We all know how to do campus visits.
In fact, we know how so well that most campus visit programs have devolved into a standard format with three purposes:
Information session with application and financial aid info (...with details and information that people know where to find already)
Campus walking tour, pointing at various, seemingly random highlights (...because there’s not enough time to visit everything we want to show)
Some additional meeting depending on the student, such as with a faculty member or a coach (...where we spend even more time talking at you)
In other words, we bore them, then we tire them out, then we bore them again.
This is a real missed opportunity! A student and their parents take time off school and from a busy schedule to visit campus, and their impression of the school is driven first by how comfortable they felt—spoiler alert, usually not very! Parking was far, hard to find, expensive... The weather was wet, cold, miserable... The sessions were boring...
Woolston Inventive challenged the campus visit program at a private university in the Midwest to do something far more engaging and compelling. To prove effectiveness, we piloted a part of the visit within the standard agenda for prospective nursing students. This allowed for experimentation at low risk. We took the last section of this three-part campus visit and gave the faculty a challenge. We gave them one hour to do three things:
Tell stories!
The Admissions Office staff dropped off visiting students and their parents in the nursing building with a faculty member. They started with a 10 -minute introduction. This introduction was NOT how to get into the program, and it was NOT test passing rates, and it was NOT which hospitals students do their clinicals at... The students already know this stuff!
Instead, faculty told stories from their personal experience as nurses. These students were already excited about going into nursing. Something had already inspired them, we just needed to feed that inspiration. So faculty told stories of actual experiences they’d had, of people they’d saved, or lives they’d changed. Even after just the introduction, students came away more enthusiastic about going into nursing than they already were.
Visit the Skills Lab
Then those faculty took students to the Skills Lab. There was nothing particularly “special” about this room, it was just like the skills lab on any other campus: half classroom, half hospital room. But instead of the standard approach of popping in for a minute and pointing out the obvious way the room is set up, the faculty actually engaged the students with the space.
Faculty took a teaching mannequin (half transparent so the organs are visible) and performed a gastric intubation on the mannequin. This was an actual teaching moment. Faculty demonstrated how to prepare the tube, bending and manipulating it so that it’s more pliable. They demonstrated how to speak with the conscious patient, slowly and quietly to calm them. They demonstrated how to slowly and carefully insert the tube in the patient’s nose and feed it down into the stomach. They demonstrated proper removal, hand-over-hand and relatively quickly to minimize the discomfort the patient is experiencing. Then (and this is the best part!), they handed the tube over to the student and asked the student to do it themselves. This was engaging and visceral and real for the student! It was particularly satisfying to watch as parents consistently got excited to the point of actually videoing their student doing the procedure with their cell phone!
Then prior to leaving the Skills Lab, we gave the student a branded reference card that (in the spirit of other Woolston Inventive publications) was so valuable they’ll hang on to it for a long time regardless of whether they enroll at the university or not. The card lists and shows a “Nurse’s essential tools,” the things that a nurse will always have on hand. This also provided a branding opportunity for relevant swag (not just swag, but relevant swag), and we gave them a branded pen light for checking eye dilation.
Visit the Sim (simulation) Lab
Finally we took the students to the Sim Lab. Again, there was nothing particularly “special” about this room. In fact, ironically, many campus visits include a quick stop by the sim lab to show the “groundbreaking, innovative, and interactive” technology, but without doing more than mentioning that the mannequins can breath and talk and move. We did more.
On the back of the reference card we had just provided them, we showed the nine places on a human body where one can find a pulse. Most people know about two or three: the wrist and the neck especially. Did you know there are nine?! Most students, including prospective nursing students, do not! So then we challenged the students to find the pulse on the mannequin in those spots.
Automatically as a result of this very different approach to the campus visit, everyone had a better experience. Each student LEFT THE CAMPUS A BETTER NURSE, even though they’re not even actually a nurse yet! They left the experience smarter (a Woolston Inventive imperative). They had a clear and actual vision of what it’s going to be like to enroll on that campus, something they weren’t getting on any other campus visit. Parents left excited about what they saw their students do and how much fun they saw their students have while learning. Faculty were more involved and enthusiastic: We weren’t leaning on faculty to duplicate the efforts of admission counselors, so faculty were excited about the authentic teaching opportunity and they embraced it.
And we were actually able to measure ROI. In fact, when we measured subsequent enrollment rates for prospective nursing students who participated in this campus visit program compared to nursing students who did not, we found that they enrolled at three times the rate. Also, the feedback was immediate and unanimously positive. Students and parents said they had no experience like this on literally any other college visit. Faculty, reluctant at first about doing “yet something else additional” became enthusiastic contributors. As word got out, more students signed up for the visit and more faculty wanted to be involved. Students left with meaningful, valuable, relevant, “sticky” memories and mementos.
We can do this with your visit program too!
Whether you’re on a college campus or any other location, we can make a visit stand out in meaningful and memorable ways.
Epilogue:
But this experience was so valuable it led to even more opportunity! Faculty had such a positive experience that they asked about following up with the students after the fact. They asked whether we had any beautiful images of the campus that we could turn into postcards to send a handwritten thank you note to the students. We surely did, but in true Woolston Inventive fashion we said: We can do better than that! In a best-case scenario for a postcard like this, it goes up on the fridge. Instead we asked them, what can we send that will actually be useful and sticky, not just a genuine thank you note?
So we identified a knowledge gap: The 11 organ systems of the human body. Many students know this, or at least are studying or have studied this. In fact anyone can name at least several of these organ systems of the top of their head, but few can readily name all of them. This then became an incredibly useful reference piece and study guide. Now, putting it up on the fridge is a worst-case scenario—far more likely, this valuable thank you note is going to get frequent use as a bookmark, or go up at the student’s desk or on the student’s wall. It’s another great example of how Woolston Inventive can turn a standard and staid expectation into a meaningful and engaging experience packed with relevance!