speaker-1 (00:08.824)
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Shopping Around for Higher Education, which was a joint project between the Orange County Regional Consortium of the Strong Workforce Project and Graduate Communications. My name is Tony Tang and my counterpart is Cheryl Broom. And we're here to talk about

Some of the findings that we had come up as we were looking at what's the best in class colleges and universities when we look at marketing, especially in these changing times. So let's take a look at that first slide. A lot of things have changed over the years in terms of what's happening around us, especially because of COVID. We've had to make changes, our vocabulary has changed and

You know, because part of the problem, biggest problem we've had is that our students have been greatly affected. So one of the things that we might have to consider is really is the financial situation of a lot of our students. And one of the statistics that has come out is that FAFSA enrollments are on the decline significantly. which really tells us is that a lot of students really are having second thoughts in terms of how they're going to use

their potential aid in terms of entering the college world. So let's look at the next slide.

speaker-0 (01:30.744)
Thank

speaker-1 (01:32.622)
Some of the things that is happening around us also is that because of COVID, one in four college freshmen who started with us, they're not coming back. And partly is because they're entering the workforce or they're just struggling. They're just really, we've learned a lot in terms of that, their expectations of how we as education institutions are gonna make things better for them.

as the next bullet mentions is that US colleges have enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago. That's a big number, which is telling us that people are thinking about not necessarily coming to college, they're entering the workforce or they're finding something else rather than college. And so one of the things that community colleges have faced is that our enrollments have been going down.

and we've been seeing and we need to find what's the best way to get them back to our colleges. So one of the things we have to really take a look at is we got to step up our game. We've really had to look at what do we do to engage those students to make sure that they feel that they're important to us. So let's take a look at what we some of the things that we can do. At the Orange County Community Colleges,

One of the things that we wanted to do is we needed to ask the question, how can our colleges convince first time students to enroll or former students to come back? The expectations, because I still remember when I was a student, timeliness of a faculty member was if I got a response from a faculty in two weeks. Nowadays, what we're really running into is that the expectations with technology is that they want

instant gratification or instant response. So one of the things that we've found is that we need to start looking at that and we'll provide you with that information. Also, the timelines are shorter. We need to be able to attract their attention and be able to grab them sooner because that's how they make their decisions. One of the others is what's great customer service. One of the things we've found is that our students

speaker-1 (03:53.354)
are our customer. And in that being our customer, we need to be able to provide them great customer service because we're competing with private educational institutions, other community colleges, four-year universities. There's just so much competition for that specific student that we need to be able to find out what's the best way to reach out and touch them. And then how can our marketing stand out from all the clutter? Just because we're in a very competitive world.

every institution's looking at how to market better, what tools, what technologies should they be using in order to get everyone's attention and really is to close the deal because ultimately closing the deal means enrolling in your institution.

So what we did, we went a little undercover. When I mean by undercover, the three of us that we'll disclose to you here is that we really wanted to do a secret shopper. A secret shopper where we looked at what are the best practices from institutions across the country, not just in California, not in the Midwest, but let's look at private institutions. Let's look at, and.

public institutions, because we wanted to know what's best. So let's unfold who those people were.

speaker-1 (05:16.75)
So here are the group, myself, as I said, my name is Tony Tang and I'm the Dean over at Saddleback College. our other counterpart as part of our regional consortium, Dr. Jessie Crete. She was instrumental in terms of providing us with data about institutions and what to look for. And then also my friend here, Cheryl Broom, who was the

ultimate secret chopper because she asked the right questions. So let's go to the next slide. So who was Orange County? Orange County, the Los Angeles Orange County Regional Consortium consists of 28 colleges with Orange County being a sub region where we had 10 institutions and we're all community colleges. So we're two year institutions and what our service is really is trying to get people ready for the workforce.

Our regional framework that we communicate, coordinate and collaborate. We really want to work together with the goal of developing the economy and the workforce for our specific region. And, you know, we're really proud that we have our website, which is futurebuild.org, which has won awards. But, you know, the real reason is to provide quality information to those people that use our website, whether there be a faculty member.

a potential student, a student, or even an employer. They're all welcome to come because we have something for everybody on our website. We do a lot of other items such as research, we do outreach, and we do great reach out to make sure that people get the word that we provide a good service or a tool to make people ready for the future. Next.

