Meet Erin

Interesting post this week in Jacques Steinberg’s blog at the New York Times, “The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid” about campus visits. (If you don’t follow Steinberg’s blog, you should. I’ve added it to the sidebar here. You should also read his gripping book, "The Gatekeepers.") As anyone who has done this work for a while knows, what happens in higher education eventually trickles down to independent schools. Following “The Choice” has proven to be a forewarning of things to come.

The most recent post was written by Lily Altavena about the somewhat unexpected consistency of campus visits this summer. Going to a campus and checking your gut for the right elusive “fit” is still a sacred part of the process, seemingly unhampered by the uptick in plane ticket fares or prices at the pump. I have certainly seen the same in my own experience this past year. As I prepared year-ending stats last week (yes, just a fortnight before we start with year-beginning stats!), Ridley College had a 27% increase in campus visits in 2010/2011. It certainly makes me wonder—if not actually assume—that the campus visit is even more important at these more tender ages. After all, at Ridley we start boarding at age ten. How can a parent enroll their ten year old in a school they have never seen? And when possible and affordable, I would imagine we get more visits featuring both parents instead of maybe the more typical one-parent/one-student combo on the college tour circuit.

Last summer I read somewhere (I tried earnestly to find you my source to quote but I can’t) that 77% of college-bound students listed the campus visit as the most influential factor in their decision. I don’t suppose that surprises much of anyone. No matter how much we spend on marketing materials, websites or plane tickets around the world, nothing confirms a student and family’s choice more than the proverbial “gut feeling” they get from a visit. It’s actually maddening how little control we have in the end when the gut can override an expensive, expansive and sophisticated marketing and yield campaign.

So my office started thinking about this at the start of the summer. We know those 2012 families visiting early are going to be key and we wanted to cement their interest in Ridley before school started in the fall and they had to make decisions about where to file applications. But how could we take an essentially abandoned campus and make it memorable? How could we get them more than just interested but actually excited about coming to see us, sometimes with both temperature and humidity at 90%+!?

Each summer we hire a recent graduate to work in the office and give all our tours (and stuff envelopes and fetch Starbucks and take inventory of our brochures and do data entry and…). Since we have only one tour guide all summer, we decided to generate some excitement and anticipation among our visiting families. We created a video that was emailed out to families before their visit introducing Erin and hitting some of our key messages. We thought if they felt they knew her, it’d make the connection both more immediate and more authentic.

We won’t know until a year from now if we saw uncommon yield success among those families but certainly the feedback we received was most positive. Families—and, more importantly, prospective students—felt they had a connection to both Ridley and to Erin before they even stepped foot on campus. We were excited to welcome them and they were excited to be here. And by having information about Erin and about Ridley before their visit, it shaped their questions and heightened their enthusiasm.

Meet Erin here.