International Students

After blogs yesterday, today is the turn of email.

This week, I guess I’m on a mission to rescue you from the sirens of the lost technologies casting the premature death of very good marketing/communication channels with great proven return on investment.

So, let me put it this way right from the get-go: email isn’t dead.

Email marketing is still very relevant in higher education especially in these difficult economic times where ROI is going to become even more important.

At one condition though, you got to do it right.

Both speakers from the upcoming Email Marketing 360 webinar series, Karlyn Morissette (Dartmouth) and Carmella Manges (St Edward’s University) have been very successful with their respective email marketing strategies and agreed to share their expertise and experience with you just after Thanksgiving on December 2nd and 3rd.

Interested? Intrigued?
Keep reading the description of this 2-webinar series below.

Already sold on the idea?
Register by November 19 at www.higheredexperts.com/emailmarketing360.
At only $240, the total cost per connection for both webinars (you can stuff a room with people from all your offices on campus) is quite budget-friendly.

“Email Marketing 360″ is a 2-webinar series that will show you that email is far from dead – even for communications targeted to younger audiences – when done right. You will learn why and how to set up an email marketing strategy for your office, department or institution. You will also find out how to make sure you measure the ROI of your campaigns.

December 2, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: December 9, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Marketing to Inboxes: 5-Step Plan to Effective Email Campaigns
Karlyn Morissette, Web Producer at Dartmouth, will guide you on the road to successful email marketing campaigns. She will explain why and how email can help you get your message across, recruit more students or generate more gifts by following her 5-step plan.

December 3, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: December 10, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Analyze this! How to inform your email marketing strategy with the right analytics
Carmella Manges, Director of E-Marketing at St. Edward’s University, will explain how the right approach with analytics can help you show the ROI of your campaigns and fine tune your email marketing strategy. She will share best practices and lessons learned in implementing a complete email analytics program for her institution.

For registration and information, just go to www.higheredexperts.com/emailmarketing360.

Since we had to postpone to January 13-15, 2009 the series initially scheduled this week, Social Networks MBA, you can still get a $25 Amazon certificate if you register for both series. More details about this offer can be found on this previous post. I’ve already issued a few gift certificates for registered folks.

Got questions? Email karine@collegewebeditor.com

No post since the last edition of this series “Catch up-Date with Karine” aiming at fighting the information overload, I guess you can imagine how busy the past week has been. Anyway, here’s what I got for you with this special edition about “all things Admissions.”

With NACAC’s 64th national conference taking place last week in Seattle, it’s “Admissions applications or websites” fest

With so many admissions professionals gathered under one roof, this conference was the theater of several launches in the admissions web market including admissions.com (Monster.com’s take on college search) and Unigo.com (launched by a young entrepreneur with connections in the media and the higher ed blogosophere)

Meanwhile, Allegheny College (Mike Richwalsky’s home base) has decided to add its contribution to the college search a bit differently by launching a new online initiative.

The YouTube channel and website named “College Search 101″ feature videos by their admissions head with very general advice. Remind me of an audio podcast done by a business school about 3 years ago: just general advice, no heavy promotion of the institution itself.

Last but not least, in the new released study department, don’t miss:

The State of the College Admissions – a 75-page PDF report produced by NACAC

Here are a few interesting facts included in the report:

• Online Applications Increase: Colleges received 68 percent of all applications for Fall 2007 admission online, up from 58 percent in the Fall 2006 admission cycle.
• Cost to Recruit: On average, colleges and universities spent about $578 to recruit
  each applicant for Fall 2007 admission, $836 to recruit each admitted student and $2,366
  to recruit each enrolled student (when admission staff salaries and benefits were included in the admission office budget).

And a chart worth your time if you’re in charge of the admissions website:

Features - Admissions Websites, NACAC report

Do you Twitter?
I do (feel free to follow me @karinejoly) as more and more people in the web and PR higher ed world.

But, what about our prospective students or their parents? Do they?

We’ll probably find out in a few months by measuring the success of an initiative Colgate University has just launched, as Charlie Melichar, VP for PR & Communications, mentioned in an exchange via Facebook (and when I get contacted by a university VP via Facebook, it’s probably a good indicator that he will be a good source of interesting new initiatives):

We just launched a twitter stream on our homepage. We have a first-year student posting pretty consistently — though it’s just day one

When I checked it out yesterday around 6PM, Ajay Chahar (aka @colgateunvrsty), who is as far as I know one of the first official student Twitterers (please, correct me if I’m wrong), had only 10 followers.

The experiment was introduced to the world in a news story about this special student published Wednesday on Colgate website:

Now, after choosing Colgate, he’s ready to share his experiences in a real-time way so high school students and others can get a sense of what it is like to be a student here, a place he said offers the “complete college experience.”

Chahar is using a service called Twitter to provide brief regular updates on what he is doing. Pretty much anything and everything is worth a new “tweet,” and anyone can read these slices of college life.

What’s really interesting (and should I say “bold”) is that Colgate chose to include the Twitter updates on its homepage – at the bottom left though, not front and center:

The stream doesn’t link directly from the homepage to the Twitter account though, but to a page where contextual information is provided along with the latest updates.

I’m not sure Twitter is the tool to communicate with students (although I do find it very useful in my daily job), but this experiment might prove me wrong. I’ll keep an eye on it and will let you know.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your opinion about this unconventional initiative.

Do you think it’s going to work?

Did you know that the world doesn’t agree when it comes to paper formats?

We may use letter and legal in the US, but the rest of the world print and write on a slightly different paper format called A4.

Why should you care about A4?

What seems to be a detail can actually become a major hassle for prospective international students trying to print your nicely formatted PDF application forms and admission documents. Because the A4 is a bit longer and not as wide as our letter format, there is a big change that your documents won’t fit as they should or worse that some part will go missing.

I’ve recently redesigned the web section of our International Services Office. His director who deals on a daily basis with international students requested that all PDF forms be available in A4 format with good reasons.

How do you switch between letter and A4?

Very simple in MS Word (as it should be in any other Word processor of your liking):

• Change the paper format under Page Setup from letter to A4
• Check and adjust your document to the new format (MS Word will actually do some of the work by itself)
• Print to your PDF application and voila!

If you take the time to provide A4 documents targeted to international students, I’m sure you’ll make friends all other the world.