Services: Attract More of the Right Students
Helping you starts with a deep assessment of current practices, comparing them against best practice, then sharing recommendations for both immediate and long-term improvement in systems, strategies, tactics, investments, campus mobilization, and team deployment. Our team uses the 5 P lens to provide a comprehensive evaluation.
Strategic Planning
Every college needs a strategic plan. Accreditors, donors, and board members require not only the presence of a strategic plan, but even more want to measure the difference it is making in the life and progress of your campus. Developing the plan is an important first step, but even more critical is implementing your plan in active, measurable ways. In order to implement, you need both buy-in and ownership from your faculty, staff, and board.
Enrollment Optimization
We analyze your current recruitment system and develop a plan informed by research and a thorough understanding of best practices. We take a comprehensive approach, looking not just at big-picture strategy but also at specific tactics, personnel deployment, staffing, resource allocation, and campus mobilization. We help you understand exactly what you need to do to attract the students you need.
Leadership Counsel
Leadership counsel provides presidents and other college leaders with a safe place to talk through challenges and opportunities with a trusted, experienced expert. This is available in several different forms, customized to meet your needs.
Best practice, by the way, does not consist of a laminated sheet. Principles which comprise best practice must always be translated in the unique nature of your campus, competitor set, program mix, enrollment, and setting. Picture a rural Bible college with less than 200 students and a comprehensive Christian liberal arts university in the suburbs with 1,500 students. While many of the same principles apply in each setting, differences in scope, program mix, size, team depth, and setting must be considered when framing recommendations.
In addition to enrollment assessments, we also help colleges and universities with:
- Writing recruitment and strategic enrollment plans – this is usually done as a follow-up to an assessment, capturing the recommendations and what we’ve learned into a written plan with action steps, key metrics and goals, and supporting analysis of your data.
- Staff training engagements – from our research with Christian college admission counselors and those who supervise them, training and ongoing professional development is an ongoing priority. From summer training workshops to longer engagements, we can help ensure your team knows what to do, knows when to engage others, knows how to make the case for why your institution is worth choosing, and knows how to make the most of the data you have.
- Enrollment coaching/consulting retainers – enrollment leadership is a complex, demanding, and never-ending task. From decades of conversations with enrollment leaders, we know they crave access to ongoing expertise, perspective, and a safe place to examine ideas, talk about team and campus challenges and opportunities, and extract key “so what/now what” insights from their data. Enrollment coaching can be as simple as a monthly scheduled phone call or as involved as monthly, in-person days. We can customize a coaching engagement to meet your needs.
- Making strategic sense of your data – what data should you collect? What does a regular rotation of enrollment and market research look like and what do you do with the results? How do your funnel metrics compare to other relevant institutions? Our team can help you answer these questions and more, providing training, analysis, and data-informed recommendations for strategy development and refinement.