Which generations do what online?

The latest Pew study looks at online activity by generation, and it offers some insights for recruiting Millennials.  No big surprises, probably, but confirmation of the things you most likely already knew.  At the very least, this is good ammunition for requesting a bigger budget for certain online recruiting tactics.

In a nutshell, the youngest internet users favor games when they’re online.  The older generations are more likely to use the Internet for shopping, banking, and other money-related tasks.

What do Millennials use the Internet for? Two things, both of which we address at length in our white paper.  Gen Y and thereabouts (ages 18-28 ) are the cohort most likely to watch videos and communicate via instant messaging.

In our research, we’ve found a number of college and graduate school admissions professionals who have integrated these two media into their recruiting efforts.  If you’re not among them, you’re missing out on a relatively inexpensive set of tactics.

A case study of Case Western

We noticed this week that Case Western University used a blog post to advertise a recent web chat powered by our product University WebChat. Very cool!

It looks like Case’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences uses their blog as a primary tool to disseminate news about their programs and recruitting efforts. They have stories advertising their PhD program, coverage of relevent studies being published and profiles of key faculty and staff.

Case is making a great effort to outreach over the Internet, and a blog can be a great way to do that. Why not try it? You can get one over at WordPress.com, Typepad and Blogger… and pleny others.

Millennials overwhelmingly use Internet to research college choices

Insights on Admissions Marketing — a cool admissions blog I just found and added to our blog roll — has a neat post covering an eduWeb presentation about the behaviour of Millennials searching for colleges.

The write-up is a great summary and I recommend you read it. Here is my favorite statistic:

75% of time spent in researching a college is done on-line.  While assuring that your house may be in order relative to the Admissions web site, you must assure that your main .EDU homepage is effective as well, if not more effective in engaging prospective students.

Overwhelmingly, potential students are using the Internet to learn about your school. They are finding about your program not by calling you, not by visiting you, not by reading your mailings but by looking at your website.

One of the major reasons we created University WebChat was to offer a simple tool to let admissions counselors extend their customer service experience online and engage with Millennials in the medium they are most comfortable (the Internet).

It’s critical you ask your admissions team this question: Are we maximising our recruitment effort by engaging with our prospects online with every tool available?

Coast Guard Academy uses web chat to speak with potential students

I was excited to see this article in Campus Technology magazinee about how the United States Coast Guard Academy is using web chat to communicate with potential students online. From the article:

“Student recruitment is one of the primary benefits of utilizing University WebChat, but it also addressed our interest in providing quality customer service,” said Leo Gonot, associate director of admissions for marketing at the academy. “Currently, we have three admissions officers who are collectively responsible for approximately 3,500 applicants. A chat session is a great way to offer instant feedback to questions raised by our applicants and their parents. It is almost always the case that if one student has a question that several others will have the exact same question. Chat is a great way to address the needs of several students during one session.”

Of course, we’re also gratified that the article is about University WebChat, which is the web chat product that the authors of this blog work on (when we’re not blogging!).

Full article: Coast Guard Academy Taps University WebChat To Speak with Potential Students

Millennials’ mass media of choice makes them more accessable

I don’t think any school has ever used TV ads to recruit students.  Even though past generations of teens through twenty-somethings have spent hours every day in front of the tube, television offers limited ability to target the ideal recruits, and the costs are prohibitive.

That’s why Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy report is such good news for admissions counselors.

The gist of their findings shouldn’t surprise you–computers and all their mobile cousins are taking over TV as the top source of entertainment. This is true for roughly three fourths of Millennials, and seems to hold true internationally.

What this means, effectively, is that if you use digital recruiting tactics such as we’ve surveyed in our white paper, you’re going to effectively get TV power on an internet budget–and with easily measurable results, to boot.

New NAFSA presentation offers tips for interacting with Millennials

The NAFSA: Association of International Educators west coast chapter (called region 12) posted a some really neat presentation slides that used our white paper as a source.

The presentation is called “Millennials and Beyond: and Understanding and Working with a New Generation of Students”. It covers some tips for interacting and engaging with Millennials. It’s a great read, and we are flattered that our white paper served as a source.

My favorite highlight from the presentation are the tips they offer for reaching the Millennial market. They include some neat ideas on blogging and using twitter.

Here are the first three tips from the presentation:

1. Become a Thought Leader
2. Hang out where your students or potential students hang out
3. Stay Connected!

You can grab the report here:
Download Report [PDF, 2.3 MB]

Enjoy!

The power of transparency in your blogs

Yesterday Jeb Banner did a post on Small Box Blog about Zappos.

The gist of his post is that Zappos’ most valuable asset is their culture, and that the hiring process is geared towards preserving that culture. They’ll readily turn away applicants who don’t fit the culture, even when it means rejecting otherwise highly qualified individuals.

This sounds suspiciously like the admissions procedure at institutions of higher education throughout North America. Your job isn’t just to act as a greedy filter to snatch up the best and the brightest while blocking the kids whose test scores don’t pass muster.

There is a much more nuanced process of discovering and nurturing students who will both benefit from and contribute to your institution’s culture.

The right content on your admissions site can help this process by pre-screening a lot of potential applicants.

