Jennifer Copeland's Blog on College and University Marketing

Undergraduate Admissions: Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2007

So, what is interactive marketing and how can it make you a better enrollment marketer? I explored this topic earlier this week at SACAC 2007 with undergraduate admissions professionals from throughout the southeast. Here are the highlights from our discussion:

Success Story: Young Harris College

With an enrollment of over 500 students, Young Harris College is a private, United Methodist-affiliated residential two-year liberal arts college located in the Appalachian mountains of northern Georgia.

Challenges:
Like many institutions today, in recent years Young Harris found that deposited students were not enrolling at the same rate they had in the past. With more students submitting deposits at more institutions and more students canceling deposits after the May 1 refund deadline, the College was faced with a steadily climbing deposit cancellation rate.

When that cancellation rate hit 31% in fall 2005, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Clint Hobbs knew something had to be done. “Our staff was working as hard as they could to generate and then keep deposits, yet we kept loosing more and more of them each year. I knew we’d hit the point that we would have a very hard time generating even more deposits to make up for the loss. We needed a new approach to how we communicated with deposited students.”