Let's talk about the process and I'm gonna hand this over to Cheryl.

speaker-0 (07:15.672)
Thanks, Tony. Like Tony said, my name is Cheryl Broom, and this was an absolutely amazing project. We hired a couple of people to go out and secret shop institutions, and we'll disclose who they were in a minute. But we had some former public information officers in California and Nevada and a high school student as well actually go through the process of becoming

a student at these institutions and then rank them on how they did along the way. So we use this rubric system and we looked at what was the experience when you first came to the college website? What was the experience after you left the college website and started seeing advertisements on social media? What were the programs and services like? What was it like to talk to advisors and counselors? Were people friendly? they

helpful. And then finally, what was the follow up? So once a form was filled out and submitted or an application was done, what happened after that? Were students connected with, were they helped along the way? So we did this full kind of evaluation system to keep things neutral and consistent across the different colleges and have a written report. So if any of you are interested in reading or seeing the matrix, you can request that and we're happy to share it.

So who did we see Chris shop and how did we choose them? Well, we decided to look at three community colleges outside of California. It's like Tony said, all 10 institutions that were part of this study are in Orange County in California. So we wanted to see what kind of out of state colleges were doing. All three of these are Aspen award winners and are recognized as being really progressive in their communications.

So we looked at Miami Dade College in Florida, Pierce College in Washington that has kind of a similar demographics to the Orange County area. And then Palo Alto College, which is part of the Alamo College's district. In addition, we wanted to see what a for-profit and a nonprofit private college was doing as well. So West Coast University is here in Orange County.

speaker-0 (09:38.324)
and they specialize in allied health fields and they're a for-profit college. And National University is in San Diego, but it's a national college that does a lot of online programs and it's a nonprofit. And they really focus on serving non-traditional students. And you'll see from their advertisements that they do that in a unique way. So Tony and I are going to share some highlights from each college. And then we are going to dive into

recommendations. So, Tony, whenever you're whenever you want to jump in and say something, just stop me, just interrupt me. So let's start off with National University. So like I said, National University is a nonprofit in San Diego. And what makes them unique is they offer their curriculum in these four week periods. So you can start really anytime during the year.

speaker-1 (10:16.43)
I'm happy too.

speaker-0 (10:34.664)
and jump right into four-week classes. So it's really conducive for adults that have work and family priorities. And this model allows you to start any time. So it doesn't have to be August 23rd and January 12th to start being a student. You can start any time during the year. And what we really found from them was, I mean, they immediately responded to our information requests. In fact,

They kept calling until our researchers answered the phone. So it was just constant phone calls to get in touch with someone. They didn't give up. And after they connected to our researchers, they were immediately connected with an advisor. And then they used email to continue to build that connection. So they kind of turned it on its head. They didn't do email first. They wanted to reach the person immediately.

One thing that stood out with National University was that initial phone call with an advisor. And this gets back to what Tony was saying in the beginning about financial aid. They asked right off the bat, like, are you going to need financial assistance? And just promptly got rid of that barrier and connected our researcher with a financial aid specialist to make sure that she could get what she needed. And then find, go ahead, Tony.

speaker-1 (11:57.998)
I was say one of the things so really is the quick touch, but I think one of the big highlights with national is also the four week classes is being able to accomplish things quickly, so that it fits the students timeframe, which is a challenge for most colleges because we're still set stuck in that structure of a semester or trimester mode that this is where maybe late start.

classes or a flexible schedule. your scheduling system will accommodate flexibility, we can mirror what National also does.

speaker-0 (12:35.33)
exactly. And that's what people want now. They're not, they want that flexibility. They want to be able to start when it's most convenient to them. So, but you need a Dean like Tony to make that happen. So, finally, National has really, really heavy retargeting on social media. And you'll see some of what they did later in our recommendation section. And this is West Coast University.

And they have this just amazing video that was sent to our researcher and is on their website and is in their social media that really highlights the role that alumni play in their college and makes you feel really like, wow, I'm going to be part of something special. I'm going to get a job and I'm going to make an impact. So I'm just going to play about 20 seconds of this because of time. And then you can always go back and watch it.

feature prominently on their YouTube channel.

speaker-0 (13:57.998)
So we just thought that was really well done and they use alumni a lot in their marketing. They have really well crafted alumni videos that show graduates on the frontline. And it's really built this sense of pride in the institution. So really a great highlight. If you go to their website, their request information form is right there. It's really easy to request information.

