UTPB: Creating the Tools You Need

Situation

As UTPB re-focused its recruitment efforts on the local region as opposed to spreading limited resources ineffectively across the massive state of Texas, they were looking for a way to empower admission counselors to think outside the box and recruit in innovative ways. Typically recruiters are assigned a specific geographic location, and are responsible for visiting all the high schools in that area to promote the school. Often, recruitment does not extend far beyond this, and often that is sufficient. This was not the case for the Permian Basin however where the college-going culture was not as strong.

We began by shifting the focus of recruiters and expanding it significantly. Instead of a large territory comprised of swaths of the entire state along with adjacent states in which they were responsible for visiting all the schools, recruiters were assigned a portion of the newly defined catchment region only. They were tasked with not just visiting the high schools, but creatively increasing the visibility of the university throughout the entire town to which they were assigned. This continued to include high school visits of course, but now might also include some variation of civic, recreational, promotional, and other educational (besides high schools) opportunities.

Solution

To help with the approach, Woolston Inventive created a “tooldeck” for recruiters, a cross between a toolbox of recruitment techniques and the organizational framework of a deck of cards. This beautiful, branded deck was customized beyond color scheme and the back of cards (typical generic branding for a deck of cards). Instead of simple suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, those symbols were worked into a new icon of the wildlife, plants, and other distinctive features of the geography of the region. We even switched the colors from the traditional black and red of a deck of cards to the black and orange of the University of Texas system. We also branded the box with a hand triumphantly holding a diploma to remind our staff of the ultimate goal.

Each card 2 through 10 was labeled with a specific opportunity for visibility in the town, for instance:

• The “civic” suit included ideas like: organizing and sponsoring a local service project, establishing a recurring presence at the city library, establishing visibility at the community center, visiting the nursing home

• The “recreational” suit included ideas like: becoming involved at community events or festivals, building a presence at nature centers or museums, building a public city website or calendar resource, handing out water bottles at events

• The “promotional” suit included ideas like: setting up town brags or picture posts from iconic spots in the community, purchasing billboards (usually much cheaper in these outlying areas), sponsoring local organizations, partnering with local businesses with swag or other team-ups

• And of course the “educational” suit, easier and more traditional which built upon the traditional high school visit by encouraging alumni profiles, faculty spotlights, and program or major spotlights based on what was more relevant in the area

The face cards (jack, queen, king) were left blank to allow for other options that the recruiter could identify unique to that town and actually write onto the card.

In this way, each recruiter could create a “hand” unique to each town, as small or as large as the situation might dictate, specific to the opportunities there. Obviously this is not a traditional recruitment model, and not all of these ideas would be viable opportunities in any city, it just depends on the community... which is actually the point! Further as the examples above might suggest, not only did this approach give each recruiter more options on how they approached recruitment, it gave them much greater discretion in who they would partner with there and how they would spend funds.

One final note about the tooldeck, regular players of card games will wonder about the two jokers in the deck. These cards also had a purpose! They were used to map the area, one locating the region of focus within the state and the other providing an outline view of the individual territories for each of the recruiters!

Success

This tooldeck proved to be a powerfully effective mechanism. Aside from the stated purpose of giving the admission counselors a technique for establishing a unique recruitment strategy for each individual town for which they were responsible, it created excitement and energy throughout the university. The tooldeck itself was popular among leadership who were able to share it tactfully with important university partners, and it generated recruitment ideas and opportunities far beyond the admission counselors for whom it was originally intended. This strategy and this tool contributed directly to the university’s record freshman classes and to the university returning enrollment to pre-pandemic levels.