UNLOCK THE KEYS TO ATTRACTING AND RETAINING YOUR STUDENTS
Doing so effectively requires that you gather quantitative data that let you understand and convey
1. Students’ biggest foci, goals, and challenges;
2. Their satisfaction with the extent to which your institution is helping them meet these foci, goals, and challenges; and
3. What they see as opportunities for improvement.
Small colleges and universities provide tremendous educational value—particularly when contrasted with large state universities. Their investment in students, individualized instruction, commitment to helping students develop critical thinking and writing skills—these things all set the smaller colleges and universities apart in positive ways, particularly as businesses increasingly cry out for graduates who possess these skills.
But for too many of these institutions, your challenge lies in articulating and demonstrating your value.
Our turnkey data system provides the information to achieve these goals, which can support continuous process improvement and marketing for your institution.
The benefits of this system include but are not limited to
1. Supporting retention of current students by ensuring you understand them at a deep level and can also use that information to serve them even more effectively;
2. Providing information from your students on their core foci/goals/challenges, which will not only show you where to focus on serving current students to increase retention but also provide information that will let you create content marketing and marketing messages to attract more students like them;
3. Identifying students’ current expectations and satisfaction, by uncovering both areas of strength and opportunities for improvement; and
4. Providing statistical data, testimonials, and online reviews that will fuel your marketing.
We achieve these goals by
1. Using our proprietary Opportunity Generator™ to provide a ranked list of your students’ top concerns, priorities, and/or challenges, as well as
2. Using the Feedback Generator™ to tap how you are doing relative to your students’ expectations and goals, including
a. Measures that tap overall, or general satisfaction;
b. Indicators that tap specific satisfaction, so we illuminate both areas of strength and opportunities for improvement;
c. Measures that gather testimonials (from those who say they would recommend your institution), so you quickly gain not only feedback from which you can profit internally but also powerful social proof that you can use in your marketing (we ask for permission to use the testimonial in the survey, so we can begin building a bank for you right away);
d. If you wish to include a Referral Generator™, we can do so.
This system, then, provides a snapshot of how your institution is doing against how it would like to be doing. It will affirm where you are on point and meeting expectations, as well as identifying areas that need to be addressed to keep students satisfied and attract more students like them. We make the process efficient, painless, and on point.
Elements of this system include:
A student survey containing all of the elements we outlined above;
Invitation copy you can use to invite students to complete your survey;
Summary of data and implications, with identification of action items;
A data dashboard that provides data visualization;
A census profile of the area in which your institution is located (this becomes important because prospective students increasingly consider not just the characteristics of the institution itself but also of the area in which the institution is located); and
Licensing that allows the institution to implement the survey on an ongoing basis.