We filled it out and then we weren't able to schedule one on one with an advisor because of scheduling problems. So what they said is, okay, well, if you can't get in with an advisor, we're going to put you in a webinar for some pre-group advising with other students. So we were in a webinar with other potential students and we got to meet them and hear other people's questions. And it was really helpful. And then they just like accepted us. like, well, you're accepted. You can do all the paperwork later. Go ahead and.

pick out your classes and become a student. And we'll help you do the paperwork before classes start. So something else that's really different from community colleges that kind of inundates you with the paperwork upfront. This one's like, let's get you in classes, meet other students, meet your counselor, then we'll do all that paperwork. So big highlight there. So moving into our community colleges.

Miami Dade College was just amazing with their social media. And we're going to show you some examples in a little bit, but they use TikTok really well, organic TikTok. They use their mascot. They show campus life. They have this hashtag, BMDC. They even have a statue on campus where you can take a picture of yourself in front of a live hashtag. And they use that to do a lot of curated audience, curated content. They show their social media on their homepage.

They connect to local events going on. They are really part of the city. So they really are doing amazing things with their social media. We got a personalized URL. The minute we filled out an interest form, we were emailed a website that our researcher could log into where she got like a whole to-do list and all the things that she needed to accomplish.

speaker-0 (16:18.062)
And it was personalized. was like her name was the URL. And that's in our report too. So if you want to go to that website, her password's in there so you can see how they did that. Really cool. And she was assigned a pre-admissions advisor that she could two-way text. So it wasn't just pushing out messages. She was able to text back questions and get answers back right away. So just an amazing use of two-way communication.

And Tony, did you want to add something? look like you're about to say something.

speaker-1 (16:48.618)
no, I think really it's that touch where they feel like they owned it by giving them their own URL. I know it's difficult for some people's systems to be able to get to that point, but if you can provide that information or provide that link to your college, it brings them closer and they want to be part of it.

speaker-0 (17:10.348)
Yeah, we started doing this in a campaign that Tony and I work on for Orange County Community Colleges, the Future Vote campaign. We now have someone dedicated to calling potential students and texting. And it's just it's going amazing. It's been a great addition.

speaker-1 (17:29.718)
Yeah, our point of contact when someone call contact says for information actually calls them almost right away. And the person's bilingual, so we can be able to handle more than just English. And it's someone who's knowledgeable about the programs in our region and who knows all the right people to get them in the right place. And the big thing is follow up.

making sure that they don't feel like they're lost in the system, that they're important.

speaker-0 (18:00.672)
Exactly. So Palo Alto College also has this amazing social media. And what I wanted to point out here was once we all started secret shopping, we got put into the education category in the digital marketing sphere. So now we're starting to see not just like these colleges ads, but like every college's ads.

I'm still getting retargeted by literally almost every college out there because now we're part of a higher education category online. So you really have to do something to stand out. After a while, it all blends together, especially if your ads are blue. That's a really popular higher ed color. And they really stood out by using their own students. So they use the mascot and they use students to do curated videos and tours.

And we'll show a really cool one here in a little bit. They even give away cars, which I thought we thought were really cool. We're like, oh, this is a great idea. So really great enrollment messaging and really good use of student content. And then finally, Pierce College, the last one we looked at really focused a lot of their marketing on retention. And they won the Aspen Award for Guided Pathways and Course Mapping. And their retention rates are 20 % above the national average.

And they have a podcast where they've got a faculty member, a student and a student services professional who talk about everything from mental health to college resources to study tips. So they are really focused on retention. And this is like a really great lesson for, think, all of us. You can market, market, market, market. But if you're not retaining students, you're not going to see

your enrollment stabilize or go up.

speaker-1 (19:58.926)
You know, Cheryl makes a good point here because a lot of times administrators will be looking at that marketing budget and they're going to say, well, what did you bring to my college? And with all this marketing money that you've spent and what they always are looking at is new enrollment. as an administrator who understands marketing and working with marketing professionals,

One of the things that we really try to educate the other administrators who are looking at our budgets is one of the best ways of marketing is retention because it costs far less to retain a student than it is to get a new student. And so why not let's put our monies where it's most effective, which is keeping our students so that they know where to go to get support and so they can complete.

