The End of the Campus Visit?
In the late 1990s, realtors began posting homes for sale online, showcasing photos and details of their listings to prospective buyers. This represented a big shift in real estate and realtors likely saw a dip in the number of homes they were showing face-to-face. However, the in-person showings that they did have were more qualified and better prospects for selling.
Similarly, car dealers have seen more people avoiding the traditional car buying process of spending the day at the car lot test driving cars and haggling over price, only to see the prospective buyer walk away without purchasing the car. From the comfort of home, car buyers are looking at photos, researching the make, model, and price, and reading testimonials of current owners of the particular model. When they are armed with the necessary information, they head to the car dealer ready to make an informed decision.
Now, the shift has come to higher education. The pandemic has obviously changed campus visit experiences for prospective students, requiring them to rely on technology in unprecedented ways. But what may have at first been a stop-gap solution to recruit students—offering Zoom counselor calls, adding more content to the school’s website, etc.—is likely going to become a permanent fixture of college recruitment, even when things return to normal.
What the pandemic has revealed is that much of what students can learn about a school in person can also be done virtually. Prospective students and their parents can connect with admissions and financial aid staff over tools like Skype or Zoom. In fact, some schools have gotten extra creative with virtual visit opportunities. And despite the fact that college enrollment is projected to be much lower this fall due to the pandemic, prospective students are still making decisions that will affect the next four years of their life (and beyond) without physically seeing these campuses.
This doesn’t mean campus visits will go by the wayside forever. There is still something special about walking around a potential campus, hearing the youthful chatter of students on their way to class, gazing at the beautiful architecture, and getting a “gut-feeling” about a certain place. But it does likely mean that schools continuing to offer robust digital campus visit experiences will have a huge competitive advantage. In other words, the “campus visit” is entering a new era.
With that in mind, below are four ways to embrace this new and substantial shift in college recruiting.
Change Your Mindset from “Temporary” to “Evolving”
Sending emails with ordinary campus videos and pointing prospective students to Instagram images is fine for now. But this isn’t a long-term solution. It’s important to commit to bringing the virtual campus visit to your prospective students in more polished, developed, and innovative ways.
Even when things return to normal, students are still going to rely heavily on the virtual experience that you’re providing them. If not outright replacing the campus visit (which it likely will for some students), digital campus tours can serve as a bridge between exploring your website and coming physically to campus—a tipping point for justifying the more expensive and time-intensive act of visiting a school in person.
In response to the pandemic, the University of Arkansas men's basketball team has successfully adopted a strong strategy of virtually recruiting their student-athletes. What has come as a surprise, though, is how effective this strategy has been. The school prioritizes video calls with recruits, which allows them to casually show their sports facilities, academic buildings, and the surrounding area of Fayetteville—all at a convenient time for the student. The sense of personal connection they’re able to establish with face-to-face technology, combined with the convenience and ease, has been telling.
Arkansas also developed specially-tailored presentations they can share online for position players, which provides a certain level of customized depth that would be difficult to do in person. The takeaway? Arkansas plans to permanently adopt some of these digital strategies in their recruiting efforts, even when students are able to visit in person again.
Invest in Virtual Technology and Training
This expenditure might mean opting for equipment that allows you to create a much more robust virtual tour experience. Some virtual campus tours leave much to be desired, offering only pixelated, frozen images limited to key areas of a given campus (something no better than what any Google street view could provide). But there are technologies out there that can help prospective students imagine walking around campus with much greater detail and ease.
It can be helpful to take a page from what other organizations are doing as well, such as realtors or property owners. In fact, nowadays you can even virtually tour famous museums, thanks to certain technologies and innovations.
By embracing a more permanent approach to technological initiatives, you can justify to stakeholders the importance of such investments. That might mean paying for high-quality video tours of your campus, residential halls, labs, facilities, and sporting venues. It might mean looking into a virtual campus tour software to allow for a more immersive tour. Or it might mean purchasing high-quality cameras for student tour guides when giving live, virtual campus tours.
