Don’t make the same mistakes as the GOP

Lets look at two quick facts:

1. In 2016, the youngest millennial will reach voting age and the largest voting bloc in the United States will be Millennials, not the Baby Boomers.
2. The real story of the recent presidential election in the United States wasn’t the major victory for the democratic party, but the historic loss for the republicans (the GOP).

I promise not to mention politics too often on this blog, but this recent post about Millennials and the election contains a valuable lesson for recruitment:

President-elect Barack Obama wouldn’t have that new title if not for voters in their teens and twenties, according to those who study youth voting patterns. More than just voting for him 2-to-1 over John McCain, young people — part of the so-called millennial generation — were the “sales force” that marketed Obama to the nation, said Eric Greenberg…

Two parties — two organizes — vied for the White House. The one that learned to speak and engage the Millennials succeeded. The party that ignored the Millennials failed.

The lesson is clear: Failing to understand and speak to these digital kids will be deadly to your hopes are building an exciting, diverse, competitive and productive incoming student population. Accept that they are different, accept that they are challenging and adapt your message to them. Don’t expect them to adapt to the message you wrote for a different generation.

How to use admissions blogs to recruit Millennials

You probably believe in the potential value of blogs, since you’re reading ours. But when we researched our recent white paper, we discovered something interesting.

Most of the admissions officers we talked to said they felt admissions blogs were important. And the students we interviewed who said they visited blogs generally found them useful. But a surprising number of Millennials told us they had never visited an admissions blog.

This is the classic online dilemma: You build it, but they don’t come.

We did manage to find some exceptions, and you’ll find links to some outstanding and successful admissions blogs in our white paper. There are two strategies that seem to consistently make these blogs effective.

The first is simple. You have to publicize the blog. In your emails and other correspondence with applicants, on your main web pages, and every time you interact with Millennials you should make them aware of your blog. Whenever possible, give them a specific reason to visit your blog.

The other big blogging secret my be unnerving to some. The secret is to let students post in the blog, uncensored. This gives your blog an authenticity that may be missing if every post was written by an admissions counselor. The most effective (and popular) blogs have a healthy balance of posts from both the students and the administration.

We’ve included a lot of information on blogging and other technology in our white paper, The Millennial Environment: New Recruitment Strategies for the Next Generation. You can download it here.

Making videos to recruit Millennials

I did a recent YouTube search for “College Admissions” and found 1,490 videos. The term “campus life,” which is likely to reflect videos produced by students, resulted in a much larger 29,900.

Clearly, the creation and sharing of video is a significant part of Millennial’s lives. If you can tap into some of that creative energy when you recruit, you may be able to reach additional students.

In producing our white paper, we asked some Millennials about video as a recruiting tool. Most of them said they were bored or even put off by obvious advertisements. But something that’s sincere, entertaining, and hopefully a bit edgy can have a positive impact.

One of the best ways to do this is to get current students, or even applicants, to make the videos themselves. This might take a leap of faith, because you’ll really have to relinquish almost all control over the project.

If you’re concerned about what a random student might put in a video about your institution, consider that it’s probably already been done. If you do a search on YouTube, it shouldn’t be too hard to find videos about your institution. One more isn’t going to hurt, and it can have a strong positive impact if you empower the right person to make it.

In our recently-released white paper, we go into depth on how you can use video to recruit. You can download the white paper here to find out more.

Even the banks are doing it

As if we needed more confirmation that Millennials like interacting over instant messaging (IM), text messages and web chats. A new survey by Javelin Strategy and Research showed that the Millennial’s preferred method of banking is over the web, specifically IM on their PCs and text messaging on their phones.

Here is my favorite quote from the Ars Technica coverage of this survey:

A new survey conducted for Microsoft by Javelin Strategy and Research shows that “Millennials”—people between the ages of 18 and 30—heavily prefer interacting with their banks through higher-tech (and lower-human-interaction) methods like the web, IM, and SMS. Unsurprisingly, a large majority of Millennials surveyed said that they prefer to go online for basic banking transactions, like checking account balances (74 percent) and paying bills (70 percent). (Hell, doesn’t everyone who’s into technology does these things nowadays, Millennial or not?)

Young people tend to go a step further than most average people, though, when it comes to dealing with banking customer service. 15 percent reported that they prefer dealing with customer service over IM, and Canadian Millennials in particular preferred IM for a plethora of other activities, like receiving financial advice, opening a new account, or applying for a loan. Australian Millennials seemed to like receiving account alerts over SMS at more than double the rate of the general audience (23 percent).

Banking activities — like checking your account balance and moving money around — are notoriously sensitive transactions that users tend to want to ensure are secure, private and confidential. If Millennials are willing to bank over IM, then they definitely want to interact with your customer service (read: your admissions recruiters) over IM, web chats and texts.

Might be time to host that first web chat, setup that Facebook Admissions group, open an AOL IM hotline or send acceptances over SMS (text messages to cell phones). We cover all of these technologies, and more, in our white paper: The Millennial Environment: New Recruitment Strategies for the Next Generation.

We cover each next-generation Internet technology, provide links to more resources and reading for each technology and discuss how you can use these to enhance your marketing efforts.

A few good broadcast email tools

A typical broadcast email deliverability report

Readers of this blog are most likely always on the looking for better ways to email hundreds or thousands of potential students at once.

Maybe you want to send fancy eNewsletters, or maybe just text invitations. Maybe you’re hoping for a tool that can send emails to very large, or relatively small, groups—one that can integrate with your offline database, customize the content for large donors, send emails to tailored segments of your list, or track who’s opened which email.

