Last May, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column about admission blogging for the August 2006 issue of University Business: “License to Recruit? Admissions-sponsored student blogging can get real results for your institution.â€
Brendon Connelly, Director of Graduate and Professional Studies Admissions at George Fox University, answered these questions at this time.
1) Your institution used student blogs/journals as recruitment tools. Can you please describe the way you implemented them (When? How many bloggers? How were they recruited? Were they paid?)
We were pretty impressed and influenced by the Wharton MBA diaries. We launched three MBA student blogs in Fall of 2005. We used Typepad as a platform, but styled the blogs so that they were generally integrated with the look/feel of our website. The students were chosen by their professors, based on class participation, writing skills, etc., and the overall effort was managed by the Admissions office. The bloggers weren’t paid for their participation.
2) What were your marketing goals for these tools? Why did you choose to offer student blogs/journals on your admission website?
The overall goal was to give prospective students an authentic and diverse look at life as a George Fox University MBA student. We wanted our bloggers to be a destination for prospective students—a place on the web where they would go daily to read interesting posts about business-oriented topics interspersed with a little dish from class or insight into homework or reflections from the workplace. We wanted to the blogs to be so compelling that they would be a recruiting tool that we could highlight. Blogs can be and do all that, but (we now know) there’s much more to a successful implementation than simply selecting smart and witty students with impressive titles to blog for your school or program.
3) How did you measure the results of this initiative? How many visitors/page views did your blogs get? How well did they perform compared to other recruitment tools? What kind of feedback did you get? WHy did you stop?
This is where where it gets embarrassing. Our daily visitor count was typically in the single digits. My sense of the thing is that the project came together in a generally slapdash sort of way, and the final result wasn’t as visually appealing as anyone would have liked. We compounded the problem by never really promoting the blogs in any meaningful way. I think we were waiting for the bloggers to write better, more frequently, whatever. And when we felt like they figured out the medium, we’d start promoting it. It just never came together and we finally pulled the plug.
4) Can you quantify the return on investment of this initiative? What is/was your budget (including any offline promotion efforts such as postcards, brochures, etc.)?
I can’t quantify the ROI on this effort because we didn’t set up the blogs to formally capture prospect data in any meaningful way. We were never able to identify blog readership as a referral channel, mainly for the reasons listed above. The overall cost of setup was relatively low, compared to the cost of doing a “testimonial†mailing to the same potential audience. I say potential because the market penetration of our blogs never really took off. It was all unrealized potential.
We split our budget dollars across our specific programs (for instance, our Doctor of Management, Executive Track MBA and Professional Track MBA each have their own budget allocation, rather than sharing a larger allocation), so I don’t have a single big number to use for our promotions. It varies pretty broadly among our programs, but it’s generally in the high five figures.
5) Would you recommend the use of blogs/journals to other institutions? Why?
Definitely. I’m still a fan of blogging on all fronts: personal blogs that are more like diaries, professional blogs on vertical topics and marketing-oriented blogs. Here’s the caveat, though: it is so simple to establish a personal blog that it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that a marketing-oriented blog is just as easy. It’s not. I think institutions are still in moving along the learning curve as far as blog marketing goes. Some schools have found success, others are still working on it and yet others are kind of skeptical about the whole thing. I don’t think there is any magic in blogs—some institutional cultures will be better suited for blog marketing than others. That’s fine—not every institution needs a stable of students bloggers (or administrative bloggers, for that matter). From my limited perspective, the best choice for selecting student bloggers is to find students who are blogging already and either repurpose their content (with permission, of course) for your pages, or recruit them to author a new blog. But those are topics for another column, I guess.