which is more, it accomplishes more in the benchmarks for how an educational institution is gonna perform.

speaker-0 (21:02.798)
Yeah, and marketing can play a great role in retention, which is the example here from Pierce College. So we'll show you, we'll show you how, how they're doing that in a minute. So what we did was we put together some recommendations based on what we saw all of these colleges just do really well. Like what can we learn from all five of them? So that our own campaign in Orange County can be stronger, but also so that all

colleges out there who are looking to strengthen their marketing and communications can take some things away too. So we organize this into three levels. So level one is these are some easy things that you can jump in and start doing. Like do these things now. If you're not already doing them, this is what we would prioritize based on what we've seen. Level two is, okay, these are going to be a little bit more difficult, but these are great strategies. And if you think this is possible for you,

This is where we would focus on next. And then our level three is like, you're going to make some big progress here. Like this is, this is what everybody should be doing, but it's hard. This is the tough stuff and it's going to take money and it's going to take time and resources and leadership. But this is what, where we think that, you know, ultimately people should be going. So let's start with our level one. If you aren't already implementing these tactics, you should be, everybody should be collecting lead generation.

Get your information forms out there and start calling people back and doing it in a personalized way. So don't just rely on your application. Some people aren't ready to jump straight into an application. They want to talk to someone, get questions answered. And so make that request form easy. On FutureVille, have an online chat. We have a little poll people can fill out to win $100, and we collect information that way.

Think of new ways to collect information. And then once you have it, you're going to want to email, right? Email is easy, but it's overused and it's, not, a lot of colleges frankly aren't very good at it. So try to do text and phone calls and make it two-way and make it personalized. Do it the right way.

speaker-1 (23:21.486)
You know, what it's interesting is that a lot of times our potential students and our current students, the way they communicate is on their phones. And so they don't read their emails on a timely basis, but they react very quickly to a phone call or a text message. So it's amazing how many times someone looks at their phone because they've got a text. And so that's the expectation today, which is really is,

If you're going to give me timely service, send it to me in a text.

speaker-0 (23:54.998)
Exactly. Yeah. And don't just push it out, but respond to it too.

speaker-1 (24:00.11)
And just real quick, one other thing too, is that sometimes potential customers may not want to give you information. so what Cheryl was mentioning about dangling a carrot for them to give the information, we do a monthly giveaway of a gift card or gift certificate if they do provide us with that information. And of course, we don't want to spam them.

because otherwise it'll just block us and now it doesn't help us. But the carrot definitely helps.

speaker-0 (24:35.874)
Yes, yeah, and we get good information from the poll that we get. We're seeing where people hurt us and getting some feedback on our marketing and collecting information. So it's a good it's a win win. This is Pierce College's email, which we really liked. It was really intentional. It was welcome, welcoming, personal, was brief. It was specific about Jamie had put in a researcher that she was interested in nursing, so it had

nursing information, who to contact. So it wasn't like, go do all this stuff, but we're not gonna give you someone's phone number. It has like multiple ways to email and to contact people. And it came from an individual that we could reply to. So it was a really good example of using email in a good way. For social media, we loved the use of mascots. Like I said, we got in and it was so, yeah, it's like hundreds.

We really saw that ads that had some motion graphics or videos tended to stand out. Seeing student life, seeing alumni campus life, having information about who the college was, was really great and it made things stand out. This is the use of social media or use of mascot and social media right here was really fun. This is Miami Dade.

speaker-0 (26:24.43)
So their mascot, you know, making a birthday cake for the city of Miami, their mascot is doing things all the time, which makes it really fun and shows their connection to the community. So celebrate your student achievements, be relevant to your community, just to stand out a little bit more. And finally, just really quick here, well, we'll show this in the next one. I'm getting ahead of myself. Talking about building pride.

