Situation Summary
We worked with a mid-sized regional university in a genuinely unique situation to re-focus recruitment marketing that led to a significantly increased return on investment. This school was in a relatively urban setting but surrounded by vast rural stretches far removed from the population centers of the state. The school had been struggling with recent enrollment declines and was trying not just to reverse those declines but even grow enrollment. Like just about every other college in the state, they were using tried-and-true traditional recruitment methods focusing on the population centers of the state where there was a critical population mass and enough people for growth... except it wasn’t working!
We analyzed the data and found, for instance, that from one of these population centers (a top population center in the US) only 2 students in a class of about 600 had enrolled as a result of recruitment efforts there. By contrast, the majority of students at the college were coming from the surrounding region. This was challenging given that in addition to how rural and sparsely populated the region was, we discovered low college-going rates with many primary feeders in the mid-30% and mid-40% range, ranging down even to 29% high-school-direct-to-college rates in a few instances. The combination of all of these factors—the remote locations of many of these towns and school districts, the small populations, and the limited potential for enrollment—was why this university had not been actively recruiting in these areas, relying exclusively on current enrollment trends and word of mouth. Verifiably since they weren’t recruiting in these towns, other colleges and universities across the state were also neglecting the region. Essentially the entire area was going un-recruited. It’s no wonder that recruitment success had been so limited.
To summarize the challenge: The school was recruiting in areas where they were hard-pressed to be successful, and not recruiting in areas where they had been seeing most of their success and where there was untapped potential, although how much was undetermined. We concluded that we should re-direct recruitment efforts and invest them into the region.
Strategy Development
We built and implemented a three-part strategy to re-focus recruitment efforts in an effort to grow enrollment by doing the following:
Build a unifying theme for recruitment efforts: “College-bound”
We envisioned embedding recruitment within a wrap-around program with a higher purpose than recruiting college students to a single university. We designated the idea of “college-bound” as a sort of brand, not just to promote a college-going culture but also to raise awareness of the university and increase the visibility of its own brand, impact, and alumni. We realized that the work to drive students to college as a viable option would be beneficial to the university to some extent regardless of how many of those students enrolled there. With college-going rates so low, just by appreciably increasing the number of students enrolling in college, all schools in the region would see enrollment growth.
But especially the university leading the culture change.
Direct recruitment efforts
Typically recruiters are assigned a specific geographic location, and are responsible for visiting all the high schools in that area to promote the school. We began by shifting the focus of recruiters and expanding it significantly. Instead of a large territory comprised of large swaths of the entire state along with adjacent states in which they were responsible for visiting all the schools, recruiters were assigned a portion of the newly defined catchment region only. They were tasked with not just visiting the high schools, but creatively increasing the visibility of the university in each town to which they were assigned. This continued to include high school visits of course, but now might also include some variation of civic, recreational, promotional, and other educational (besides high schools) opportunities.
To help with the approach, Woolston Inventive created a “tooldeck” for recruiters, a cross between a toolbox of recruitment techniques and the organizational framework of a deck of cards. This beautiful, branded deck was customized beyond color scheme and the back of cards (typical generic branding for a deck of cards). Instead of simple suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, those symbols were worked into a new icon of the wildlife, plants, and other distinctive features of the geography of the region. Each card 2 through 10 was labeled with a specific opportunity for visibility in the town, for instance:
The “civic” suit included ideas like: organizing and sponsoring a local service project, establishing a recurring presence at the city library, establishing visibility at the community center, visiting the nursing home
The “recreational” suit included ideas like: becoming involved at community events or festivals, building a presence at nature centers or museums, building a public city website or calendar resource, handing out water bottles at events
The “promotional” suit included ideas like: setting up town brags or picture posts from iconic spots in the community, purchasing billboards (usually much cheaper in these outlying areas), sponsoring local organizations, partnering with local businesses with swag or other team-ups
And of course the “educational” suit, easier and more traditional which built upon the traditional high school visit by encouraging alumni profiles, faculty spotlights, and program or major spotlights based on what was more relevant in the area
The face cards (jack, queen, king) were left blank to allow for other options that the recruiter could identify unique to that town and actually write onto the card. In this way, each recruiter could create a “hand” unique to each town, as small or as large as the situation might dictate, specific to the opportunities there. Obviously this is not a traditional recruitment model, and not all of these ideas would be viable opportunities in any city, it just depends on the community—which is actually the point! Further as the examples above might suggest, not only did this approach give each recruiter more options on how they approached recruitment, it gave them much greater discretion in who they would partner with there and how they would spend funds.
