Get ready for more work and greater stress — at least according to predictions by some of your colleagues who responded to the question, “What does the future hold for college recruiting?”

For his forthcoming book — Overthrowing Dead Culture: The Vision to Change the World of College Admissions — TargetX CEO Brian Niles is asking admissions officers and their presidents to contribute to Chapter 10: “The Future.”

Submissions so far have ranged from the increasing role of technology to the age-old appeal of storytelling, from the growing importance of the campus visit to the changing nature of graduate admissions.

But one of the major threads is how the difficult job of recruiting students is only going to get more demanding and time consuming.

“Admission professionals will devote an even greater percentage of time providing personal access to students and families,” predicts Barbara Elliott, VP for Enrollment Management at the University of the Arts. “More conversation, more authentic person-to-person touch points will be critical as technology and binary personalization become even more pervasive in daily life.”

The President of Allegany College agrees: “Students of tomorrow require information at their fingertips now,” writes Bruce Exstrom. “Instant communication is critical, and part of the communication is the personal touch.”

“Recruiting in the future must allow students to have a personal, individualized, authentic experience,” adds Wes Waggoner, Director of Freshman Admission at Texas Christian University. “The phrase ‘We’re closed on Saturday and Sunday’ No longer works in retail; and it’s not likely to last very long in the non-profit, educational industry either. To serve our students, we’ll be there whenever we need to be there.”

More demanding, yes, but also hugely rewarding. “The admission world will continue to be exciting,” writes Marianne Inman, President of Central Methodist University, “for the task of enrollment professionals is to find the best match between student and institutions. The diversity of colleges and universities and their mission to serve learners of all ages and interests is the basis for the strength and popularity of American higher education.”

You can add your own predictions — and see what others think:
www.targetx.com/odc

You can also download Chapter 2: “The Change”:
www.targetx.com/odc

So let’s connect some experience economy dots and make them all relevant to your campus visit programs.

Disney to finally make their Disney Stores an “Experience”
Disney Stores have never really matched the Disney Magic. They’re just stores. Passive buying. Not an experience and not at all reminiscent of a Disney park.

As reported in the New York Times:

“The world does not need another place to sell Disney merchandise — this only works if it’s an experience,” said Jim Fielding, president of Disney Stores Worldwide. The company plans to unveil the new look in May in Southern California, Long Island and Madrid, and is close to signing a lease for that Times Square flagship.

Theaters will allow children to watch film clips of their own selection, participate in karaoke contests or chat live with Disney Channel stars via satellite. Computer chips embedded in packaging will activate hidden features. Walk by a “magic mirror” while holding a Princess tiara, for instance, and Cinderella might appear and say something to you.

It’s your birthday? With the push of a button, eight 13-foot-tall Lucite trees will crackle with video-projected fireworks and sound. There will be a scent component; if a clip from Disney’s coming “A Christmas Carol” is playing in the theater, the whole store might suddenly be made to smell like a Christmas tree.”

Disney will seek help from Steve Jobs and the folks at the Apple Store and spend about $1 million per store renovation.

Lesson: Welcome to the experience economy!
So many campus tours are like the old Disney Stores–They don’t represent the dynamic student experience. They’re just passive death marches of “look at our buildings.” Invest and reinvent your campus visit. The college experience is the ultimate in the experience economy but campus tours don’t incorporate experience economy principles and they should.

Speaking of Apple and it’s popular iPhone…
An entreprenueral student at Yale University has developed an app for the campus tour, uTourX, which will allow for student and student groups to create specific tours unique to their point of view.

As the Yale Daily News reports:

“Yale tour guides, beware: A new iPhone application is vying to take your place.”

“All the tour guides will have an incentive to tell people to buy their tour, because they will get a cut of the profit every time it is downloaded,” Uhlenhuth said.

Uhlenhuth said he hopes to eventually be able to provide a variety of tours for each school. He suggested the “ADPhi Drunken Stumble” and the “Whiffenpoofs Guide to Yale” as tours he’d like to see on campus.”

And tour guides should be aware. Prospective families are craving authenticity and real. They are visiting campuses to find out if it’s a good fit for them. And they’ll be happy to incorporate an iPhone App if it presents campuses from an honest student point of view(s).