Here's our level two. Here's our next one. And we only have a couple of minutes left. So I'm like, how do we do all this in a half an hour? Like I said before, using students as part of your social media is great. And here's an example of how Palo Alto College does that. And we thought this was really cool.

speaker-1 (27:27.342)
Palominos we're over here at the Palomino Center for Countdown to College happening from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. We got enrollment assistants, financial aid assistants, and you can even meet with advisors so come on down. I'm late! I'm late! There's more! We've teamed up with North Park Toyota for the graduate and drive giveaway. Students who apply for semester and graduate by spring 2023 can be entered into win their very own North Park Toyota vehicle.

speaker-0 (27:47.902)
for the fall.

speaker-0 (27:57.134)
So like, wow, that's a great idea. Get a car, get people to graduate and use that and have students be excited about it. So it's just a great, great idea. So using your own students is wonderful. And then we also noticed that this college, actually all the colleges were really good about keeping things on the right platform. So they weren't just doing something and plastering it everywhere. Like the mascot was used on TikTok and it was used

on reels and then different information was used on Twitter. So they really were good at using each channel appropriately. And here's TikTok. We thought, God, what a great way to use TikTok is if you have a mascot, this is where it belongs because this is our 18 to 24 year old audience. And here's Miami Dade's mascot on TikTok.

speaker-0 (29:01.858)
So cool way to use TikTok. So some of you out there are like, are we on TikTok? That's one way to do it. So we're kind of running out of time. So I'm to be quick here, but we absolutely loved colleges who created excitement. That's exciting to become a college student. whether it's a congratulations email, having people do the tagging. So like tag if you've been accepted.

To our college, let us know, tag us, create some excitement. We also saw that there was an opportunity maybe to send something by mail for your colleges to do this. And maybe this could be something for high school students straight out of your local high schools could be get a congratulations envelope with confetti coming out of it. You know, just to create some pride. And these colleges were really good about creating pride. So in our last 30 seconds.

Our big stuff. here's this personalized web page that Jamie got. clearly this is from CRM or some sort of technological product. And this is something that we can be doing better, is using technology to support students and to make sure that we're continuously communicating with them.

speaker-1 (30:23.694)
You know, you may have heard of CRM and but it takes a commitment by the institution. It takes personnel. It's not something real simple. It's an investment that the institution needs to make. So, but it's very valuable because now we can track and make sure that they get ultimate performance.

speaker-0 (30:42.298)
And it's a big commitment. And I've worked with colleges who've made that investment, and then nobody uses it because it really takes the entire college getting behind it and the right messages. You have to have the right messages as well. And Tony talked about this earlier, bringing up if you've got a chance to do an anytime model, this is where people want to be right now, especially in non-traditional students.

And if you don't have an anytime model, but you do eight week classes or late start classes, you can market them that way. we have multiple start dates. We've got classes starting in October. We have classes now in February. And in the past, I think these were really marketed more towards current students, add another three units or four units, take another class.

But now you can market these to the general public because people want to start when it's convenient to them. And National University does a great job showing that they are really built for students who want to start any time during the year.

And then finally, focusing on retention and student support, we really encourage you to take a look at Pierce and how they've set up their pathways. It's really great program mapping and advisor check-in points throughout the way. So really, really well done on their website. So if you're in the Guided Pathways model or your college is starting, this is a great college to look at for an example. And they do a great job of making students feel more than just a number.

It really is a personal experience. And I think I've been in community college system for 17 years now. And you do get jaded after a while, especially on the front line. And we have to remember these are new experiences for students and we have to help them along the way. And our final recommendation is take a look at your own practices. You know, maybe have a third party come in and secret shop your institution and see kind of who is boss.

speaker-0 (32:51.308)
and your problems and where you can make some improvements. So we did this with Tony a couple of years ago.

speaker-1 (32:58.358)
And it was great. was an interesting process. We secret shopped all 10 institutions in our region and we came out with a report for each college, but also we did one for the region as a whole, partially because we always wanted to look at what was the best practice, not necessarily the places that we stumble, but we wanted to do everything from looking at

What were the barriers that a student would run into that would prohibit them or just not promote the college well? Because we really wanted them to all finish the process of enrolling into our classes. So one of the things that we would do is we wanted to walk through and do it both if we were an English speaking as well as a Hispanic or Spanish speaking and

just because those are the two main categories in our region. But the big thing is really is looking at ourselves and looking in the mirror to see how we can be better.

speaker-0 (34:02.474)
Exactly. So great project. So we encourage it. So we're wrap up now. We're going to take questions. But if anybody wants a copy of the report or they want, you know, the slide deck so you can watch those ads a little bit more closely, just shoot me over an email or email Tony and we're happy to share with you. So with that, we are going to hit stop on the recording and I guess we'll be live now to answer your questions.

speaker-1 (34:29.207)
Well, we look forward to answering whatever questions you have.