The importance of communicating with your currently enrolled students

A while back I was working to help a campus with their communications flow to incoming students. The plan was to blend the recruitment communications flow with the matriculating student communications flow. We made a startling discovery: At some point early in the summer, what had been a carefully crafted recruitment communications flow became a completely uncoordinated mish-mash of mailings from different campus departments. Worse, if a student registered for and attended an early summer registration event, they could go six weeks with no communication from the campus at all. Then, once classes started, there was no institutional plan for communicating with current students. Sure, various offices sent e-mails and stuffed mailboxes, but there was no coordinated communications plan.

That single occurrence got me thinking, asking, and observing. Were most campuses like this one, investing so much time and energy in building a communications plan to recruit students and then having almost no communications plan for continuing students? Shouldn’t a communications plan for continuing students be just as important as the prospective student communications plan?

To check my own impressions, I dug into two recent Noel-Levitz’ reports: the first on best practices in marketing and recruitment, and the other on best practices in student retention. In the first, 2011 Marketing and Student Recruitment Practices at Four-Year and Two-Year Institutions, my expectations were confirmed. Note in the table below, which comes straight from the report, how intentional colleges and universities are in their written communications flow to students. Notice how communication frequency increases as students move closer to matriculation.

What I found in our 2011 Student Retention Best Practices at Four-Year and Two-Year Institutions report challenged the impressions from my campus-based work over the last few years. One item the survey asked about was a “comprehensive plan for communicating with current students via e-mail, the Web, regular mail, etc.” To my surprise and contrary to my experience, the survey results show that 85.7 percent of two-year publics, 81.3 percent of four-year publics, and 75.8 percent of four-year privates DO use such a method for retention. Across all institution types, though, less than 22 percent of schools say that it is a “very effective” practice, with between 35 and 44 percent saying such a strategy is minimally effective.

So I wonder now what campuses are doing with their continuing student communications plans. Are they re-marketing their college or university, or are they promoting programs and services? My hunch is that it’s more of the latter, and not much of the former. Why not do both?

Every campus I work for has success stories, from current students partnering with faculty on research, to powerful service learning programs, to recent alumni finding jobs or otherwise making their dreams come to life. Too often too few on campus know those stories. Maybe it’s also because I earned a master’s degree in English, but I know that narrative is a powerful force in our lives. Well-crafted communications to current students that capture student and alumni success stories show our current students that they are in the right place to make their own dreams for success come true. Those stories resonate with students.

If you make a purchase, major or otherwise, does the company stop communicating with you after the sale? More likely they try to get you to join their rewards program (think airline miles; electronic store rewards programs; grocery store savings programs).

Campuses should be doing the same with their students. You may not build rewards programs, but you should be regularly reminding your students of the value of the educational path they are walking, re-marketing your campus, and in a very real sense re-recruiting the students who are already studying at your institution. It not only goes a long way toward helping you fulfill your educational mission of guiding students toward the completion of their educational goals, but it also is far more cost-effective for you to retain a student than to take the time and expense to recruit a new one.

If you would like to explore this topic in more detail, my colleague Jim Hundrieser is conducting a free Webinar, Designing Effective and Efficient Communication Strategies for the Millennial Generation, on September 16. Or feel free to e-mail me with questions or leave a comment.