Lesson one: Keep it real and authentic. Ditch the spin and the tightly scripted best buildings, grass is always green campus tour.
If you don’t stage a campus visit that is authentic and real your audience will find you ordinary and bland. Millennials cherish and celebrate imperfections and they want a school that is comfortable to do the same. If you don’t show your real school and answer questions honestly, your audience will go around you (think Campus Dirt, Rate My Professor and countless other online resources) to find it. And now “there’s an app for that” when it comes to the campus tour.

iPhones, smartphones and AR - Augmented Reality (soon to be part of the campus visit)
The future is mobile marketing. Countless companies are creating applications and mobile/location based programs that enhance the in-person, in-place experience. It’s called Augmented Reality or AR and basically it layers data on top of iPhone and other smartphones. Some techies predict that “Augmented reality is going to be huge. It might even be big as the web.”

Read more about it in Fast Company Magazine, High Ed Web Marketing Blog and the Adweek Mobile Marketing Guide. It’s going to change marketing and move it all towards location based. Which means more customization and personalization.

From the AdAge Mobile Marketing Guide:

“To understand why people are so excited, look at the impact other digital innovations have had. Search, for example, solved a big part of the “what” problem — helping you find what you’re looking for. And while search didn’t know much about our social filters, social networking came in and offered up a “who” filter. Now we’re looking at the “where.” And it’s the combination of these filters that have the potential to change consumer and marketer behavior.”

“Everybody’s got a website, but nobody has a mobile experience right now,” he said. “Next year, probably the end of next year, if you pull your phone out and you’re in the Hilton hotel and it doesn’t tell you information about the Hilton, either your phone is broken or the Hilton’s broken. If you, as a business, own a location, you’ve got an interesting shot at reaching your customer.”

Lesson: We all want what we want when we want it. Embrace the iPhone and other smart phones to help add customization and personalization to your campus visit experiences.
They are a great way to stage a robust self-guided tour or to enhance your main visit experience with elements of customization. After your information session and main tour, have computers where prospectives can download self-guided tours of things they are interested in; academics and extracurricular.  Start with simple Mp3 or iTunes downloads from computers in your admissions office and then expand to more robust AR using data, images, video and more.

1. Your campus visit should be an engaging experience.

2. You can enhance that experience with location based tools and AR.

3. But remember, no technology can replace honest human interaction and dialogue. It only enhances it. So that’s why your tour guides/ambassadors should be free to be themselves and free to be conversationalists not scripted tourbots.

It’s all about the experience!

For most schools, changing the way they market is like turning an ocean liner. That’s why college fairs, high school visits, search mailings and other recruiting staples still play such a large role and eat up so much of the admissions budget.

But there are some schools that can change direction like a jet-skier, and those are the ones that TargetX considered for this year’s “X Award” for excellence in student recruiting. The winner is a college in California that has made great strides in “overthrowing dead culture,” the phrase adopted by TargetX CEO Brian Niles to represent the company’s philosophy of modernizing admissions marketing.

California Lutheran University was recognized with the 3rd annual X Award for “reinventing recruitment marketing,” including such steps as:

- Creating key staff positions that focus on electronic communications and the campus visit experience.

- Forgoing the viewbook, search piece and other traditional publications in favor of a timely and vibrant magazine that’s sent to students as they enter the recruitment funnel.

- Instituting an aggressive “yield campaign” aimed at the incoming class of 2010.

- Building a new space to serve as a visitor center, focusing on the special touches that will make it a uniquely CLU experience.

- Recognizing the power of storytelling, including a web page that offers individual stories from students, faculty, alumni and others, and invites visitors to “tell us your story.”

- Using its towering abstract sculpture of Martin Luther — affectionately known as “Enormous Luther” — as a signature moment at the end of each campus tour. CLU tour guides offer to photograph visiting families in front of the statue and then email the shots after visitors return home.

To see an online version of the “Cal Lu” magazine, visit:
www.callutheran.edu/admission/undergraduate/cal_lu/2009_fall/

To visit the “storytelling” page, click:
www.callutheran.edu/50/your_stories.php

P.S. For the first time, the X Award was also bestowed on an individual. Providence College’s Chris Lydon was honored for “embracing change in recruitment marketing.” Based on the enthusiastic response of 130 of his peers at the recent “iThink” discussion at NACAC, it was the right choice.

Last week some 125+ Admissions VP’s, Deans, Directors and Senior Associates gathered at TargetX’s second annual iThink during NACAC in Baltimore.  Last year’s event was held at the Seattle Public Library’s Washington Mutual Foundation Room (the day WaMu was “Seized and Sold!” as the city’s newspaper headline proclaimed).

This year’s venue was the historic Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  The setting itself was a lesson on change. Once an industrial powerhouse, Baltimore lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs. Now it is a $5 billion dollar a year tourist destination, and its three “firsts” of the Inner Harbor Festival Marketplace, National Aquarium, and retro/heritage ball park have become the standard blueprint for other cities to copy as they try urban renewal.

