In this thought-provoking conference presentation, we will delve into the elusive concept of differentiation within higher education institutions. We will explore the challenge of articulating what truly makes each institution unique, and how to uncover that distinct "special sauce" that defines them.

Using real-life examples from three diverse institutions, we will discuss effective strategies for discovering and embracing your institution's individuality.

Join us for an inspiring journey toward unlocking your institution's true essence, leaving you equipped to create a compelling and cohesive brand that sets you apart in the higher education landscape.

Learning Outcomes

• The Quest for Uniqueness: Understanding the struggle in differentiating higher education institutions in a competitive landscape.
• Case Studies in Differentiation: Examine three exemplary institutions and learn how they identified their core strengths and differentiating factors.
• Unearthing Your Institutions Identity: Practical techniques to unearth and define your institution’s unique attributes, values, and offerings.
• Building Brand Cohesion: How to align internal stakeholders and create a cohesive brand narrative that reinforces your institution’s distinct identity.
• Authentic Storytelling: Mastering the art of communicating your institution's uniqueness to prospective students, faculty, and stakeholders effectively.
• Leveraging Differentiation: Exploring the impact of differentiation on enrollment, engagement, and overall institutional success.

In the dynamic landscape of higher education, Bow Valley College faced a formidable late-summer challenge — a significant deficit in fall admissions. Concurrently, an institution-wide restructuring brought sweeping changes to the leadership and operational structure of the admissions office. With pressure to meet enrolment and revenue targets within a mere eight weeks, a collaborative effort ensued.

Under the guidance of the manager for student recruitment and the new manager for admissions, a rapid response approach was initiated. This involved identifying programs with low applications and admissions and exploring innovative tactics for recruitment and conversion. Leveraging the shared talents of multiple departments, an agile framework was established. By collaborating closely with institutional data analysts, strategic opportunities were identified, and proactive engagement strategies were implemented to convert prospective, waitlisted, and inactive applicants, strategically filling under-subscribed programs.

Through shared problem-solving, the team not only rectified the deficit trend in admissions for both the September 2022 and January 2023 intakes but surpassed enrolment and revenue targets. This presentation will unveil ten short-term tactics employed by Bow Valley College's student recruitment, marketing, and admissions teams. These tactics offer valuable insights into maximizing yield at every stage of the enrolment pipeline, from prospect to confirmed and registered student. Importantly, these adaptable strategies can be leveraged by almost any institution to address urgent admissions and drive new student figures. Furthermore, the presentation will outline how cross-team collaboration transcends managerial and operational divisions, demonstrating its potential to conquer shared challenges and foster institutional success.

Bow Valley College is a two-year comprehensive community college serving 16,000 learners in Calgary, Alberta. Situated on the traditional homelands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Îyâxe Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina First Nations, and the Métis Nation, the college offers programming in business, community studies, entertainment arts, health and wellness, and technology, along with academic upgrading, E.L.L., and non-credit professional courses. Alongside its main campus in Calgary, satellite campuses service the towns of Airdrie, Banff, Cochrane, and Okotoks.

Corresponding Author
Phil Ollenberg
Associate Registrar
Bow Valley College

Biography
Phil Ollenberg (he/him) is the associate registrar for admissions at Bow Valley College and doctoral student in education management. With 15 years of industry experience in higher education recruitment, marketing, and admissions, Phil is a collaborative and strategic leader focused on student-centered solutions. Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, Phil is now a settler on traditional Treaty 7 territory in the city of Calgary, Alberta. Beyond higher education, Phil is a dedicated Star Trek nerd, doggy daddy, LGBTQ rights activist, and Disney parks enthusiast.

Using a student-centered and trauma-informed approach when reviewing and approving requests for late and/or compassionate withdrawals leads to higher retention rates. In this session, we’ll walk through our approach to late withdrawal requests, extenuating and compassionate withdrawal requests and how this impacts student retention at our institution. This will be an interactive session allowing time for dialog on institutional policies, processes and best practices on withdrawals.

Learning Outcomes

• Understanding withdrawal requests
• What is a Student-centered approach to withdrawals?
• Sharing Knowledge: Community of Practice

Join us for a thought-provoking panel discussion that delves into the pivotal role of diversifying international student enrolment in Canadian post-secondary institutions.

The panelists will explore the multifaceted importance of both geographical and program of study diversification shedding light on the social, economic, and educational benefits international students bring to Canada and its international student community. Together, we will examine how diversification goes beyond mere numbers, transcending enrolment statistics to create a profound impact on the Canadian higher education ecosystem.

