What are the best practices for evaluating enrollment management strategies?

The SMART goal strategy is important, but having this implemented for not only Sales & marketing, but also on the Enrollment Team, Customer Support team, & operations team is important. These goals should focus on the organizational North Star Metric (NSM) & are the contributing factors to achieving the organizational NSM. The ROI calculation should also have qualitative and quantitative measurements for these departments. The major focus should be on understanding & and achieving process excellence using these key metrics. Thus identifying the workable KPIs & parameters for growth along with interlinked (direct or indirect proportional) input metrics are critical for ensuring the right input & reduce hits and trials at a higher scale.

Defining goals and metrics can be particularly difficult at the graduate level for Graduate Enrollment Management (GEM) since many universities operate in a decentralized model where the individual schools and programs are responsible for their own recruitment, admission, and ultimately hitting their own individual targets. A GEM plan is still incredibly important for a university to succeed, but the first step in defining goals and metrics must go beyond the institution's mission, vision, and values, and explore the individual program goals and knowing the landscape in your particular institution. Which programs are able to grow? Which are trying to diversify? The goals will vary across programs and should be considered first.

It's important to go beyond the quantitative analysis and promote qualitative engagements between the existing students/ alumnus with prospective students. While having a high percentage of students who get employed within 6 months of graduating from the school is great, organizing FAQs with the alumnus of a school/department make it more believable and relatable for students looking to apply. 1:1 interactions should be encouraged as well. A school that provides application guidance in a manner more transparent and detailed than other schools, like providing the do's and don'ts of SOP writing to the browsing student, may stand out and invariably attract more applications, because they are more supportive than expected by the young browser!

Data collection and distribution on a regular, reoccurring schedule builds trust and collaboration. Training various campus partners to review the same success metrics and then proactively identify areas of opportunity requires constant education and training as new team members come on board, making your processes as important as the data analysis.

This can be incredibly difficult given the number of data sources on any given campus. Often universities will have different inquiry forms, applications, app review tools, CRMs, and many other technology partners across the lifecycle. Finding a way to get all of the data out of those systems and into a common reporting structure can be the most challenging step. In Graduate Enrollment Management (GEM), the decentralized nature of the programs adds an additional layer of complexity when often the different schools and programs leverage their own technology that may differ from the central offices. Working in partnership with the technology vendors to try and automate as much of the data exports as possible will help with efficiency.

At the graduate level, this is imperative. I've seen great benefit in departmental staff and faculty joining their own discipline-specific communities in order to gain a better understanding of how their competitors are performing and understanding the landscape at a discipline-specific level. For example, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) provides their members great data on the state of the pharmacy profession. Similarly, AACSB or BusinessCAS are two communities providing information to Business Schools, AACN for Nursing programs, EngineeringCAS and ASEE for Engineering programs - the list is endless. Finding the right community and access points for your specific discipline at the graduate level is key.

In this very step, it's critical to identify a realistic goal and benchmark it against the industry standards or leading competitors. But most people miss out on one thing is input metrics & scale comparison factors along with your exceptional methods, which can create a massive difference in results. However, having some ballpark figures, percentages, and targets helps you drive and optimize your inputs on a higher frequency - be it marketing, lead generation, funnel optimization, sales touch bases, or customer servicing process timeline. Making this team-wise, department, and function-wise is critical, and having a proper inter-linked metrics function is critical. So that one's metric is positively impacting others' metrics.

Having a cross-team communication about the campaigns and strategies before rolling out campaigns is also critical. Sharing a campaign reflection report including what worked and how and what didn't, along with areas to look into with respective internal stakeholders' help. Sharing the achievements to challenges with teams, stake holders, and even users also helps get feedback and suggestions. At least, it also makes them feel a part of it. Making these internal communication & reports, along with findings personalised to each department via the help of leaders of each, is important to ensure relevant information is shared along with action items for each department to work upon - Numbers and Statistics along with observational insights

Usage of Documentation for Evaluation - ✅Performance Analysis: Use documented KPIs outcomes to conduct in-depth performance analysis. ✅Benchmarking: Use historical documents to benchmark current performance against past results. ✅Compliance Checks: Use legal & compliance documents to ensure that all strategies are compliant with relevant regulations. ✅Knowledge Transfer: Well-documented strategies make it easier to onboard new team members, ensuring long-term planning. ✅Case Study Development: Use the documentation to build case studies that provide detailed insights into what worked and what didn't. ✅Transparency: Detailed documentation ensures transparency in operations, which is crucial for stakeholder trust and for potential audits.

Stakeholder Feedback is very critical and thus impacts all other strategies- ✅ Surveys and Interviews: Gather feedback from prospective students, current students, and alumni to understand their perspectives. ✅ Faculty and Staff Input: Consult with faculty and staff who are often close to the student experience. ✅ Consult with Partners: If you have external partners like admission agents or consultants, their feedback can be invaluable.