OATdb Archive - Sam Houston State University

OATdb Archive

2014 - 2015

Enrollment And Communications

Goal

Recruitment And Enrollment

To provide affordable, quality education to a diverse population by recruiting and enrolling qualified freshman, transfer, adult learners and graduate students for admission.

Objective

Competitive Marketing Team

Streamline the graduate admissions enrollment process by hiring a graduate e-communication person to implement Hobson's in the admissions process.

KPI

Qualified Communication Staff

Qualified staff hired. Communication plan used with prospective graduate students from inquiry through enrollment. Associate Director Lauren Sears began to implent a mult-chanel communication plan.

KPI

Online Communication For Graduate Students

Create the intial foundation of the yield rates from application to acceptance for graduate students through online communication.

Action

Communication Implementation

Communication staff has implemented a multi-channel communication plan for graduate students via Hobsons Connect, with touchpoints in the following phases: prospect/inquiry, applicant, and accepted student. Media channels include Hobsons emails and phone calls, mailed print items, and online live chats via College Week Live. Prospective students receive approximately 9 emails over a period of 60 days, including an email authored by the graduate advisor of the academic program of interest (53+ unique academic program emails maintained), a printed brochure about their academic college of interest, a phone call from the Graduate Recruiter, invitations quarterly prospective student chats, and occasional news emails topical to their interests. Applicants receive 3-4 emails notifying of incomplete application status, as well as a phone call, a “fun facts about SHSU” postcard, and invitations to attend online chats with Grad Admissions staff via College Week Live. Accepted students receive a welcome email, a mailed enrollment checklist/folder, and email and phone communication about registration periods.

Goal

Identify An Appropriate Enrollment Management Tool (EMT) Hobson/Recruiter

Identifing an appropriate enrollment management tool (EMT) Hobson/Recruiter would allow our Department to stream line communication, provide a portal for advising, increase reporting and tracking from recruiting to enrollment to graduation, and allow for additional or supplemental application materials.

Objective

Streamline Communication

Streamline communication to students, provide a portal for advising. Increase reporting and tracking from the start of recruitment to time of enrollment to graduation. Allow for supplemental opportunities for additional application materials.

KPI

Cost Analysis

Cost benefit analysis of various enrollment management tools (EMT) available.

Result

Ellucian Recruiter

Result

Implementation Set Back

With multiple set backs Ellucian’s SWAT team’s recommendation was for us to wait for the latest release of Recruiter version 4.0. The original release date was January 2015 but it was not ready. The current release date is the end of September 2015. SHSU’s Graduate Admissions implementation is currently on hold pending this release.

Action

Ellucian Recruiter Implementation

The project kick-off was April 23, 2014. During project discovery onsite with the consultant in July 2014 there were several goals that were deemed as unfeasible in Recruiter. The main one being the fact that Ellucian did not have a solution for applications loading from ApplyTexas into Recruiter and then into our SIS. We worked around this issue, utilizing the consultants time, until it was necessary for project go live. It was decided to continue with only implementing the Graduate Admissions with hopes to revisit the use of Recruiter for Undergraduate Admissions at a later date. Late September 2014 a project Gap Fit Analysis was conducted by Ellucian’s team. The results were provided to us with a recommendation of continuing with implementation while they had a resource dedicated to creating an application parser to load our applications. Once this was delivered late November 2014 our project team concluded the parser delivered did not provide all or even correct data.

Goal

Recruit And Identify Higher Quality Undergraduate Students

New strategic plan: Competitive Packaging Program "Sam Scholar". A recruiting program to identify higher quality students that more than likely would not have applied to SHSU on their own. This program will develop scholarship packages for these individuals based on test score and high school GPA. Goal is to attract higher quality students to support the new College of Health Sciences and all other academic programs as SHSU.

Objective

Sam Scholar

Competitive Packaging Program – a recruiting program to identify higher quality students that more than likely would not have applied to SHSU on their own. This program will develop scholarship packages for these individuals based on test score and high school GPA. Goal is to attract higher quality students to support the new College of Health Sciences and all other academic programs as SHSU. We intend on targeting 20K students who have not applied to SHSU that fall within a test score of 23-31. Our goal is to have 3K apply to SHSU and have at least 500 enroll with SHSU.

Build a team to support the program by utilizing current employees within Admissions, Financial Aid, and Enrollment Management.
The team will create the appropriate messagin, monitor distribution of messages and udpate messages as needed. The messaging includes dollar amounts for specific sholarship. The team lead will monitor the distribution amounts to make sure that we are staying within budget.

This is not a short term program. We will implement and adjust as needed but this will become an enduring program in order to support our academic programs.

KPI

Qualified Team And Team Lead

Appoint a team lead to CPP and utilize staff within Admissions, Enrollment Management and Financial Aid.

Result

Team Transitions

Christine Gann was appointed as the CPP team lead and included a team of Rachel Somers and Mauri Martin from Enrollment Communications, Lydia Hall and Brandi Jones from Financial Aid. Due to implementation of another project Christine Gann was replaced by Program Marketing Coordinator Meghan Burton was appointed to be Team Lead assisted by Rachel Somers

KPI

Miller/Cook & Associates, Inc. And Capture Higher Ed

Utilizing third party vendors for initial setup process. Although this is a proven recruitment tool, it is a completely new program and a completely new way of thinking for recruiting students at SHSU. Although we have had an increase in enrollment over the last 7 years, we must begin to attract higher quality student especially with the possibility of outcome based funding. Additionally, the university has announced the new College of Health and Sciences. The new programs that will be housed in this college require a higher quality student. For example, the current average ACT score in the US is 20. However, the average ACT score of health science majors is 24. We have to attract the higher quality student to ensure that they have the academic standing needed to be successful in health science programs

Result

Establishing Goals

Miller/Cook & Associates as well as Capture Higher Ed allowed for SHSU and Sam Scholar to establish a starting point in our competive packaing project. The vendors helped establish realistic goals and set the CPP team on the right track. After our pilot year ended we have decided to no longer utilize the vendors as an in-house team is now able to manage the communication plans and work with prosepctive students.