Taking this approach also means training the necessary staff and faculty to effectively use these technologies for a more immersive virtual experience. As Arkansas’ basketball team realized, a Zoom or FaceTime call proved much more effective than email or phone. In this case, it was important that all necessary staff knew how to effectively use such technologies—and committed to doing so when they could.
Related to this is the organization of processes around using these technologies. Obviously, faculty and current students cannot constantly be available for any prospective student to call for a video chat. But you can create a system whereby certain students and faculty make themselves available at specific times. This can require larger, campus-wide planning in addition to technical training. Yet, it’s important to get campus staff and faculty to embrace the notion that these aren’t just short-term solutions. Their effort and commitment serve a much longer-term strategy for recruiting students.
Understand What Prospective Students Want from a Virtual Campus Tour
Why do students ultimately visit campus? Is it to meet with faculty? Do they want to get a sense of the type of students who attend? Do they want to make sure it feels like a safe and welcoming environment? (This is especially important for parents.)
And how do answers to these questions change depending on the audience? For example, what particular resources or facilities would first-generation students care to experience virtually? Would that be different for their parents?
Of course, there are many reasons why students (and their parents) visit a campus. But it’s important to understand more clearly what students are looking for from any visit, be that virtual or in person. Then you can map out that experience as part of a comprehensive user journey, determining what can be accomplished or augmented online. If you offer a breathtaking view of the mountains or major city skyline, how can you capture that experience virtually? How can you relay your school’s spirit of tradition and history through digital means?
Collecting information about what students want may require sending out surveys, conducting focus groups, and researching competitors. And it may require creating multiple buyer journeys for different user personas: out-of-state, first-generation, parents, student-athletes, musicians, etc. This information can help you make strategic decisions. It may result in the production of a high-quality video tour of your new science center for a prospective biology student. Or it might lead to a series of iPhone videos of current music students showing on-campus practice rooms and concert venues for a prospective music student.
Look for Opportunities to Improve—Not Just Substitute
You shouldn’t only be thinking about how you can duplicate the in-person campus visit experience. It’s true that on one hand—especially when in-person visits are not possible—it’s good to replace it as much as possible. But this, again, is a stop-gap mindset. By proactively investing in virtual campus visit strategies you are actually able to provide benefits that traditional campus visits can’t.
For example, technology can allow students to see and tour way more areas of campus than they could in person. Instead of only seeing the center of campus, a dining hall, the library, and a handful of other easily accessible areas, you could go where students really live. For example, recruit students in each residence hall to craft interactive walking tour videos—allowing prospective students to experience day-to-day life to a much more detailed and nuanced degree. Plus, by having current students conduct the tours, they offer an “insider’s” perspective that prospective students wouldn’t get on their own (or even through an admissions counselor).
This video from the University of Washington is a good start since halfway through the video we get some visual content about a residence hall. And this one from the University of Georgia isn’t bad either, but we are still left with static images of various dorms on campus.
But this video of a residential hall at Elon University is immersive and personal, and it does a better job of conveying what life might look like day-to-day living on campus. It offers the relational, impromptu experience that you might have received in person, instead of just seeing a still frame of a campus hall exterior (which anyone visiting in person can see). And this same personal approach can be taken for any other area, building, or venue on campus.
You can also build a network of current students willing to FaceTime with prospective students. Instead of hoping a single student can join a group of touring students for lunch to answer their questions, you can offer them the chance to talk with particular students of similar backgrounds. Of course selecting students for this role should follow a similar process that you would use in selecting student recruitment team members for in-person visits.
This virtual idea works with faculty, too, where technology frees prospective students from having to physically attend a professor’s office at a specific time.
Of course, this requires coordination and organization, as well as creating digital spaces for prospective students to learn about and connect with students and faculty virtually. But it’s yet another advantage that virtual campus tours have over in-person ones.
Are You Ready to Get Started?
Ultimately, upping the game of your virtual campus experience will require time, effort, and resources. But a serious and ongoing investment can allow you to offer an immersive and compelling campus experience to prospective students—all from the comfort of their own homes. Your marketing strategy will have a major advantage as we move forward into a future changed forever.