(One final note about the tooldeck, regular players of card games will wonder about the two jokers in the deck. These cards also had a purpose! They were used to map the area, one locating the region of focus within the state and the other providing an outline view of the individual territories for each of the recruiters!)
Determine broader tactics and initiatives
In addition to the highly customized recruitment approach for each town, we planned a few specific strategic initiatives that could permeate all areas regardless of the recruiter or territory. These emerged from the focus of the overall strategy (college-bound) and common opportunities across the area. Some examples include:
Branded “College-Bound” shirt: As noted elsewhere on the website giveaways are sticky if they are some combination of useful and cool. Everyone already has too many t-shirts, so we branded a dry-fit, long-sleeved, hooded t-shirt. We put on it the college-bound logo, class of 20XX, and the university name. This was certainly more expensive than a regular t-shirt, but because we were so clear about our target for it we were able to produce one for every senior in the entire region, then deliver them to the school counselors for distribution. This also created opportunities to connect and collaborate with school counselors; many of them were already good partners, but some were just too busy to work with us and this opened doors for us for collaboration because we were bringing the counselors something awesome to give to their students. In theory the shirts were “sticky” because as a dry-fit it folded up very compactly making it highly portable, and as a light long-sleeved tee it was versatile meaning that students could wear it in all kinds of weather, indoors and out. Subsequently we knew it was effective and popular because within a month we started seeing it all over the area: in stores, in restaurants, in schools, even on pickup basketball courts! Not only was it effective as a branding opportunity, but when students wearing this looked in the mirror, they literally saw themselves as college-bound.
Alumni profiles: Given the importance of the university in the region, we had countless alumni throughout the area who worked in all industries. We put together a process to profile willing alumni from or in the towns where the recruiters were and highlighted their work, their favorite spots around town, and their experience at the university and how it prepared them for success.
Kid art: Naturally many of these alumni were graduates from the education programs and were now teaching in the elementary, middle, and high schools. We put together an art competition for their students and published the winning entries as university-branded bookmarks and as greeting cards. Not only did this feature the students but it also gave us yet another collaborative connection with community resources, distributing bookmarks through the public library, and greetings cards at the local drug store
Leadership partnership: The rubber meets the road (also literally) in the office of the mayor where the real work gets done. We coordinated a meeting opportunity between a very willing university president and the mayors of towns to discuss common areas of interest and ways the university could serve.
Among other things! There was plenty of innovation in the traditional work too, including a very close partnerships with the primary volume feeders in the immediate area (the “can’t afford to miss” schools) and a financial affordability given the importance of managing both the cost and the value of college. All of this fit elegantly into the wrap-around College-Bound program.
Results
As a direct result of the coordination of these efforts, the university not only reversed the enrollment decline but began breaking records for the largest freshman class in history. It returned to pre-pandemic levels of enrollment but, even more importantly for the long-term pipeline and funnel, it began to build a more stable brand, identity, and reputation throughout the area. The university provided critical support not just to high schools (like usual) but now also to entire communities and organizations throughout the towns, and it increased the relevance of college to the entire region.
One final note, while this case study presents a very linear summary, the actual development of the College-Bound initiative developed and evolved essentially simultaneously but almost in reverse order. With creative and committed recruiters and leadership, Woolston Inventive was able to capture countless good ideas, focus them, and develop the unifying theme (College-Bound) that focused all of these efforts into a cohesive strategy where each initiative magnified the impact of the others.