SEMM Forum 2018 - Strategic Enrolment Marketing & Management

: Social Media and its Impact on Marketing, Branding, and Student Relationship Building

This session will focus on social media platforms and the extent to which they influence marketing, branding, and student relationships.Social media's role in a student’s educational journey will be examined, and results from a three-year survey on student social media preferences will be shared. This presentation will also delve into the role that university presidents share in marketing and communications via social media. This presentation will conclude with some findings regarding the value that students place on social media channels, and the presenters will make some suggestions as to how to more effectively reach students and market/brand educational institutions via social media.
: Recruiting and Retaining Generation Zed Students

Gen Zed individuals were born in 1995 or later and represent the vast majority of traditional-age students on college and university campuses today. Even so, if you have not adjusted your strategies to address their unique needs and preferences, you will not seize the biggest opportunities that exist to ensure their initial enrolment and ongoing persistence. The session will include an overview of the Gen Zed population with related implications for recruitment and retention methodologies.
: Using an Ecosystem Model to Maximize Student Enrolment

The common viewpoint of many faculties is a programmatic or graduate/undergraduate level of individual program offerings, each with their own recruitment and marketing strategies. This results in programs and levels of study each pursuing their own common, but seemingly unrelated interests, which leads to resource redundancy and wastage.

The ecosystem model demonstrates the interconnectedness of the various program offerings within a faculty and the benefit of adopting joint marketing and recruitment activities to maximize the lifetime value of an applicant or student. The result of this joint approach to operations is a more streamlined marketing and recruitment strategy which benefits from a more clearly defined audience.

Our presentation will identify how to go about transforming a faculty perspective from one of programmatic viewpoints to a shared and more robust outlook on faculty operations. This is done by mapping the relationships between faculty interests, acknowledging the complete customer lifecycle and developing actionable tactics that make the ecosystem a workable model.
: Managing the Organizational Change Associated with SEMM

SEMM results in a transformational change for many areas of the post-secondary organization. The impact of this change is often overlooked, which can result in serious implementation challenges, which in turn can undermine achievement of SEMM objectives.

This presentation will focus on the change management aspects of a successful SEMM implementation including highlights from international literature on organizational change in post-secondary organizations, areas where change management should be considered as part of the SEMM implementation plan, examples from multiple projects and specifics on how change management can be implemented to enhance SEMM outcomes.
: Branding Keeps Students, Not Just Recruits Them

Today, institutions are more focused on branding than ever before. It can be extremely challenging managing a brand in the higher education sector, especially when potential and current students live in a world driven by snaps, stories, AI and emojis.

It's impressive and exciting when an academic brand breaks through, makes a connection, and wins the heart of a student. Some would say that once the new student has registered, and shows up for class, the branding job is done... but it's only just begun. What many forget is that strong branding is more important to those already connected to the institution versus those being recruited to join it.

In this session, Sean Williams will speak to the importance of branding, the impact it has on current students, and how it helps keep students coming back year after year. He will highlight and speak to how key areas across campus support the institution's brand, and ensures students stay loyal, committed and engaged.

This session will speak to the undergraduate and graduate years, as well as highlight how best to transition students into active Alumni that are vocal brand advocates. Advocates that will help recruit new students, give back to the institution or simply stay involved.
: Promoting Pre-doctoral Fellowships to Indigenous Students: A Case Study of New Niches and Niche Marketing

In Vicky Arnold’s presentation, she will tell the story of how her faculty created new niche positions and how Vicky promoted them to a niche market while finding a new niche for herself. Based on recommendations in the TRC report and a renewed focus on both scholarly research and faculty renewal, the Faculty of Arts and Science launched four new Pre-doctoral positions for Indigenous scholars.

The first challenge/opportunity was that pre-doctoral fellowships are almost unheard of in Canada and the second was finding the numerically small but extremely significant market for theirs: Indigenous PhD students at universities other than Queen’s who had completed all of their degree requirements except their final project/dissertation.

An additional challenge was that she had just started a new position and was working with a new cast of characters to demonstrate our Faculty’s commitment to Indigenous education to both internal and external audiences. The morals of Vicky’s story: the importance of continuous learning, listening and storytelling, building relationships, and creating community when trying to fill a niche for Indigenous students.
: The Use of Student Journey Mapping in Higher Ed Web - How Are We Doing?