Our panelists will share their experiences and insights on how Canadian post-secondary institutions should attempt to attract a diverse range of international students, ensuring that Canada remains a welcoming and inclusive destination for education abroad.

Together, we will explore how diversifying international student enrolment is not just positive for the institution but an investment in Canada's future.

Topics of Discussion May Include:

• Student enrolment by geography
• Student enrolment by discipline
• Diversifying enrolment pipelines
• Diversifying recruitment tactics

Effectively recruiting students doesn’t have to be complicated or cost a fortune, but it is important! In this presentation, we will reveal our “Secret Shopper” results. Working with our “shoppers”, we requested information from colleges and universities and monitored the timeliness, frequency, and quality of responses to student information requests.

This session will cover:

• The latest results from the program
• Tips on what to do and what to avoid
• An overview of the feedback from 550+ current prospective students
• How to implement a lead response communication plan at your institution

For those who saw our presentation at SEMM in May, we’ve added an implementation section that will help you start building a lead response communication plan at your own institution.

Every institution has one: a map that helps students get familiar with campus. A lot of the time, they fall short of being a helpful resource for students. Done well, they can enhance both recruitment and student orientation, and help students feel more welcome on campus.

Gen Z are digital natives who rely on technology to be self-reliant. Interactive maps help them get familiar with the campus and feel "in the know". In this way, they are useful recruitment tools and later serve to ease the transition to campus and reduce anxiety throughout orientation.

In this session, you'll learn the main jobs that a campus map is "hired" to do, through a student and staff perspective. Drawing from end-user research with both groups, you'll gain an understanding of the main use cases around campus mapping and wayfinding. At the end of the session, you'll have a simple framework to evaluate the effectiveness of your campus map, identify any gaps, and get a checklist for what's needed to deliver a truly useful student resource.

Learning Objectives

• Gain an understanding of the main use cases around campus mapping and wayfinding
• A simple framework to evaluate the effectiveness of your campus map and identify any gaps
• What is needed to deliver a truly useful student resource

Communications professionals in higher education act as the vital bridge between stakeholders, target audiences, and subject matter experts with diverse needs. In the fast-paced world of project management, effective communication is the key to a successful takeoff and smooth landing.

As marketers and communicators, we understand this better than anyone – so often finding ourselves opting in to (or being nominated as) the role of project managers on integrated planning teams. But let's face it, the pressure to perform is high when you take on such an integral role. Starting with confidence, fueling momentum, and seeking feedback early and often are game-changers, boosting your chances of success and refining your PM prowess.

Hear from Allie Bear, the Manager: Marketing and Communications Strategy at Wilfrid Laurier University with over 10 years of industry experience, as she takes you through her process of reframing her role as a highly practical project manager, developing and launching a project management process within her integrated Recruitment and Admissions team, and employing tactics to protect against failure and promote success in MarCom projects big and small.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand why we are often called on to – or naturally gravitate towards – leading roles and why your skillset already sets you up for project management success.
• Learn how to confidently step into the role of project manager to keep MarCom initiatives – both significant and small – fueled from the start without fizzling out.
• Explore how you can employ a practical, proven toolkit to build, launch and maintain your project plans and keep all team members engaged along the way.

Many post-secondary education institutions struggle to improve their outdated and problematic online catalogues – major web projects can take a long time and resources might be limited. Red River College Polytechnic's recruitment and marketing teams faced similar challenges, but they found a solution.

Discover how our teams collaborated with over 100 stakeholders throughout the college to develop Program Explorer (rrc.ca/explore), a dynamic microsite designed to help prospective students explore and uncover the diverse offerings of RRC Polytech. By incorporating user experience best practices, this web tool follows the successful model of Airbnb, featuring a robust search and filtering system accompanied by compelling visuals. We partnered with all academic departments of the college to develop more than 150 comprehensive program landing pages in five months. With Program Explorer, users can easily search for programs based on keywords aligned with their interests and desired careers.

The site offers over 40 filters to fine-tune program options and even allows for side-by-side comparisons using a convenient comparison table. By leveraging this engaging tool, prospective students can gain inspiration and a deeper understanding of the programs they are interested in as they embark on their educational journey. Join us to discover more about Program Explorer and gain exclusive insight into the technical and organizational challenges that were overcome to bring this project to life.

