Aka, more college selection process fun. Start with brochures. Pneumococcal patient or college undergrad? You decide! No difference in the images because they ALL use the same types. One thing that will never change, like, ever, is college brochure real fake fakery. (By the way, Go Tide! Even though I just grabbed your brochure at random—don’t hate.)
But every one either has a group in front of the student union happily throwing a frisbee—or a money shot of scenic mountain backdrop. In lieu of that, a close-up of ducks in the man-made pond in front of the library will do just fine.
Another thing that hasn’t changed is the damn introduction given parents and students during the open house. Sure, after driving for three hours, I’d love to sit for another hour in a warm auditorium—listening to the dean of agriculture read from a 120-page Powerpoint deck. (If that’s not a client meeting btw...) Like an ideal Presidential speech: Keep it short and sweet. Here’s the day, there are your guides, grab some coffee, bitches.
Standard issue intro aside, the biggest single factor in picking schools is shaping up to be one thing: Hospitality. Basically, when you show up for a tour or open house, does the school have its shit together. It’s easy to be jaded by pitches, offers and such because I spend time tearing that stuff apart, but when you actually have an experience that doesn’t suck, it stands out.
One school that we were hot on just got spanked/pwned/posterized after we toured another school we didn’t know much about and had almost written off. Wasn’t money, because the school runs slightly more. Wasn’t location, because it’s in God Clings to His Guns country and not exactly easy to get to.
It was the way they took the time to explain the school. Booths everywhere explaining things, free coffee and snacks every 20 feet. Those things aren’t the only factors of course. (Kinda like saying you should buy the car because of the balloons and free hot dogs.) The school still needs to have modern facilities and equipment, a decent teacher:student ratio and opportunities for a life. All things being equal though, the “show” matters.
(Of course once the school has our government-provided financial educational assistance funds, (student loans), it’s a different story. The beautiful student union grounds are trashed that first weekend and your kid’s iPod gets ripped-off. Until then, you can only “hope” life matches brochure.)
Actually going out of your way to answer a ton of questions, having a lot of admins and students available everywhere, (and to a person anyone was able to help), and scheduling repeat events throughout the day in case you missed one made the difference. (Add this shot and it was a win-win!)
Not sure what’s next, but the decision won’t be based on a brochure.
3 comments:
I all seriousness, colleges spend so much time on development and have done little to push forward the case of recruitment in year. I would imagine part of the problem is most of the bigger places have to turn people away, anyway, so what's the point? And the little colleges just don't have the money to be inventive. But I like this what your on-the-ground experience implies. I wonder how much it would hurt them to just digitize the entire content portion of te experience? Keep things text based and feed manageable bits via email. Or offers kids the chance to sign up for text messages that give key school facts daily and can be sent out after finishing each part of a tour. Seems things like that would be more relevant and palatable to the student. Oh well. I'm tired and thinking too much. Very good post, Bill.
Thanks for writing this.
As the owner of two teens, I swear that I could write a book on this, and can't wait for the day that a University calls our agency for work.
It's so obvious. It's so easy. And yet they almost all do the same. Starting with the 120 slide PowerPoint.
Yeah, but even the worst schools described here still present recruitment tactics light years ahead of the ad industry. Why, if Madison Avenue shops offered minorities coffee and snacks every 20 feet, we’d have solved the diversity problem years ago.
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