So IKEA decides to open a new store.  They go to a local ad agency to discuss marketing.

IKEA:

We want everyone in town to know about our new store.

Ad Exec:

We can do that.  It will cost $1,000,000.

IKEA:

…Um, we were thinking more like $20,000.

Ad Exec:

Ha ha!  Wait, seriously?

Undaunted, IKEA came up with a brilliant solution.

They put $20,000 of their own furniture in their parking lot beneath a banner that said, “STEAL ME.”

Then they relaxed for the next 2 weeks as local news reporters took care of the rest, interviewing people nightly and turning it into a countdown: “When will all the furniture be gone?”

Limitations often lead to innovation.

So, what would you do if your marketing budget were cut in half?

Immediately, the salesperson began describing the computer’s features and how they would benefit the customer.

I understand why this happens.  Buying a computer can be a daunting experience.  They’re confusing, they’re expensive, the different models don’t really seem so different, and no matter which one you purchase, you have a sinking feeling you’re going to regret it a year later.

Choosing a college feels pretty much the same way.  Students have almost exactly that same question: "Why should I consider your school?"

But that’s no way to buy a computer.  That’s no way to choose a school.

When asked why a customer should purchase a particular computer, the better salesperson would say, "Maybe you shouldn’t.  It depends on what you want."

I’d love to hear an admissions counselor turn that question around to a student and ask a few of her own:

• What do you like best about high school?  What don’t you like?
• Do you have a favorite teacher?  Describe that relationship.
• If there were no such thing as doctors, what would you do instead?
• What kind of town did you grow up in?  What did you like about it?  What didn’t you like?
• Why do you want to go to college?  To get a job?  Because your family expects you to?
• How often do you go to parties?  How do you feel about drinking?
• Do you play an instrument?  Do you want to continue in college?
• What about team sports — do you want to continue playing after high school?

Use the answers to give that student an honest assessment of whether or not your school would be a good match.

If you don’t feel your school would be a good match, suggest competitors you think might be.  Be more than a recruiter and more than a counselor: be a friend.  More important than squeezing out another application is the positive word of mouth that student will generate, extolling his encounter on blogs, social networks, to friends, parents, teachers, advisors, and so on.

But if you do feel your school would be a good match, now you’ll be able to describe in detail the reasons why.  You’ll be able to use concrete examples that have significance to the student.  "You said you like playing the sax, but you want to go to college so you can get a good job.  Our university allows you to take free lessons at the music school without having to declare a major in music performance.  We’re one of the few schools in the country where you can do that."

This high level of conversation should be the ultimate goal of every communication campaign.

But look at your mass e-mails.  Look at your website.  Are you really having a conversation?  Or are you just talking?

When I first began writing software (12 years ago), much of the fun was in debugging code, trying to figure out why something did not work the way I wished.

There was no greater pleasure than spending hours or days fixing a complex problem and taming the code to my will.

And there was no greater frustration than realizing that the code would never work, that I would have to start over with a new approach.

Looking back on those years, I now know that the joy of debugging is a characteristic of amateur programmers.

The Professional

A professional programmer takes no joy in debugging.  He knows that spending more than 5 minutes debugging code is a clear sign that his approach was flawed from the start.  He takes a certain pleasure in ruthlessly deleting giant swaths of code in favor of some new idea.

The Takeaway

So when I see admissions offices promote complicated approaches that might result in small increases in applications or deposits, it feels so abhorrently wrong that I immediate distrust it.

I can’t help but think that if the best they can do is make such minor improvements, then it’s time they change their recruitment approach entirely.

Blogging, text messaging, Facebook, podcasts, variable printing, personalized e-mails, etc.

When part of a larger strategic vision and done with a deliberate purpose, these approaches can be effective.

But when done to wrangle some tiny competitive advantage, they are completely inadequate.

When you reach that point, when you start believing small tweaks will have "big payoffs," then it’s time to stop.

At that point, you’re debugging a failed approach, and it’s time to start over.

Contact does NOT measure interest.

I believe this is true for 3 reasons:

#1 Addition = Subtraction

Let’s pretend we add points to a hypothetical "interest" score for every point of contact a student has with your office.

See the graphic: this has the same net result as subtracting points from students who do not contact you.

Is that fair?  Let’s think about the reasons I might not contact you.

Maybe I didn’t contact you because I’ve known since I was 12 that I would apply to your school.

Or maybe I’m a first-generation student who didn’t know you counted contact in my favor.

Or maybe I wasn’t taught how to show interest in ways you recognize.  For example, you might not know that I stayed overnight with a friend on campus, and I might not think to mention it on my application.

#2 Interests Change

But even if we pretend addition works, there’s still no guarantee my interest won’t change later.

Maybe I’m religious (and a criminal; see below) and one day, after 50 positive conversations and 50 points in my favor, I think to check whether or not your school has a chapel.  Let’s say it doesn’t, and that’s important enough to me that I discard you from my short list.

Another example: when I was researching colleges, I hadn’t yet decided whether I wanted to major in English or computer science.  When I finally chose computer science, half my school relationships ended overnight, despite whatever scores existed in their systems.

#3 More Means Less

Theoretically, we don’t just measure interest so we can segment prospects.  We also do it to understand how a student feels about our institution relative to any others (at least that’s the case if we use interest scores to predict enrollment potential during application review).

In other words, if a student has a high score in your system—and assuming you think that number is accurate—then you have to accept the shaky proposition that their corresponding interest scores at other schools are low.

But you’re smarter than that.  If a parent calls your school 10 times to ask about your pre-med program, she’s probably calling every other school 10 times about the same thing.

