The Higher Education Data You Need to Make Prospective Students Welcome
Ensuring that there is a good fit between the student and the institution or program is an essential first step. However, making that student feel welcome, accepted and ready to engage with their community is another matter entirely. Skipping this next important step can lead to student melt, anxiety and loss as they might end up choosing another institution that provides them with the support they need to feel and be successful. And the best part? You might already have the higher ed data you need at your fingertips to get started.
Here are some of the ways you can leverage higher ed data to make prospective students feel welcome:
Data helps pave the way for the right student-to-student connections
A worry that deters a lot of students from following through from their admittance to attendance is wondering how well they’ll fit into the community and if they’ll be able to make friends. You can give them the chance to start early, before they ever step foot in their first class, to develop connections that will encourage and support them in their academic journey. With Unibuddy Chat, you can facilitate connections between your current students who choose to be ambassadors for your school and potential students who are looking for support and information from the people they’ll be learning alongside.
Related: How to Run a Successful Student Ambassador Program
Getting accurate higher ed data that helps you meet your objectives when it comes to making students feel welcome can be a challenge. You might know what you want access to, but sourcing it in an effective way is its own difficult task. Unibuddy Chat offers you the chance to get to know a potential student’s interests and concerns. Student ambassadors who chat with these incoming students will have insights to share with recruiters from their peer conversations and can give a list of ideas and topics that have frequently been mentioned in their chats.
Assure safety and security through chat community data
As a recruiter or administrator, you have access to the chat service and can oversee safety and security. Moderating chats can be a task for a recruiter or a trained ambassador who is able to flag concerning behavior and make changes, ensuring that student safety is a priority. Privacy remains a focus as the only individuals who have access to chats are the potential students, student ambassadors and select staff assigned to the chat and community programs. Unibuddy is only a host for the platform and cannot see the activity within chats and communities.
Related: What makes a great digital student ambassador?
Gen Z spends a lot of their lives online, and they are very savvy at identifying anything that isn’t authentic in connecting with them, ensuring that they know how private their information is and how it gets used is a factor in engagement as well. You can build their trust in your higher education institution and in both Unibuddy Chat and Unibuddy Community by explicitly sharing how their data gets stored and used, and who can access it. When students know that their information is used wisely and protected well, they can feel comfortable being transparent so that recruiters know what issues students are struggling with.
Accessible data that enables recruiting actions
Our Unibuddy Platform allows recruiters to observe trends in activity with an easy-to-read interface. Tracking engagement with events or on chats and communities is plain to see, and this data can be used to improve and run better campaigns that are built off real data from students communicating their needs. For example, if many students are expressing a desire for more social mixers in the community chat, that’s an opportunity for recruiters to use that data and make it a reality so students feel welcome and connected to their new institution’s community or through Unibuddy Community groups.
Related: Want a proven way to engage Gen Z? The magic is in belonging
You can also get seamless integration with your CRM, so that the higher ed data you need for individual students is in one repository and can be tracked and managed to ensure that each student has what they need for success at your institution. Administrators can analyze this data to see what the overall trend is and what solutions would be worth implementing to support the most amount of students in reaching their goals, whether it’s community, networking, future planning, career-building, job fairs, social events and clubs or academic help.
Track community connections and health data
With the help of the right technology, students can participate in a variety of chats related to their interests through platforms like Unibuddy Community. They may be part of the first-year chat, a conversation related to their program or discussions about clubs and social events. Taking this data, recruiters can assess which chats are active and encourage participation, so that information can be applied to other communication that may not be as active. To be clear, a chat that isn’t very active may not need to be, and activity can wax and wane as students grapple with busy periods. However, if a chat is continually not having much activity, using other data to see what’s going on in a particular group can help recruiters implement solutions like having ambassadors provide prompts or invitations to engage the community.
