We met with one of our clients last week, a small liberal arts college. Their solution is up and running and we started our monthly results review meetings. The purpose of these sessions is to review the results, isolate best practices thus far and develop recommendations for things we can do differently so the results can continuously improve.  I love this process for a lot of reasons. Here are a few:

1)   It provides a forum for the team, which consists of staff from the admissions and communication departments, as well as key players from DIG to talk strategically about what’s happening, what it means and how it will help us accomplish the objective. We get to focus the members of the team who have lapsed into “just do it” mode on the reason we started the project in the first place.

2)   It gives the client a chance to tell us about things that are happening within their organization. In many cases, things that we can help with come up for the first time in these meetings.

This was a particularly good call because our client has seen some great improvements in the number of applications, acceptances and most importantly deposits compared to last year. They were all pretty happy. Despite their delight, I’m not ready to recline on a chaise with some bon bons.  There is something going on with people scheduling visits on-line that I want to dig into (no pun intended) and I want to turn around the reminders faster than we’ve been doing.

It’s too early to tell if the current 72% increase in applications, 58.5% increase in students accepted, and a 71% increase in deposits over the same period will stay at that level but it’s certainly promising.  One thing is certain though, an integrated cross channel strategy gives the prospective students, the college, and our team much more to work with and a foundation for continuous improvement.

Armed with action items from the meeting, we’re focused on improving the quality of the interactions with prospective students taking place on their personalized micro-sites and seeing if we can move more to schedule visits on line. Can’t wait until next month!