And when a student’s interest scores look the same at every school, that number becomes meaningless as any kind of predictor.

Correlation is the Cause

All that said, I do know there exists a correlation between contact and interest.  I’ve seen the data.

But I’ve also seen data showing very clearly that a city’s crime rate will go up as the number of churches increases.  It’s an absolute fact.

That still doesn’t mean religion has anything to do with crime.  The crime rate goes up and the number of churches increases because population increases.

Really…

The fact that contact and interest tend to increase over time means absolutely nothing concrete for prospect segmentation or deposit prediction.

Do you agree?  Add your comments.

It wasn’t until we finished our first in-house search campaign that we finally understood all the benefits that came from running things ourselves…

The 3 Components of Search

There are 3 components to every search campaign:

1. data acquisition and import
2. communication
3. processing and fulfillment

Here’s what you gain from running each component on your own:

Data Acquisition and Import

If your search vendor acts as your liaison to the major list sources (PSAT/SSS, ACTPLAN, CBSS, and NRCCUA), then you were probably led to believe that setting effective purchase criteria is a very complicated process.  And certainly, handing this off to an "expert" will make your life easier.

But here’s what you gain from doing it yourself:

direct control over list criteria

Some search vendors want to determine which names should be purchased "in order to achieve your institutional goals."  But choosing purchase criteria is not difficult, and most list sources will provide you with access to an expert who will discuss with you the best criteria to select given your long-term goals.  Who would you trust more: someone who thinks you’ll fire them if your long-term goals aren’t met (the list sources), or someone who thinks you’ll fire them if you don’t get high response rates (the search vendors)?

advantages from list competition

The list sources compete with each other directly.  When dealing with list sources, search vendors will have some advantages over you (bulk pricing, multi-year commitments, and credit for duplicate names).  But these benefits will rarely reach your checkbook.  Instead, chances are good your search vendor charges you close to the going rate, no matter what discounts they receive.  But because they’re also purchasing names from every source, there is one advantage you can have over them.  As an institution, if you’re willing to focus your purchases on particular list sources, you can force bidding wars and lock in better values for multi-year commitments.  

importing list purchases

You’ll want to make sure your IT department is involved with the list sources early into the process.  Each list source will provide different fields and in different formats; this makes setting up initial import routines pretty time-consuming.  And because you’re purchasing from multiple list sources, you’re likely to receive duplicates (names that appear in more than one list source, or that already exist in your system from previous imports).  Your IT department will need to merge these duplicates with your existing data during the import process.

They should also mark the original list source for each record.  Not only can you receive credit from some list sources for future purchases, but it also helps you determine how lists overlap and how you can better partition your purchases among the different list providers in the future.

Communication

Traditional search campaigns include both electronic and paper communication streams.  So far, our data show no difference in the "value" of paper versus electronic responders.  We do know that students are much more likely to respond through e-mail than reply cards.  If your search vendor created your paper communications and you can’t do that on your own for any reason, don’t be afraid to switch to e-mail only.

Whichever media you choose, use the Box Model to help develop your message, define satisfaction paths, etc.

Electronic Search Campaigns

Running your own mass e-mail campaigns is just about the easiest thing in the world to do.  You need just 2 things to make it happen:

1. access to a bulk e-mail server
2. bulk e-mail software

Even if your IT department can provide access to a bulk mail server, I suggest you consider outside vendors.  Because mass e-mail is such a competitive arena, you will easily find hundreds of great vendors who provide excellent rates and amazing services.

We dropped our IT department’s mail server in favor of PowerMTA for the increased throughput, integrated authentication mechanisms (for better delivery rates), and ISP-specific throttling capabilities.

As for bulk e-mail software, I highly recommend Campaign Enterprise Manager from Arial.  The tracking reports are fantastic, the integration with our information system is painless, and the community support is very helpful.

Once you have these 2 items in place, you’ll be able to run electronic campaigns year-round, not just during search.

Processing and Fulfillment

The one piece of search I was most worried about was the processing and fulfillment of paper responses.  I wanted to make absolutely certain we could handle the high volume of response cards that might be returned to us, especially during the winter months when we would also be processing application materials.

Accordingly, this past year I contracted with a "local" vendor for data entry and fulfillment.

That turned out to be unnecessary.  Student workers or a single temp could have easily handled the volume of paper reply cards we received.

Conclusion

When looking at the entire search process from beginning to end, you realize just how basic everything really is.  In essence, we had done the same thing hundreds of times before.  That’s because every event we run follows the same basic sequence as a search campaign:

1. Create an incentive (the program, a response piece)
2. Pitch it (e-mails, self-mailers, letters)
3. Process responses (electronic or paper)
4. Fulfill (confirmation e-mail, packet for visitors, etc.)

Finally, even if you have a great relationship with your search vendor, you should consider bringing search in house for the following reasons:

• to gain strategic control over purchase criteria
• to have a proven mass communication infrastructure available for year-round campaigns
• to save money

The decision to fire our search vendor was one of the scariest we ever made.

As it turns out, it was also the best.

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:

1. refused: "prospects won’t apply; we recommend you focus on responders"
2. avoided: "our system can’t do that; we can only provide responder data"
3. 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.

Search Comes Home

So we fired them.

But it took a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of unhappiness before we committed to making the leap.  Because, despite how unhappy we were, we bought into their hype and truly believed running a successful search campaign ourselves would be nearly impossible.

As it turns out, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

to be continued…

Was the topic helpful?  Did I leave anything out?  What did you like and what could I improve?

UPDATE: Conference slides are now available on the new Box Model Resource Page.