout this paper.

These two beliefs–that contact shows interest and that we can control student decisions–are the central tenets of the enrollment funnel.  If they are not true, then the funnel no longer has any value for us.  And yet, rather than discard the failed model, we look for ways to fix its many problems.

Continued…

Part 2 of 5
Serious Problems

Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

According to the enrollment funnel, students progress through five distinct stages of increasing interest in an institution: prospect, inquiry, applicant, accept, and enrolled.  Some variations on the theme exist, but these five stages are a fairly common component to all of them.  For years, institutions have known a few of the very serious problems this model engenders.

Because the enrollment funnel focuses on recruitment and “pushing” students through stages, it demands a continuous short-term approach that leads to problematic trade-offs.  Specifically, our desire to push students through specific stages of the funnel (our focus on high response and conversion rates) can lead to an incoming class that does not reflect the institution’s original enrollment goals.

Even worse, our attempts to push students through stages leads to over-inflation; we end up with inquiries who will not apply, applicants who will not finish, and admitted students who will not deposit.  Last year at my university, fewer than 18% of search responders began an application; in other words, more than 82% of our applications came from non-responders.  Our focus on increasing response rates improved one area, but it hurt us down the road.

This short-term focus on stage transitions also stifles strategic innovation.  If new initiatives do not show immediate (i.e., stage-transitional) payoff, they are often discouraged.  We are left clinging to modestly-successful historical approaches that will not disrupt any of our tenuous predictive models.  In short, the enrollment funnel limits strategic thinking more than it supports it.

For example, our institution sends senior inquiries the first part of our application paired with a viewbook.  These two items could not be more diametrically opposite to prospective applicants.  The viewbook is used by students to help remove schools from consideration, a tool for the start of the college search process; as such, it belongs in the early prospect stage.  The application, on the other hand, is seen by students as a major milestone of the search process; high-quality students only apply to schools after careful consideration, not on a whim.  But because we have achieved modest success with this combined approach in the past, we feel safer continuing the mailing (and spending an incredible amount of money on print and postage) rather than pursuing alternatives which may or may not be more successful.

A third problem with the enrollment funnel is that, over time, it has become less and less useful as a predictive model.  Students jump straight from prospect to applicant without ever demonstrating the characteristics of an inquiry.  Added to that, an increase in applications no longer guarantees an increase in deposits.  And students we might traditionally expect to deposit opt instead to attend schools we may not consider competitors.  Searching for answers, we try to mold the model to fit reality, are told to mine our data and to perform multi-variable regression analyses.  In the end, we are left with a greater understanding of the past, but without any real predictive abilities or suggestions on how to recruit future classes.

But the biggest problem by far with the enrollment funnel is that it encourages us to focus more attention on students in later stages than earlier stages.  If students do not flow through the funnel, they are discarded.  Case in point: despite being a very well-known and popular higher education consultancy firm, we were the first university to request all prospects from our search vendor, not just inquiries who responded to the initial offer.  The idea was so contrary to their prescribed approach, it took two full search cycles before they would consent to give us our data.

Prior to that watershed moment, we never communicated with 80% of the students whose names we initially purchased, choosing instead to focus on the 20% who responded to our search campaign.  But when any contact initiated by a student is enough to elevate him from prospect to inquiry, you not only lose out on discriminating prospects, you also end up with an inflated pool of inquiries.  Setting the hurdle so low makes the distinction between prospect and inquiry almost worthless for recruitment.

Besides leading to a weakened inquiry pool, in an age of cheap communication, there is no longer any reason why an institution should so eagerly embrace first interest during a search campaign but not after.  Anytime a prospect wants to demonstrate first interest, to reach out to your institution, you should jump at the opportunity.  Limited space and resources are never an excuse to turn away a student who wishes to take a step forward and interact with your institution.  Creating a false distinction between diluted inquiries and unknown prospects is a quick and easy way to lose many potentially great students.

The fact is, until they apply, everyone is a prospect.

Continued…

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…

The cover story on this month’s Campus Technology magazine isn’t unique, but it definitely deserves some criticism.  Here’s the lead-in:

Resourceful college administrators, marketers, and technologists are discovering that the best way to reach…prospective students…is to speak to them in their own social networking space. … Your incoming students are now expecting a presence of your college or university on social networking sites.

Why is this bad?  Because the article’s entire premise–that colleges need to move to social networks in order to communicate with students–is patently false.

The author tries to justify the need to move to social networks by using a combination of mischaracterized research from Noel-Levitz and the biased opinions of so-called experts who make a living selling social networking software or consulting services.

For example, the article duplicitously suggests that because students want to engage with admissions counselors using instant messaging, colleges should respond by joining social networks:

72 percent of those surveyed would like to interact with an admissions counselor or student admissions worker via IM. Officials at Mars Hill College (NC), a liberal arts institution, must have been paying attention to findings like this: They wanted to get closer to their current and prospective students, so they decided to do it by congregating where the kids actually congregate— online on social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn.

That makes absolutely no sense. Social networks and instant messaging are two completely different media used by students in different ways and for different reasons.  Just because students say they expect colleges to use instant messaging doesn’t mean they also want us in their personal social networking space.

Continuing their faulty logic, the article cites the part of the Noel-Levitz report suggesting students wish to see campus-based social networks as an excuse to promote the move to MySpace or Facebook.

What great timing, then, that the night before reading the article I spent 3 hours helping moderate one of the freshmen focus groups conducted by the admissions office at the University of Rochester.  At one point, the students in my group were asked point-blank whether or not they wanted colleges to become more involved in social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Without hesitation or qualification, their answer was a resounding, "No!"

Asked to explain, they expressed the same concerns and doubts we’ve heard before: if they know an official is "lurking," they won’t ask honest questions, won’t expect honest answers, and would therefore no longer find value in the site and probably stop using it completely.

That said, they very much appreciated the social network we had created on our site for the incoming class.  They liked having the official resource where they could get serious questions answered, as long as they also had the personal space where they could talk about parties, drinking, and other topics of real concern to them…without being judged.

In other words, prospective students only find value in public social networks when admissions offices stay away from them.  If we get involved, students become frustrated and move elsewhere for the information they’re seeking.  Do we really want to frustrate our prospective students?

The article tacitly acknowledges this with a warning that social networks regularly delete profiles created by institutions because they drive down the value of their site to individuals.

So here’s what we’re left with:  biased sources, faulty interpretation of research data, no student perspective, and a warning that social networks don’t appreciate what the article promotes.  I expected better.