The admissions office at the
University of San Francisco was ready to bring everything together. "We were really interested in doing more electronic outreach," says Ronell Toledo, web services director at the university.
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Ronell Toledo
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"We had gathered a collection of communication tools such as chat technology, online surveys, graphic postcards, CD-ROMs and multimedia online presentations. But what we were lacking was an overarching management technology for these different tools, one that would allow us to mix and match and combine them into cohesive communication plans," adds Toledo.
Not to mention, whenever the counselors wanted to send out e-mails to prospective students, they would have to contact someone in the IT Services office to pull the e-mail list from the student information system. The counselors would then have to enter new additions by hand and send the e-mail using their own accounts.
Everything came together in October 2005 when the admissions office implemented Hobsons EMT Connect². Connect² is designed for prospective student communication. One centralized database manages web site inquiries, e-mail and direct mail. The first version of Connect came out in 1999, and Connect² launched in March 2005.
“We’re trying to enable universities to make communication as personal as possible,” explains Paul Freedman, Hobsons’ EMT managing director, “not just dropping in someone’s first name.” Hobsons paid attention to customer feedback suggesting they make the application more usable.
Now, everything is wizard-based, and every screen is a three-step process. Data that is updated in Connect² is shared across campus. Also, SAT and ACT data can be loaded into Connect² for tailored communication.
Currently, 200 institutions are using Connect.
"Connect² is very easy to use and was straightforward to implement," says Toledo. "It's going very well. We achieved the initial objective of being able to manage our prospects by doing standard data entry, exporting reports for mailing labels and providing prospect lists to various schools and colleges at the university. In addition, we've been able to send out e-mail communications with very rich reporting."
Admissions office staff can now see to whom they’ve sent messages and how many people opened them. This enables follow-up messages to those who opened the initial e-mail. And the list of people who opened the e-mail can be exported to a spreadsheet with one mouse click and used as a call list.
"We've placed the information about prospects in the hands of counselors themselves, which is wonderful," says Toledo. "Counselors can log in, query for a prospect pool they want, export the list they need, and have us in web services send out the e-mail. There's a nice dialogue between the counselors and us-- all without the need to continually badger ITS."
"Our enrollment and our application rate have both increased, not directly as a result of technology, but because the counselors have leveraged technology,” continues Toledo. Over four years, freshman applications have doubled and traditional undergraduate enrollment has increased 24 percent.