Brain Waves Blog

It’s no secret that online spaces provide students with opportunities to connect to others and build community, but do you know how often that’s happening on your campus’s Reddit page? A quick peek at your page will often reveal questions, comments, and potential concerns—all right on a public page that anyone can see. Higher ed communicators are community builders, and understanding what happens on forums could help your campus grow a stronger real-world and digital community. 

Looking back on conversation topics and trends we’ve seen in our five+ years of industry research, we see lessons and insights you can use moving forward to make the most of yield season (or the recruitment process at large) and build a robust incoming class. 

Brand fragmentation is a consistent theme we see in our industry and client research. There are lots of reasons for this, but mainly the folx charged with “managing the brand” are thinking about “the flagship.” When you embrace the adage that “brands aren’t what you say they are, they’re what they [your audience] says they are,” the fragmentation is obvious. 

Your campus is working to tell a cohesive, compelling brand story, but if you’re not working with a collaborative shared strategy, your message is being drowned out by conversation from accounts managed within departments, colleges and units, research centers, and other disparate areas of campus telling a different story in a different way in hopes of meeting very different goals. Let’s count the ways your brand is fragmented.

Ongoing social listening analysis allows you to better understand your baseline conversation and create personal benchmarks, track seasonal changes, evaluate the effects of crises, and measure the impact of new campaigns. 

At best, the “demographic cliff” is an oversimplified, incomplete, and misleading phrase for the very real and inevitable demographic shift happening in the United States. The world is not ending; this isn’t going to deplete the value of higher education; and even if there are less “traditional college students,” there will still be humans who need and want postsecondary education. Those folx are just going to look different; come from different backgrounds; have different needs and experiences; and be different people than they have been historically. Despite those whose fear is attempting to stop or slow it down, the make-up of this country is changing and that’s not a bad thing.