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…

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.