Student Journey Mapping has been a topic of discussion and the focus of many multi-year projects across higher education over the last few years. How far have we come? How has our sector, as a whole, accepted this process and where have we implemented it?

In an effort to advance the collective knowledge of High Ed Web in the area of student-centric decision making, JP Rains will cover a variety of ways in which his colleagues have leveraged student journey mapping and share what type of results they have found. Sharing successes and failures, both his own and from others, he will aim to give an assessment of how Student Journey Mapping has influenced our space. This process has been used in a variety of ways; from building new websites, to social media strategy, and to redefining a student admissions experience.

Each of these ways advances the positive influence we can have on those who matter most - our students. Having personally interviewed half a dozen veterans of Student Journey Mapping (and having delivered the "how to Journey Map" presentation last year at SEMM 2017), his aim is to deliver key takeaways for conference attendees. His hope is to deliver this talk and move the needle on student-centric decision making, arming our attendees to better understand their students, and almost more importantly, help their executives better understand their core audience.
: How to Use the Power of Micro Influencers in Higher Ed

Micro-influencer marketing has taken the marketing world by storm. We've all seen the impact of celebrity influencers on massive brand campaigns on instagram etc., but now these micro influencers have taken centre stage with 5x higher engagement and a much better ROI.

Influencer marketing has just started to take hold in the Higher Ed. sector and already Colleges/Universities using this powerful tactic are seeing phenomenal returns. Hear from the experts that have executed dozens of micro-influencer campaigns in the Higher Ed. industry on best practices and how to execute your own successful micro-influencer campaign.
: What Students Are Thinking: Surprising Findings from Maclean's

Every year Maclean’s magazine surveys thousands of post-secondary students across Canada to get their perspectives on their education, campus life, money and whether they feel prepared for life after school. This session will offer insight into a number of surprising findings from the survey and what they illustrate about what students value in an education. Plus, we’ll answer any thorny questions about the magazine’s annual rankings themselves.
: Student Recruitment Marketing: A Detailed Discussion on Current Challenges, Best Practices and 2018 Trends

Get into the mindset of your fellow marketers and recruiters! Based on survey results taken from professionals in the field, this workshop will examine the current challenges marketers and recruiters face in developing effective strategies, working within budget constraints, staying on top of digital trends and reaching students. This workshop will allow you to explore new concepts, develop ulterior strategies and make connections. Through practical exploration, you’ll return to your work setting with new ideas to connect, collaborate, and expand your work.

Learning objectives:

- Communicate and collaborate in groups to identify effective student marketing strategies
- Discuss current challenges and develop solutions for how to address obstacles in student marketing and recruitment
- Pinpoint emerging trends and discuss how to best capitalize on them
- Identify where areas of your recruitment/marketing budget could be better spent
: Where Are You? Understanding Institutional Branding in Canadian Higher Ed

In today’s postsecondary landscape, it’s difficult for an institution to know where it needs to go until it knows where it currently stands. Put another way, institutions need to know how they are positioned within the minds of prospective students, parents, and the people who might one day employ that school’s graduates.

Understanding this positioning lies at the heart of postsecondary branding research, which is a crucial component of any school’s efforts to chart a new direction and to garner the support of its stakeholders—from faculty to senior administration to key donors, employers, and other community members.

Drawing on decades of proprietary research conducted in partnership with hundreds of Canadian institutions, this presentation will give attendees new perspectives on the landscape of branding within Canadian postsecondary—what matters, what doesn’t, and why—and how this impacts key audiences’ perceptions of those schools.
: The Decision Factory at Utilitarian University: Processing Applications in an Admissions Office

This fictional case study will highlight the usefulness of applying queuing design and control methods to operations in an admissions office.Every year, universities around the world face the challenge of processing a high volume of admissions applications in a timely manner. Their admissions offices are in essence a factory, one whose output is decisions, but with a critical difference. Where a factory has some degree of control over the timing, quality and volume of inputs, an admissions office has far less control over the timing, quality and volume of applications received.

The application process starts with a pool of prospective students then proceeds through the stages of application initiated, application complete, decision (admit, deny or waitlist), offer (accepted or rejected), and finally to matriculation for those accepting their offers. In recent application cycles, Utilitarian University received a volume of applications so high that the Admissions Office was taking over a month to render decisions on files ready for evaluation. Respondents to an ‘offer declined’ survey noted they received offers from Utilitarian’s main competitor – Veritas University – two weeks prior to receiving the Utilitarian offer. In response to this trend and out of concern for the potential detrimental impact on future enrollment, the Provost of Utilitarian asked a professor in the Department of Statistics, Dr. Cue, to analyze the applications queue in the Admissions Office.

