Navigating the complexities of digital student recruitment

Push methods, pull methods or a hybrid mix of both? Digital student recruitment continues to evolve as a moving target for higher ed institutions to hit. And you can’t possibly keep up with every new development, social trend or additional strain on your existing infrastructure. But what if we told you that you might already have the additional resources you need right at your fingertips?

We caught up with Ayo Strange, Director of Educational Solutions at Educational Testing Service, and Dr. Maureen Grasso, ASHRAE Fellow and a Professor in the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, as part of Unibuddy Connect 2022, our global higher ed conference, to discuss the state of graduate enrollment and trends in international student flows, lessons learned during the pandemic, and strategies for finding and effectively connecting with prospective candidates.

See their full session on-demand, as part of Unibuddy Connect 2022, here. 

Here are some takeaways from their session:

Student recruitment happens anywhere, any time on any device  

Perhaps the greatest benefit of digital recruitment tools is also the biggest challenge: having the ability to be everywhere and anywhere all at once. From different time-zones to different devices to different communication mediums, you need to make sure your higher ed team is in front of every student – without spreading yourselves thin. 

Related: What makes a great digital student ambassador 

The key, according to Dr. Grasso, is in leveraging in-house resources you might already have at your disposal. “Students don’t just drop out of the ceiling,” says Dr. Grasso. “We have to actively recruit.” And her formulaic solution is simple, yet effective, formula for higher ed recruitment success: “Tap those faculty members who are great at recruiting students,” says Dr. Grasso. “And use your current students.” By connecting students and engaging staff to prospective students, you can scale your reach without overextending your hand.

Proactive student recruitment is a blend of push and pull 

There is no one single golden answer to reaching your future students. Instead, according to Dr. Grasso, higher ed institutions are leveraging multiple channels to reach their target audiences – both push, where messaging is pushed to students, and pull, where students come to you seeking answers. While about 43% of institutions, for example, credit their greatest yield from their website for engagement, 90% send personalized messaging to target student prospects. Other channels used for student recruitment purposes include engaging via social media (40%), video chat (37%) and phone calls (62%) or sending materials direct to a prospective student’s home (32%). 

Related: How to leverage the win-win of student-to-student connections

And yet, whether via push or pull, there’s a common theme here: authentic personalization. 

Unibuddy provides higher ed institutions not only with the tools they need to launch both push and pull recruitment programs, but also with abilities to scale these programs to the masses. With Unibuddy Chat, you can enable prospective students to form connections with student ambassadors directly through your website – or through email campaigns and events, for examples. With the ability to scale these programs to tens of thousands of prospects, Unibuddy offers true authentic personalization at-scale.

Work smarter, not harder, with multi-channel coverage 

Coordinating all your existing digital channels together can help you cover more ground and reach more prospective students without investing in more expensive hardware or resources. And this can be achieved by collecting, assessing and applying the right digital data into your student recruitment processes. When you unpack the key nuggets of data from your recruitment program, like conversational insights gathered from prospective students or stored in your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system, you can start to think like your target audience and adjust your efforts accordingly. 

Related: The recruitment conundrum: How to scale higher ed culture to your growing digital brand

With Unibuddy, you get the best of both worlds. In addition to providing prospective students with the ability to make authentic connections with student ambassadors and staff, on-demand, our powerful tools provide higher ed admissions, recruitment and retention professionals with the data insights they need to help their school appeal to tomorrow’s generation of students. 

Learn more about the Unibuddy Platform – and our approach to empowering students to choose their future with confidence