Learning Outcomes

• Mastering user experience best practices to develop an effective program exploration tool
• Transforming data into compelling user journeys and engaging webpages
• Strategies for successful institution-wide collaboration for content creation for program landing pages

Have institutions lost their way on #brand? Do students really care about branding anymore? What does the idea of ‘brand’ mean post-covid?

In 2023, institutional branding is even more important than ever before. Gap years, virtual learning, disengaged students, fluid decision-making, and ESG alignment have disrupted and redefined the meaning behind the brand. All types of students have made changes in their brand alignment based on what’s happened over the last 3 years. Brand disconnection is real and loyalty to some institutions has been lost.

That’s why the importance and deeper meaning of ‘brand affinity’ should be front and centre across all areas of the campus. While brand is important in the recruitment stage, it’s even more important once a student has shown up or signed on for class. An institution’s brand needs to be continually worked on and amplified since the link, and hopefully, loyalty has only just begun. The goal for every institution should be to move any brand connection from ‘loyal’ to ‘advocate’. Creating Alumni advocates who will help recruit new students, give back to the institution or simply stay involved.

Learning Outcomes

• How brand views and loyalties have changed for students post-COVID;
• How branding affects and impacts student recruitment and retention;
• How to ensure 'brand affinity' is embraced across campus;
• How best to transition students into vocal Alumni brand advocates.

Almost all colleges today are heavily dependent on revenue from international student tuition. To effectively market to these students, it's imperative that leaders understand the unique interests and aspirations of the students they are trying to attract.

Furthermore, most colleges are dependent on one source country for their international student growth. Recruiting students from countries around the world benefits colleges and universities by enhancing cultural diversity, promoting global perspectives, fostering cross-cultural connections, generating revenue, contributing to research and innovation, improving their reputation, aligning themselves with the international job market, and also promoting soft diplomacy.

For schools that are focusing on or considering diversifying their international enrolment, they should not assume that what works for international students from one country will work for others. While the strengths of your college may remain the same, the emphasis in your recruitment and marketing messaging must adapt its focus on each market.

This session will provide an opportunity to dive into the data collected from the 2023 Brainstorm Student Interests Report to gain insights into the unique attributes of students from different regions. Armed with this information, SEMM leaders will have many of the insights needed to better attract, recruit, and support diverse international students.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the diverse interests of students from different global regions
• Explore ways to foster meaningful interactions and engagement amongst different groups of international college students
• Identify potential enhancements to current messaging, programming, and support services to improve international student success

Using AI and a data-driven approach to student recruitment you can determine what makes a good prospect (who is likely to apply and attend your institution). Applying this knowledge, you can finely target the general prospect pool and craft the right message to recruit the right students.

By analyzing our partner schools' enrolled students against our general student community of over 1.2 million students, we are able to unlock valuable insights that lead to more effective student recruitment.

This session will cover the following key areas:

• The methodology behind AI data-driven student profiling
• Key data points to consider for effective profiling
• Case studies showcasing successful outcomes
• How to tailor your recruitment approach using AI LeadInsights™

Join Tyler and Dan, Student Recruitment Officers from Nipissing University, as they present the successes, challenges, and lessons learned through the production of A Brand NU Start, Nipissing University’s recruitment podcast currently in its third season. Along the way, participants will reflect on how (and why) to produce their own institution’s podcast, answering questions such as: What is my message? How do I market a podcast? How might a podcast be an effective recruitment/ enrolment tool? And more. Participants will also be introduced to several technical workflows (tiered for difficulty, technical skill, and cost) to get any podcast off the ground!

Learning Outcomes

• Using analytics and both quantitative and qualitative data, consider how a podcast could be an effective recruitment/ engagement strategy for your institution.
• Using Brand NU Start as a model, reflect on some of the successes, challenges, and lessons learned when starting a University’s podcast.
• Learn several workflows, tiered for cost and difficulty, to produce your own institution's podcast. Anybody can do it!

In this session, CRi Inc. and co-presenting post-secondary educators, will explore the process of getting a functioning and effective retention system in place. This will include a look at how the institutions identify students at risk and the methods used to reach out to them. They'll share insights into how these processes got started, what went right, what went wrong, and lessons learned along the way. They'll also discuss how to get incoming students to take part and what they found to be the most effective messaging and methods of reaching out to students. And finally, they'll provide examples of what the students themselves say about the interventions they received. Join this session for an opportunity to learn from both the successes and mistakes and be rewarded with ideas and processes you can implement on your own campus.