The Next Frontier in Higher Ed Recruitment

Our guest post this week was written by Gil Rogers, Senior Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions and Coordinator of Electronic Recruitment at the University of New Haven. You can read his blog HERE. Thanks for contributing, Gil!

THE NEXT FRONTIER IN HIGHER ED RECRUITMENT

The title of this post is probably a little misleading, as most colleges and universities have been using the web to communicate with and recruit prospective students and their families since the first “.edu” domain was created.

However, many colleges and universities are being slow to adapt to the ever changing way the web is being used to connect and communicate. At the University of New Haven, we have positioned ourselves as one of the leaders in the use of the web and social media in particular with regards to contacting and communicating with our future students.

Over the last 3 years, we have seen our application numbers surge from about 3,000 for the Fall 2007 semester to nearly 10,000 for the Fall 2009 semester.  How did we do it?  Well, a lot of the success has to do with our hard working staff of Admissions Counselors having a more “applicant-centric” approach that mirrors our student-centered approach to education in the classroom here.  Of course, that is only part of the equation.

In addition to having one of the best admissions staffs in the world, we have also put a lot of time and effort into making sure we are communicating with students on “their level”.  E-mail is archaic … We have found that less than 40% of our prospective students actually read it!  There had to be a better way.

 With the cost of printing constantly going up, it has been critical for us to find ways to communicate with students in other ways … E-mails and phone calls are great; but oftentimes students want to read when they are ready to read … and respond at their own pace.  That is where social media comes in.

 It started about a year and a half ago.  I asked my director if it was OK to start a University of New Haven Facebook profile to see how it goes.  Within a week we had almost 500 “friends” before our profile was taken away by Facebook because Charlie the Charger (our mascot) is not “real” (although I would argue that!!!).  That is when I learned about pages for organizations.

 From that day, we have gone on several other social media ventures; including creating accounts on MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter (being as mainstream as possible); as well as working with some of our favorite partners including CollegeWeekLive! (the largest college fair in the world), Zinch.com and Straxis Technology.

 Last summer we worked with Straxis to introduce “MyUNHSpace”, an exclusive online community for students who had enrolled at UNH for the upcoming fall semester.  This was their own little place to connect with each other and as well as current UNH students to ask any questions they have while they waited to make their transition to college.  With the economic challenges that were looming we were anticipating about 30% of our enrolled students to cancel their deposit.  However because of the increased communication with these students, particularly on their level through the online community, only about 10% of our students cancelled their enrollment for the fall … most of whom were students who never created their MyUNHSpace account!

 This is just one example of how social media has paid tremendous dividends to the University of New Haven.  The stories go on and on … from driving traffic to the UNH Blog on Twitter, to answering students’ questions in a timely manner on our Facebook Page, communication is constantly flowing between us and our future students … and completely open lines of communication are never a bad thing.

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