A Chief Enrollment Officer that Sleeps at Night—A Website the Works (Abstract)

Almost 20 years ago the recruitment process had some key differences from today's environment.

• It used to be that the admissions counselor was the expert-- the "go to" person for a prospective student and their parents to get the answers on anything related to enrollment and available programs.
• It used to be that a prospect had one telephone number and people still answered their landline phone.
• It used to be that a business letter in a #10 envelope was somewhat effective at sending a message to prospects.
• It used to be that you could "pull" students to your institution without a strategic and aggressive marketing effort.
• It used to be that an admissions counselor could accomplish most administrative tasks with the use of a relational database and some available pre-written reports.

The student prospect has so many communication channels available to them. And, because of that, one would expect that it is easier to contact them--but, in fact, that doesn't seem to be the case.

It seems that the only medium that provides a common platform for communicating with prospects and their parents is the "web". There is plenty to keep an enrollment person "awake at night", but some of them might be "how many prospects come to our website but leave without finding the information they needed?"; What if we (the higher education institution) indeed had what they needed, but they just didn't find it?; What if they were unhappy with the way things were organized, left unhappy, but never told you?

So how does an enrollment manager overcome these challenges? How do you "push" the message to your constituents and measure the effectiveness of that message? How do you make sure that pertinent information is getting to the people who need it? How do you connect these interested parties with the appropriate admissions counselor for efficient follow-up?

So the market has changed and Higher Ed. Institutions can't really sit around and wait for students to come through the door. Judson doesn't have all the answers, and in fact we're very open about the fact that we're still learning and plan to keep learning. The following is a list of features we've added to our website in order to meet the changing needs of our various constituents:

• "Content Management System"--As the name connotes, this type of database is charged with the task of managing "content" or "blocks of content". This content can be re-used in several areas of the website without creating multiple copies of the same information.
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feeds, which will allow Judson to "push" the appropriate content to the right audiences. Constituents can choose to "subscribe" to certain channels of information.
• A "taxonomy", which is a structured hierarchy for storing all of the types of content that are necessary for a higher education institution. This is similar to a "folksonomy" but rather than the users deciding what descriptive tags are added to the content, it is already pre-determined.