In his post, Jeb Banner points out that “the web is forcing transparency on businesses.” You could easily replace the word business here with campus, university, college, and so on.

We raised this point in our recent white paper. Millennials are going to post their views of your institution, warts and all, in countless blogs, YouTube videos, and other sites. If applicants can find some of the good, the bad, and the ugly on your own site, you’ll save them some time and help them decide if you’re right for each other.

So you might as well have a few areas in your admissions blog where your students have free reign.  Prospective students will appreciate that you’re keeping it real.

Three tips for managing chat events

Setting up a web chat and marketing the chat event to prospects is just half the battle to ensure a great turn out. Here are few tips to make your ease the management of your chat events.

Tip 1: Use cool software to help with RSVPs

Managing RSVPs for an event on paper or with Excel is a pain. There are lots of cool web tools out there to help with RSVPs, and some are free.

Robust services like eventbrite, upcoming and SurveyMonkey offer lots of helpful features, but usually have fees. Wufoo is  am outstanding tool to easily create a great looking online form without any programming. While Wufoo doesn’t offer full RSVP features like the other services, they have free plans and are dead simple to use.

Also, be sure to check out Techsoup.org’s great write up on RSVP tools.

Bottom line: You shouldn’t be using paper or Excel to track RSVPs. Bite the bullet and use an online tool. It will save you and your team time, and you audience (those Millennials) will love using them to RSVP.

Tip 2: Reminders, reminders, reminders!

Just having a full RSVP list isn’t enough to ensure a great turn out. You need to remind your attendees of the event. We suggest three simple guidelines for reminders:

1. Send a reminder the day before the chat
2. Send a reminder 10 minutes before the chat is set to start, but ensure the room is open before you send the reminder. You need to ensure immediate click throughs can get right into the room. They won’t come back later to try again.
3. Call no-show attendees on the phone at the start of the chat.

The one day and 10-minute reminders are easy. And you and two colleagues can make a few dozen phone calls rather quickly. Getting a few extra students into the chat room can mean a few extra applicants and (hopefully) admitted and enrolled students. That is thousands of dollars in tuition and a few more applicants closer to your admissions goals.

Tip 3: Practice makes perfect

The sad truth about technology is that something that can go wrong, will. That nagging concern in the back of your head that you keep telling yourself won’t happen, probably will at exactly the wrong time (and in front of your boss).

The good news it’s easy to prevent problems. A few days before the event, run a practice of the chat event.

You don’t need to mock chat for an hour, but you need to make sure you can get each moderator logged into the chat room from the computer they will be using. And ask a few work studies (and ask them to recruit some friends from home to join) to gather in the chat room at the same time. Spend just a few minutes chatting, make sure everyone can login and understands how the system works.

A 15 minute practice will identify any problems that need addressing and make you look all the more professional when the event goes off without a hitch.

Bonus tip: Use text messages to send chat reminders

Millennails love text messages. They use text to chat with friends, siblings and parents. Universities are even texting admissions results. Texts are immediate, cheap (free to you) and are more likely to be read by a millennial than an email.

A text message reminder is a high impact method to keep your chat event on the mind of your prospect.

What can we learn from the Pepsi Optimism Project?

According to a new research study (on behalf of Pepsi!) four out of five Millennials are hopeful about the future as the New Year approaches. Fully 95% agree that it is important for them to maintain a positive outlook on life.

“The study also found that even though 95% of Millennials say it’s important to maintain a positive outlook on life and none reported a long-term negative outlook, 56% of Millennials feel anxious about their lives now…”

Pepsi retained StrategyOne to conduct the survey of more than 2,000 Americans as part of the “Pepsi Optimism Project (POP )”, a new and ongoing study examining the mindset of Millennials.

The survey comes as Pepsi launches a branding initiative that is part of its reinvestment in carbonated soft drinks. The campaign plans to start with a new look for Pepsi packaging, which is now beginning to appear on store shelves, and which appeared in Times Square on New Year’s Eve:

The advertising campaign will reportedly feature a consistent theme of optimism that mirrors the current social climate (and looks a little like the Obama signature logo…). We’ll keep an eye on this campaign and see what lessons we might garner for higher education from Pepsi’s research.

Bea Fields posted a clever and moving video about students on the Millennial Leaders blog. Just above the video she poses three questions:

1) Are you redesigning your education process to make it relevant and interactive for students of today?

2) Why are teachers still broadcasting information (one way lecturing) as opposed to collaborating and interacting with their students?

3) What is stopping us from using the vast technological resources we have at our fingertips to make learning exciting and a true experience for our youth?

It’s probably reasonable to address the second question by pointing out that faculty have knowledge and experience which the students do not.  But the third question deserves some thought, and it’s especially relevant for admissions.

At least at the level of higher education, many institutions are, in fact, making good use of technology in the classroom. But this short video, in addition to dramatically pointing out some important statistics, reveals the frustration that a lot of Millennials are feeling.

Chances are your institution is doing something to address this issue. There are a lot of classes and projects that involve collaboration using text and other modern media. Your tip for today is this: When marketing your institution, be sure to emphasize these instances of instruction that will impress Millennials.

Admissions officers should be familiar enough with this to answer a prospective student’s questions or offer examples of the ways your faculty are using technology to offer students an exciting and “real” educational experience.