How You Can Improve Your Admitted Student Events

As you enter the home stretch with this next class of students, your admitted student events will play a critical role in helping you achieve your enrollment goals and minimize melt.

So, how will your events be different, unique, or better than your competitors?

I ask because in the campus visit audits I do with colleges and universities, most students describe these events as looking and sounding very similar. Students move around from room to room, sitting through a bunch of presentations and listening to people talk at them. There’s a break to get some food, they may get to spend a few minutes talking to a current student or a faculty member, and then they go home and try to process what was a whirlwind of a day.

That leads me to my first piece of advice. Focus less on the amount of information you’re providing, and more on creating opportunities for engagement and connections – with your current students and staff, as well as with other attendees (both admitted but undecided students, and students who have already submitted their deposit).

Here are three additional tips that will help you deliver a more enjoyable, impactful, and memorable experience for all attendees.

1.    Give students and their parents/guardians options when it comes to how they spend their time. What an undecided student wants and needs isn’t the exact same as a student who has already submitted their deposit. Some of the questions and concerns a student from out of state has are different than those of local students. First-generation students tend to also have different wants and needs. For parents/guardians, some need additional help with the financial piece while others are curious about how dorm selection, move-in day, and billing will work, as well as different student resources that your campus provides. Offering choices ahead of time will make your event feel more personal and relevant.

2.    Intentionally connect admitted but undecided students with students who have already submitted their deposit. While the majority of attendees haven’t made a final decision yet, you’re going to have some students who have already committed and are really excited about the future. How are you leveraging that group to help you influence students who are undecided? And, how are you creating opportunities for both groups to engage with current students? Consider breaking off into smaller groups and doing low-pressure interactive activities.

3.    Have a very clear post-visit communication strategy that involves personalized outreach and not just emails and texts pushing a student to deposit and/or repeating a lot of the same information that was shared during your event. My advice is to have your messaging come from a student’s admissions counselor with the goal of trying to understand if they’re more excited or less excited about the idea of being a student at your school – and what their timeline is. The best way to glean that information involves asking direct questions like “What are one or two reasons why choosing <College Name> feels like it could be the right decision for you?” And, “What do you have left to do before you think you’ll be ready to make your decision?” I would also recommend that you send similar but separate communications with different questions to the student’s parents/guardians. I shared some of those questions in last week’s article.

If you’d like to get even more tips to enhance your admitted student events, that’s the focus of my latest podcast episode. Listen to it now. 

HERE'S WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW:

Schools have started inquiring about my popular summer recruiting workshops for their admissions, enrollment marketing, and operations teams. If you’re thinking about training and professional development, let me take care of all the details.