Action

In House Implementation

Sam Scholar enrolled 32 FTF for FY14 and FY15 yielded 29 returning Sam Scholars and 46 FTF. For FY15 Meghan Burton implemented promotional items and a Sam Scholar event with games and prizes to increase participation and enrollment. Enrollment Communications will no longer be utilizing the third party vendor Miller/Cook and has been working hard to create in-house mailed pieces, purchases test score names/prospects, and created the online communication plan in Hobsons with Marketing Coordinator Mauri Martin.

Update to previous cycle's plan for continuous improvement

Although Enrollment Communication has yet to reach our enrollment goal for Sam Scholar, Sam Scholar enrolled 32 FTF for FY14 and FY15 yielded 29 returning Sam Scholars and 46 FTF. For FY15 Meghan Burton implemented promotional items and a Sam Scholar event with games and prizes to increase participation and enrollment. Enrollment Communications will no longer be utilizing the third party vendor Miller/Cook and has been working hard to create in-house mailed pieces, purchases test score names/prospects, and created the online communication plan in Hobsons with Marketing Coordinator Mauri Martin. We continue to make improvements and create new communication elements to this scholarship program.

The main reasons for implementing the Ellucian Recruiter CRM were that it would cost less than the current CRM yearly contract and hopes to increase efficiency and combine resources.
With multiple setbacks Ellucian’s SWAT team’s recommendation was for us to wait for the latest release of Recruiter version 4.0. The original release date was January 2015 but it was not ready. The current release date is the end of September 2015. SHSU’s Graduate Admissions implementation is currently on hold pending this release.

Enrollment Communications prints 15 mailed pieces in order to communicate to prospective students. We utilized a theme of "Community" and also used "tweets" from current students to catch the interest of our target market. For FY16 we intend to create additional pieces and pieces targeted towards parents.

In addition to printed pieces we continue to communicate to prospective students, applicants and supsects through Hobsons Connect. We have started implementation of a new CRM Ellucian Recruiter but have paused implementation of our communication plan in Recruiter due to integration issues. Associate Director of Enrollment Comm, Lauren Sears and Marketing Coordinator, Mauri Martin have begun optimizing email communication to be mobile friendly and are in the process of updating all emails in Hobsons as well as the possible recreation of a communication plan targeting parents.

Communication staff has implemented a multi-channel communication plan for graduate students via Hobsons Connect, with touchpoints in the following phases: prospect/inquiry, applicant, and accepted student. Media channels include Hobsons emails and phone calls, mailed print items, and online live chats via College Week Live.

Plan for continuous improvement For 2015-16 we are implementing Sam Scholar communications in-house. We will continue to target students with 27-36 ACT and 1220-1600 test scores but will target Majors/Colleges and programs based on the recommendation of Cabinet. Our goal to enroll 100 Sam Scholar students is still in place and with collaboration from student organizations, UG Admissions and FYE Office we hope to reach our goal in 2016.

Enrollment Magement's implementation team continues to work with Ellucian Recruiter in hopes that intergration with Apply TX is successful and that auto decision rules can be identified. The implementation process is on hold as a new 4.0 version of Recruiter is being released. The implementation team will be tasked with identifying if Recruiter is the best CRM for SHSU or will seek out other CRM options moving forward.

Enrollment Communications will begin to work on a 4 year RFP for mailed communication pieces. We will identify which vendors can fulfill our need for additional mailed pieces (14-20 pieces), an artistic designer, print house and photographer. We intend to create a few pieces to target parents in addtition to our prospective students.

Hobsons Connect and Digital Marketing will continue to increase and update emails, phone calls, mailed/printed items and online live chats with prospective students.

New AVP Dr. Mulligan has implemented a social media campaign for prospective student/new applicants to bring awareness to SHSU and encourage our students to tread the acceptance hashtag "#ImABearkat."
In order to bring more social media awareness to our applicants our office intends to implement a Facebook account for UG Admissions targeting parents and making students aware of different events, deadlines and opportunities at SHSU. Utilize the current UG Admissions Twiiter account in order to connect more with prospective students and also create a UG Admissions Instagram to provide students with a way to connect to the university and other SHSU students. By cross communicating through social media, our printed pieces and our email campaigns we hope to bring the communication gaps for prospective, applicant and current students.

AVP Dr. Mulligan has reorganized Enrollment Managment and Admissions Offices in order to align the departments and better serve the University and prospective students. Enrollment Communications created Program Marketing 4 years ago to help underenrolled college and programs. As the tasks continue to grow, Program Marketing has developed into its own department and now includes a Director and 2 Coordinators. Enrollment Communications includes Associate Director, Lauren Sears and Marketing Coordinator Mauri Marting to streamline admissions communication plans and a singular voice through the communication plans. After the resignations of UG Admissions Director, Enrollment Management chose to merge the two admissions office (Undergraduate and Graduate) to make a more cohesive admissions process, allowing for UG and Grad Counselors/Recruiters to cross-train and analyst can process both UG and Grad applications. This helps reduce confusion of residency issues, and will allow for one IT Lead to maintain ApplyTX and Banner systems.