Four of higher education’s thought leaders: Kathy Kurz of Scannell & Kurz, Bill Royall of Royal & Company, Bob Sevier of Stamats, and Brian Niles of TargetX, each gave their “declaration” followed by questions and discussions led by yours truly as moderator.

The challenge was to keep the event from turning into a huge gripe session about the economy and its impact on admissions. Our goal instead was to focus on the future of both admissions and enrollment marketing in the midst of economic turmoil (and what colleges can do about it).

Sure, a changing economic landscape could be a crisis — but it’s also an opportunity. What is that opportunity? Some said, “Be authentic to who you are!” “Articulate value!” “Don’t discount the residential experience!” “Educate the entire campus to recruit” and “Leadership isn’t about getting the team on the same bus, it’s getting them in a rowing/crew scull and getting them to work together!”

There was also intense conversation about the best practices used by proprietary schools (things like quick turnaround of applicants to admits and faster responses to inquiries).  Of course, the comment “Admissions is sales” caused a stir as well. But all agreed that financial aid and career services (outcomes) need to have stronger relationships with admissions.

At the end, each participant was asked, “Based upon our discussion today, what’s one thing you’re not doing today that you can implement or change in the office tomorrow?”

At the end of the two-hour discussion, the annual TargetX “X Awards” were given to Christopher Lydon from Providence College and to California Lutheran University for embracing change and for representing the TargetX motto of “Overthrowing Dead Culture.”

After all, change is what the iThink discussion is all about.

On the flight home from Baltimore, I was reading the September 28 BusinessWeek and found two articles relevant to the iThink discussions about authenticity and change. I hope they get you thinking:

The Great Trust Offensive
Companies are revamping their marketing to earn your trust
“Consumers are telling companies in a thousand ways, that ‘if you aren’t open with me, then I won’t trust you.’ It gets to be counterproductive to fight that.” Randall Beard, former CMO at UBS

UPMC The “New Steel” in Pittsburgh
“Eds and Meds” revitalize the city’s economy
“Pittsburgh offers lessons for other communities. Its leaders didn’t spend a lot of energy trying to save troubled steel companies, suggesting it may be more valuable to look at new opportunities than old standbys. The city’s experience also shows that persistence with new ventures is critical.”

Keep thinking! And remember, as my colleague Adrienne Bartlett says, “The Mandarin symbol for change incorporates both the symbols for opportunity and crisis.”

Under which one is your school and its leadership operating?

For as long as I can remember (as far back as my senior thesis for my undergraduate degree on the costs and pricing of higher education), I’ve always had a nagging question about how colleges and universities price themselves.

In my last position at a university, I was “at the table” for discussions of pricing at all levels. I remember researching costs at competing schools, reviewing CPI trends, helping to generate profit-loss statements for the three major areas of the university (undergraduate, graduate and continuing studies) and making recommendations. In the end, a bottom up pricing model peppered with what I like to call “pulled from your butt” market-based increases in tuition was the ultimate decision, mirroring trends in private higher education tuition increases from year to year.

But now decades after my first day sitting across from a parent and having to explain what “gapping” was in their financial aid package, and now during what appears to be the most significant economic crisis my generation has experienced, a parent of a prospective college student tells us that we’ve reached the tipping point - the point where parents are not only frustrated by the cost of higher education, but now make decisions based on it.

You may have read this parent’s letter to Northeastern University. It’s nothing new, it’s just the first time I’ve seen it published online for all to read and comment.

For those colleges that are finally listening. For those colleges that may ultimately be forced to change come May 1st’s reality. For those colleges that see “the tipping point” and take a lead on change. These will be the colleges of the future. Those that choose to ignore the loud, screaming and poignant message from Robert, I believe you are risking the future of your institution - no matter how large your reputation may be.

The times they aren’t a changing. They already have.

How many times have I said in presentations or sitting with clients: “You are no longer in control.” In my presentation slide I swap out my standard black background with a bright red one in order to drive home my point.

And I followup that simple statement with one that always tends to get a rise out of those who are listening and have been in admissions for many years: “And you never were.”

More than 20 years ago I was introduced to the concept of the admissions funnel, the idea that students simply and cleanly move from one step to another with conversion rates that are eerily similar each year.  And at each stage, we’ve come to rely on what it takes to keep things consistent from one year to the next.

We believed that our message, no matter how authentic and unique, in clear marketing-speak would influence those to inquire, then apply and eventually enroll.  We controlled the message, the timelines and the outcome.
Read on…