The Undergraduate Engagement Report, Connecting with Faith-Focused Students, and Preparing Students for an AI-Driven Workforce

Welcome to Halda Insights, our newsletter full of in-house research, marketing & admissions strategies, and AI nuggets. As always, our own research is in bold. Enjoy!

Issue Preview:

• The full Undergrad Enrollment Report is here!
• Video is good...personalized video is better
• UWF's resounding free trial experience
• The Christian prospect's enrollment journey
• Preparing students for the post-AI job market

The Complete Undergrad Enrollment Journey

It’s here, everyone: The full-fledged, comprehensive data report compiled and delivered through our collaboration with Ruffalo Noel Levitz. The report analyzes data from 2000+ responses from 9th through 12th graders across the country.

Here's what it covers...

• Most potent marketing practices for GenZ
• Impactful admissions strategies for today’s high schoolers
• Region and grad-specific data breakdowns
• Trend comparison from the same survey 2 years ago

It’s an instructive piece on today’s student preferences that will inform your enrollment practices for, literally, years to come. Download it today!

The power of personalized video

54% of undergraduate prospects think it's important for schools to use their name in videos.  

We all know video helps convert web traffic. There’s great data about the conversion power of campus tour videos, video follow-up from professors, etc. But as the first complete “visual generation” comes of age, we still haven’t reached the threshold of how much video is too much–and the more personalized, the better.

23% of undergrads claim that using their first name in a video is “Very Important”. Providing follow-up in a world where 1 in 4  prospects demands the highest level of personalization is a challenge for small, overworked enrollment teams...but we are living in an AI revolution.

With the help of AI there are new frontiers for scalable video. At the very least, services can cut together pre-existing clips that relate to each prospect’s experiences and interests.

If you want to build out a truly bespoke video strategy, companies like Hippo (no, we’re not a partner, we just think their products are cool) are doing incredible things with text-to-video creation and using human-like avatars to build personalized videos at speed.

Try something out that’s new for the next enrollment cycle, and then put those videos in a Halda DLP to make sure you deliver it to the right future students!

The Free Trial Experience: The University of West Florida

If you'll forgive us for tooting our own horn a little, lately we’ve been working with the University of West Florida to get their Halda onboarding process started with plenty of momentum. Now we’re seeing some great results.

We sat down with Melissa Webb, Assistant Dean of the Graduate School at UWF, and Kristina Hathaway, UWF's CRM Coordinator, to discuss the free trial, Halda's immediate conversion power, and how we help drive students toward enrollment. We cover...

• Slate Integration for data-backed follow-up
• Ease of Implementation
• Full-Funnel Results

Here’s what those initial results look like:

We're particularly proud of the fact that we not only capture more leads, but we also serve as a catalyst for eventual enrollment. Here's the full story if you want to take a look.

The Christian college prospect's divergent enrollment journey

For schools with a faith-centered foundation, or even for admissions teams interacting with Christian students, effective communication can have a slightly different texture. We drew on our database of 400 million+ data points to explore the different interaction styles, preferences, and motivations of the Christian college prospect. We cover…

• Interaction patterns on the website
• Key concerns and motivations
• Strategies for most effective messaging

Here’s the report! We hope you’ll check it out.

Schools shouldn’t just be using AI–they should be teaching it

We understand, AI and education have gotten off on something of the wrong foot. At worst, institutes of higher education have cold-shouldered AI, and at best they've waded in with caution. We suggest that schools go ahead and start swimming in AI for the sake of their students.

Since 2022, generative AI-focused job postings have seen a 75-fold increase. That's 7500% more generative AI-related job postings than there were 2 years ago. And these jobs often command high salaries at top companies.

Institutions need to prepare students for this booming job category quickly if they want to maximize the future of their graduates and that of the school, itself.

Thanks for checking in with Halda Insights! We hope you'll stay tuned for more data and AI nuggets!