Marketing Your Return on Investment
We would like to believe that our students come to college because they want to have their minds broadened and their lives transformed. But let’s face it, usually their first motivation in getting an education is to get a good job. In their time with us, we can often convince them that becoming a fully self-actualized person is more important than that first post-grad job. However, even to have the chance to make that case, we must first put their minds at ease that there will be an economic payment upon graduation.
Institutions often struggle to tell compelling outcomes stories. Yes, each college has its handful of star alumni and students who are in fabulous internships or changing the world in some way. Beyond those stories, it is notoriously hard to quantify the return on investment that the average student will receive from the education that is offered.
Making a great ROI case is not impossible, but it does mean getting outside of some of the usual boxes in which many colleges operate and viewing the challenge the way prospective students and their families do.
Seek Better Internal Alignment
The first challenge in marketing ROI is adjusting our alignment. To find compelling outcomes stories, our advancement and career offices need to work together much more closely than they do at many institutions. Sharing data on graduates builds a robust database of outcomes to pull from. A close connection between these two offices makes it that much easier to involve alumni in helping current students with networking, interviewing, and internship placement—key examples of potential return on investment.
At some institutions, advancement and career services are part of the same division, which creates a natural environment for collaboration. After all, both of these offices work with constituents from outside the college as much, if not more than, inside. If this is not the case at your institution, the marketing department can become the connector between the two offices to make sure that outcomes information moves back and forth. Create an easy system for both offices to share their data and stories. Launch a portal for students to tell you what they are doing in their internships and early job experiences and provide access to both offices.
If your career office collects first destination survey information or collects alumni data on LinkedIn, do not let them keep it to themselves! Pool it with data on graduate success from your alumni office and creates a central source of ROI stories that can be leveraged by marketing and enrollment teams.
Start Before Day One
Institutions often miss the opportunity to make a case early and demonstrate what we can do for students by helping them confirm their career direction. Students often get very little help with early career planning, and yet one of the first questions we ask them as institutions is, “What major do you want to study?” Why wait until students are enrolled to help them when we can demonstrate the first evidence of our ROI by helping them answer this question?
Marketing teams can partner with career offices to create resources for students pre-enrollment. This could be as simple as a brief printed guide on career planning, early access to the assessments that are available to enrolled students, or optional enrollment in an online career class created for them. Communicate with admitted students and invite them to utilize these resources early. Make them available in your orientation materials. Use them as examples of your institutional commitment to helping each student achieve a great career outcome.
This kind of pre-enrollment resource provides multiple benefits.
First, it is a compelling “loss leader.” It demonstrates your institution as a source of expertise, but does so in a way that is generous and puts the good of the student before the gain of the college. If you create something that benefits students, whether or not they choose to enroll, you begin to earn trust, and you strengthen your reputation as an institution that begins paying students back from day one.
Institutionally, you also receive a benefit because students arrive more prepared. You improve the chances of students retaining and graduating on time when you help them get on to a major path about which they feel confident. You can also prevent heartache and angst for students who may have switched majors—perhaps more than once—without such early guidance.
Embrace the ROI Question
Good information on outcomes and graduate success is some of the most difficult information to find in college materials and websites. And yet, for most families, it is one of the most critical deciding factors for selecting a college. Rather than backing away from the return on investment question, we can embrace it and use it as a differentiating factor. To do this, we need to make sure that the offices most able to help make the case are well aligned and sharing data, both with each other and with the marketing team. We can also demonstrate a commitment to career outcomes by making resources available to students even before they arrive on campus.
In both of these cases, the marketing office is the vehicle for communicating that we care about return on investment, and we know that it matters to students. Embracing the outcomes question, with confidence and clarity, will make your institution a distinctive choice in a crowded market.
Let's talk about how 5° Branding can help tell your institution’s story to support your enrollment efforts.
