Brain Waves Blog

When I began in higher education as an academic advisor, I interacted with undergraduate students daily. From each conversation, I gleaned insights into needs, barriers, and successes students experienced at my institution. As I moved into university administration, that student-centered perspective greatly informed my work on retention and graduation initiatives. Heading into my fifth year in administration with little direct student interaction, my sense of the current student experience feels a little out of date. I realized this challenge was likely not unique to me and set out to learn what’s worked for seasoned university administrators to remain connected to the current student experience at their institutions. Here’s what I learned.

Regardless of having the word social in the name, social listening is not something you do just to get better at social media. Let’s repeat that—social listening is not just about social media! Social listening is an investment in strategic intelligence (across various channels), that gets you closer to what is being said to and about your institution with implications across almost every area of campus. Listening to your online conversation builds trust, which is arguably the most valuable commodity today.

Collegiate athletic programs exist for a number of reasons; namely, they’re a huge revenue generator, taking advantage of conference-affiliated and national television broadcasting contracts and merchandising to market their teams and universities.

You scour social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates about your institution. And you receive Google alerts when you’re mentioned in the news. But are you keeping up with Reddit?  

When I founded Campus Sonar, I wrote a blog post about the need for data-informed marketing in higher education. It’s been almost two years now and the industry has made progress, but I feel like we still have a ways to go. Recently, I contributed to a blog series for Adapt about data-driven marketing and current trends—and I realized I had a lot more to say (most of you won’t be surprised about that). So here’s part two of my thoughts on data-driven marketing, marketing trends, and the impact on higher ed.

With graduations across the country this spring, universities gained thousands of new alumni. But as soon as students graduate and leave campus, it becomes harder to engage with them and continue to build a relationship. One of the keys to connecting with new alumni is to not wait until they’ve graduated, but to engage with them before they become alumni. The more engaged and connected students are to an institution, the more likely they are to become engaged alumni. This speaks to Dr. Jay Le Roux Dillon’s idea of alumni identity—the measure of how deeply a graduate associates their own self-identity with their alma mater. The closer alumni feel to your institution, the more they’ll feel compelled to give—both time and money.