IU Indy: Individualized Recruitment by School

Situation

IU Indy was struggling to find meaningful ways for each person at each individual school to contribute directly to improved recruitment yield. The connection was clear for a few staff such as recruiters, but everyone else felt the pressure to be involved too and just didn't know how to contribute effectively. One technique they had used the previous year was to send a handwritten, personalized note on a postcard from the university to each and every admitted students. Obviously with over 10,000 admitted students this was a lot of work, which meant everyone could be involved. Writing this sheer volume of handwritten notes was tedious though, and people wondered if it was effective at all. Best-case scenario, it would end up on the family fridge instead of going straight to the trash.

Solution

While we helped the campus consider other, more effective ways to improve recruitment yield, we also recognized an opportunity to build on a previous effort that had widespread support even if it had questionable effectiveness. In other words, this was a simple way that everyone at least could be involved, we just needed a more effective version.

One of the primary challenges of the previous postcard campaign was how generic it was. Marketing had developed three similar postcards showing a collage of campus images, and everyone received basically the same postcard. We worked individually with each school to develop a postcard series where each postcard was unique and highlighted the programs from that school. In addition to creating a marketing piece that would immediately be more relevant and interesting to the students receiving it, this also gave us an important opportunity to build stronger relationships with the people at each school, from the recruiters and the leadership who were involved in the development of the postcard, and the individual faculty and staff who now found that it was now easier and more exciting to write a note about their programs since the message and the image on the front conveyed that immediately. No more generic messaging! Some postcards were more interesting and effective than others due to the focused nature of certain schools or the creativity of those involved, but every single one was immediately more relevant and valuable to everyone: to the admitted students receiving them because it related directly to what they wanted to study, and to the faculty and staff writing notes because it automatically guided their message toward something more interesting and relevant to each student. Now the postcard being hung up on the family fridge was a worst-case scenario, more likely students would use it and refer back to it for quite some time throughout the following year and even beyond.

Success

Aside from building stronger relationships between admissions and each academic school, this marketing project proved effective in guiding the right kinds of students to deposit. The melt rate for that year (the number of students who deposited then subsequently withdrew without enrolling) dropped to a lower rate than the campus had seen in years. We learned from both students who enrolled and those who did not that the postcards stood out from the other recruitment material they were receiving from other universities. Many students told us that they kept our postcard because it was so interesting or useful to them and even hung it on their wall.