Here on this blog we use the Constant Contact system to allow people to sign up for our (Fabulous!) twice-monthly tips and tricks newsletter. On other projects, we have used MailChimp, which I like very much. However, as

A clearly-written and practical review of a variety of broadcast email tools appears this week on the Idealware website, “A Few Good Broadcast Email Tools.” (Full disclosure: I’m one of twelve contributors to the article.) Although the article is targeted toward readers from nonprofit organizations, it’s a great summary of a wide range of affordable and leading broadcast email tools.

And for those of you who are into statistics and benchmarking, here are some useful industry averages for email marketing for the Education sector:

Open rate: 25.95% (how many people opened your email)
Click rate: 4.78% (how many people clicked on a link in your email)
Complaints: 0.05% (how many people filed a complaint that your email was spam)
Unsubscribers: 0.26% (how many people unsubscribed as a result of your email)

Are admissions officers in conflict with Generation Y?

A recent post in The Accidental IT Leader points out that in today’s workplace, the greatest probability of conflict is between Gen X and Gen Y.

While admission to an institution of higher education is different than a job, these potential conflicts are worth looking at.

Specifically, the Accidental IT Leader points out that Gen X is used to learning via the “classroom model,” where information is presented by lectures, manuals, and (in the “high tech’ version) through video or online tutorials. By contrast, Millennials have grown up learning to jump right in and learn by doing–often collaborating with peers.

Your admissions and recruitment processes probably resemble the classroom model, which is understandable as most admissions officers are from Generation X. But there are ways you can start to make the experience more hands-on and interactive, without changing too many things.

One of the easiest ways is to have current students liaise with new applicants. If you’re ready to add some Internet technology to the mix, consider chat rooms and other group-centered, real-time devices.

This might require a few small changes on how your do things, but the Accidental IT Leader’s post includes the observation that “with change comes opportunity.” This is just another way to have an edge.

New white paper: Recruiting Millennials

We are very excited to announce today the release of our new white paper:

The Millennial Environment: New Recruitment Strategies for the Next Generation

To skip this post and get the white paper right now, just sign up for our email newsletter

If you want to attract today’s students to your institution — those digital, online and multitasking Millennial folk — you will need to play on their field. There’s still a place for catalogs, email, and maybe even the good old fashioned phone call. But if you haven’t harnessed Web 2.0 tools to enhance your recruiting efforts, you’re missing out on some of the brightest candidates.

In this white paper we review cutting edge Internet technologies that Millennials are using right now, and offer ideas and insights on how to use those technologies to market and convert your prospects into admitted students.

Get the white paper right now

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What the white paper covers

We’ve released a new white paper that outlines specific recruitment strategies for Millennials using their preferred technologies. This 10-page report explains and explores the major, popular online tools Millennials are using today: Texting, Instant Messaging (IM) and Chat, Video Sharing, Blogs, Twitter and Pod casting.

For each tool, we explain how it can be used for admissions recruiting, provide links to explore the technology further and include reactions, feedback and comments from the Millennials we surveyed for the report.

Read a snippet to the white paper right now

We posted a snippet of the white paper online. Check it out!

Hot to get the complete white paper

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Show Millennials what your alumni can do

Generation Y has shown its power. Millennials had a strong influence over this week’s presidential election, and proved what we’ve said before in this blog: This generation wants to have a positive impact on the world.

Experience.com conducted a survey and found that 71% of college students and young alumni want to work for a green company. Blogger Mark Kaefer warns employers that they need to try to do everything they can to make their companies more green–even if it’s just implementing a recycling program or using cloth towels in the restrooms.

Greening your institution is a useful recruiting tactic, and you should do so for other reasons as well, but that’s not what I’m going to suggest in this post. There’s something much easier to do.

Surely you have alumni who are now performing an important service to the world. And no doubt, some of them will be glad to talk about the ways your institution empowered and inspired them.

These alumni could be natural heroes and role models for today’s applicants. They are doing the work that many Millennials dream of doing. Through them, you can dramatically illustrate the difference that your institution makes.

Members of your institution’s alumni association probably receive regular news about the great work their fellow alumni are doing. What I’m suggesting is that you share more of this news with the students you’re trying to recruit.

In times of economic woe, play to your impact on earning power

A recent post over at Generation Integration — a blog about HR issues in uniting different generations in the workplace — blogger Roberta Matuson mentions the findings of a recent hiring survey of Millennials:

“According to a recent article in HR Magazine, half of all U.S. college students would be more likely to accept a job that offers higher pay, but less career satisfaction, in order to repay their student loans.”

This Millennial sentiment is only be magnified by the recent economic global turmoil that has rocked the US from main street to wall street (to be painfully cliche). What does this mean for your recruitment message?

Simple: Make sure your highlight the programs you offer that have proven increases to individual earning power. Phone your career office for graduate employment rates, research some statistics and get some data from salary.com.

Put together a simple marketing plan — maybe just an email and a brochure packet — and highlight just a few key programs and the impact on earning they provide upon graduation. You don’t even need to create pages of new copy, just use a few key facts with some light rewriting, and your message will shine through.

ButlerU Takes WebChats To A New Level

Brad Ward, the marketing and recruitment specialist at Butler University, offers his observations on a successful WebChat he conducted last week with potential students. He held the chat from 8-10pm, and had 132 students participate in the chat, and here are some statistics from who participated (statistics provided by Brad Ward on his blog):

• 132 chatters logged in during the 2 hours.
• Only 3 were in last week’s chat (98% new visitors)
• 30% were ‘app complete’, 20% were ‘app incomplete’, 40% were ‘prospect’, and 10% were ’suspect’.
• 10% were international students.
• Every student who called in was ‘prospect’ or ‘app incomplete’.
• 11 ‘app incomplete’ students finished their application after the chat last night.

You can read about the successful WebChat, “Taking Chats to a new level.“

If you’re thinking about hosting a webchat, there are lots of good, affordable options to run your webchat.