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18 more ideas for engaging admitted students (from the cutting room floor)

November 7, 2018

It may still be application season on most campuses, but this is exactly the right time to be examining how you’re engaging admitted students. Our recent white paper, 10 Practices for Improved Yield Communications, takes a detailed look at the most important ideas we’ve uncovered along these lines. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read it.

Even if you have seen the report, I wanted to highlight a part that’s easy to overlook, but that helps illustrate just how many options exist for improving your yield communications (good news because it boosts your odds of finding a good fit.)

I’m referring to 18 additional ideas described briefly in the appendix of our white paper—approaches uncovered during our research that, while definitely worthy of consideration, didn’t make our “top 10” cut for detailed presentation in the report. This bumper crop of tactics emphasizes things you can do now, within the current yield season—ideas that, due to their modest cost, short time frames for implementation, and light lift in terms of coordination, are best suited to rapid action.

Read on for the full list.

18 ideas for improved yield communications

Cost and value

Aid-award translation: “Translate” aid offers from other schools into a format matching yours, to help families make apples-to-apples comparisons.

Outcomes reporting by major: Provide career outcomes data by academic major on your school’s website (see here for a case study.)

Parents

Social media

Social-safe response option: Allow admitted students to share photos and other content you prompt them to provide without it “hitting” their personal social media accounts.

Aggregator page for student-generated-content: Set up a dedicated website for reposting or curating material from current students’ social media feeds; share it with admitted students.

Flash swag contest: Run surprise contests on social media in which students responding correctly to a school trivia quiz receive a free school sweatshirt.

Themed photo contest: Admitted students post photos of themselves wearing school-branded T-shirts to social media, competing in several categories; winners, chosen by voting, are awarded prizes.

Communications plan

Personalization

Personalized acceptance posters: Send posters to accepted students with school-related imagery and personalized text/details from the student’s application.

“Unfakeable” customization: Add a paragraph to your admit-offer letter that discusses detail from the student’s application in a way that makes it clear it was not generated via automation.

Content strategy

The campus community

Social media campus tours: Have your student ambassadors create and post short campus tour videos to Instagram or Snapchat.”

Affinity-based student-to-student outreach: Have current students from affinity groups reach out to applicants who have expressed a related interest.

Physical formats

More recruitment ideas

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