Improve Communications from Deposit to Matriculation
Although communications might be tracked by individual departments on campus, taking inventory of the cumulative assortment of outgoing emails, letters, or phone calls can uncover duplicated or contradictory messages. These disconnected points of outreach can cause confusion and frustration among incoming students, resulting in a negative first impression of interacting with your institution.
EAB’s Communication Inventory Template can help you centralize communications across all departments that engage with students after deposit. The Template assists department communications leaders in tracking the date, subject, type of communication, audience, and intended goal of all student outreach efforts in one common place. All communications to new students, regardless of medium, should be catalogued.
Every office reaching out to students post-deposit should be included in the inventory process. Distribute a copy of a blank Communication Inventory Template to a leader in each department, and consolidate all responses into a master workbook when completed.
While logging all student touchpoints in a spreadsheet is an efficient tracking method, visually displaying the communications can reveal features of the outreach schedule that may not stand out in a spreadsheet. There are two key benefits of convening key personnel from each office for a workshop.
- First, visualizing all communications helps identify errors, such as conflicting messages sent simultaneously or with off-brand imagery. Arranging printouts of student communications by month helps pinpoint instances of these mistakes.
- Second, workshop participants can discuss changes live. Communications flagged for being asynchronous or jargon-heavy can be discussed by both the owner and other department leaders, ensuring that all communications adhere to their original purpose while also serving the broader goals of the university.Â
The audit workshop is directed toward managing the timing and branding of student communications. Communications that have language-related challenges such as those with high levels of jargon or text-heavy passages should be sent to a post-workshop committee for final revisions. Plan and conduct an audit workshop by following EAB’s guidelines in Step 1 of our Post-Deposit Communications Improvement Toolkit.
During the audit workshop, leaders should record in the Communication Inventory which touchpoints will be eliminated, revised, or kept as-is. Following the workshop, a committee of department heads should reconvene to review the touchpoints flagged for revision.
For example, many student communications aren’t as intelligible as they may seem, as the university leaders writing them are familiar to the terms used in the field. This terminology and level of speech might not be understandable to the average college applicant. Use the Gunning-Fog index, an online tool that scores writing based on readability, to ensure communications are written at a level easily digested by students. Learn more about revising communications in Step 2 of our Post-Deposit Communications Improvement Toolkit.
The long-term goal of a communication audit is to establish a coordinated, cross-department communication schedule. Centralizing this plan can help avoid sending conflicting or duplicative messages that negatively impact the student communication experience. Following the communications audit and revision process, use the Communications Inventory Template in Step 1 of this Roadmap to build a final post-deposit communications plan.
After the contents of the inventory spreadsheet are audited during the workshop and poor communications are eliminated or revised, the updated inventory should be distributed to all departments as a new post-deposit communications timeline. After the plan is distributed to all stakeholders, implement a standard method for reviewing and updating the plan throughout the year. Use Step 3 of our Post-Deposit Communications Improvement Toolkit to finalize a communications plan.
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