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.

Taxonomy Project--Key Questions to be Answered

Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design Annotated

Okay--I've already blogged about mind-mapping and its relationship to the "concept mapping" note taking scheme that I was introduced to in my college Biology class. But, I was reminded by the article above that it was Biologists who started this whole taxonomy mess--see quote below:

Historically used by biologists to classify plants or animals according to a set of natural relationships, in content management and information architecture, we tend to leverage taxonomies as a tool for organizing content.

One of my quests during sabbatical is to define a taxonomy that lets Judson University manage content better. My initial motives were driven by the need to push content to our website in a way that makes sense to our various constituents--students, prospects, alumni etc., but the truth is that this taxonomy or "information architecture plan" or "controlled vocabulary" has broader uses than just the website.

My key questions are as follows:

Can the everyday work accomplished by University employees be leveraged to create the content for the website? In other words, can the work they're already doing (no retraining necessary) be used to create "up to date" and accurate content for our various audiences?

Can a system be created for content creation that allows the "experts" be in charge of particular areas of content? For example, can the business office function of the university be in charge of the content for all tuition cost questions with all of the departments in the University linking to that content for the accurate, concise and unified answer?

Can a system of organization (taxonomy) be designed in such a way that it actually fosters relationships with our key constituents? For instance, can alumni testimonials harvested through the alumni community portion of the website be re-purposed to the departments they graduated from to potentially sell current prospects on the reason they should consider attending Judson?

Concept Mapping to Mind Mapping

I had an excellent Biology Professor at Huntington University (www.huntington.edu) that taught me about "concept mapping". As much as I enjoyed the class for its subject matter, I really appreciated his "concept mapping" style notes, that he used during the lecture. On a casual glance it might look pretty intimidating, hard to read (looked like chicken scratches--especially from the back of the classroom), but oddly enough, it made sense to me.

It looked a bit like the following:

In addition to defining many different words that pertain to the world of biology, I found it very helpful to understand the relationships between these defined words. Maybe you could talk about this as the "ontology" of these words. If you define "ontology" as the interaction between entities within a specific domain (in this case biology), I think it works.

While this was helpful to me, it had its limitations. This wasn't your classic outline that moved from right to left and down the page. This "map" from a theoretical standpoint had "flexibility" built-in, but in the real world this free flowing idea map became a problem when you hit the edge of the paper (or the chalkboard, as was sometimes the case).

Another shortcoming, when you looked at the "map" for a while you would begin to understand new connections, but making edits could be a challenge. Your best option was to draw a connecting line between the entities that where you had discovered another relationship.

The good news is--some things have changed in the last 15 years. It turns out that the world is a bit more digital now than it was before. Paper and chalkboards/whiteboards are still important, but the digital world brings with it some new options.

What used to be called "Concept Mapping" is more well known today as "Mind Mapping". And there a plethora of mind mapping software based tools available. You can find a comprehensive list of these at: http://www.mind-mapping.org/. I really can't speak to these other tools, but I can tell you that I appreciate the features I have found in a mind mapping tool called "Mind Manager" (www.mindjet.com).

One big problem solved! My virtual paper has no edges and ideas can be moved around easily.