The hope is that Dr. Cue’s recommendations for improvement would be implemented over the course of the summer so that next year the University would be ready to handle the volume of applications with fewer delays. As Dr. Cue reviewed the current situation, it was immediately apparent that the complexity of the applications queue, with its peak period and lack of steady state, merits a variety of approaches: analytical calculation based on queue characteristics to explore boundaries and approximations (Allen-Cuneen, deterministic fluid queues) as well as simulation modelling with RISKOptimizer and @RISK. What recommendations will Dr. Cue submit to the Provost to help the University’s ‘decision factory’ tame its unwieldy applications queue?
: Virtual and Augmented Reality: Bringing Immersive Content to Campuses and Classrooms

VR and AR aren't flash in the pan tech fads. They offer new ways to enrich learning and make classrooms and campuses more interactive, and are hugely popular with Millennial audiences. Virtual and Augmented Reality is the future of the digital media landscape. Popularized by games like Pokemon Go, Google Daydream, and social media apps like Snapchat, they are also proven formats for engaging Millennials. They unlock huge possibilities within post-secondary education--for campus discovery, classroom content exploration, practical applications in learning, and more.

This session will uncover how leading post-secondary education organizations are using AR and VR technology to engage prospective and current students, and ways that educators and management alike can leverage this tech for better outcomes.

The agenda will be as follows:

Defining the 'Immersive spectrum' - VR & AR Overview, concepts, and definitions
User adoption - stats on usage of VR headsets, AR gaming, general industry expectations
Examples in education - specific projects and initiatives that are available right now, including 360° content, 3D classroom models, AR viewbooks, and more.
Project management - explanation of the workflow involved and high level budget allocations for deployment

What's next? Trends to watch out for in VR/AR
: Gap Years - a Tool for Recruitment and Retention

Explore with the Canadian Gap Year Association how to connect with and recruit students who have taken gap years, how to use gap years as a retention tool and leveraging this experimental learning tool at your institution.

We will look at it from a practical and policy lens and seek to enhance strategy around gap year students.
: Relationship-building: Is it The Key to Converting Leads and Student Prospects?

In this digital age, we know how important relationship-building is in order to stand out from the crowd, but how important is it really when it comes to converting prospective students?

This session works to deliver an answer to this question. Based on a secret shopper survey of several institutions, as well as student feedback, Chris Wilkins and Lauren Lord of the SchoolFinder Group will lead a detailed discussion on what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to building relationships with student prospects.
: Students, Careers & The Impact of Post-Secondary Education

We know that gaining qualifications and readiness to start a career is the number one reason that most students pursue post-secondary education. But exactly what role do career aspirations play in their education decisions. How does post-secondary education influence students' career confidence? And perhaps most importantly to administrators, how does career intention affect student retention and academic success?

Based on new research conducted in 2018 with more than 13,000 post-secondary students, this presentation will dig deep into the relationship between career development and post-secondary studies. It will also explore the effectiveness of certain interactions on campus with students and how those affect students academic and career confidence.
: Using virtual reality to drive applications: a live case study

Shawn Chorney, Vice President Enrolment Management, Indigenous and Student Affairs at Canadore College and Mike Leon, Managing Director of Brand Heroes Inc. a Digital Marketing Agency, will walk through a live case study of an integrated digital campaign designed to increase reputation and enrolment for the Aviation Programs at Canadore College.

Boasting an impressive increase in applications, this innovative campaign leveraged state of the art virtual reality video, coupled with event collateral as well as a unique High School student awards program; all with the goal capturing hearts, minds and applications. This campaign brought in Industry, Community and Government Partnerships, and created an experience that highlighted the unique selling features of the Aviation programs in a very personal way. Shawn and Mike will walk through the campaign, and provide many value add tips and tricks on brand storytelling that connects wow factor with results!

SEMM Forum

Attract | Recruit | Engage

SEMM 2018

Speakers (Many More TBA)

Testimonials

Preliminary Program (More TBA Soon)

Pre-Conference Workshops

Some Past Attendees

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