Brainstorming at Your Institution
How could a brainstorm session be used in other areas of your school, such as student services, financial aid or admissions?
Thomas,
Great ideas! How will you initiate this happens?
Elizabeth Wheeler
I think it would be a good idea for groups to have a brainstorm meeting at least once a month. There are always issues that pop up and sometimes you need to think outside the box in order to resolve them. I know one thing that I would like for our financial aid department to brainstorm about is areas students can focus their time into when researching for grants and scholarships. With the cost of tuition today, you can never get enough help.
Angela, Great idea! How can you begin organizing this brainstorming session?
Elizabeth Wheeler
Angela, Great idea! How can you begin organizing this brainstorming session?
Elizabeth Wheeler
I think if we could organize an event, a brainstorming session would help come up with ideas & participants to make it an effective event.
Looking for new ideas to make great first impressions!
Julie, Agreed! Listening to what other departments are doing will help with cohesiveness throughout.
Elizabeth Wheeler
It is very easy for the admissions rep, financial aid and students services rep to get burned out and lose their creative juices. A brainstorming session with all staff and faculty can reignite that. It also gives other staff members a feeling of importance when their idea is used to generate more enrollments. It also generates new fun ideas that everyone can be a part of.
Great idea. Do you feel it would be beneficial to include other departments in this brainstorm session with student services?
Dr. Jean Norris
A brainstorm session could be utilized in student services to make sure that students' experience is the best quality it can be.
maria,
Great point! How do you think brainstorming sessions can help communication between departments?
Dr. Jean Norris
Giovanni,
That is so out of the box! Do you think other departments would find this beneficial?
Dr. Jean Norris
I think all departments should have Brainstorming meetings to see in what whys we could improve and help each otherand be able to generate new ideas.
An unconventional way our admissions department conducts meeting/"brainstorming" sessions is during lunch. Yes...lunch is meant for the employee's own time but while being in a more relaxed mood and setting and talking about personal matters, we've been able to come up with newer ideas to promote the school during these conversations.
Robert,
Thank you for sharing. MegaMeeting is a great resource.
Dr. Jean Norris
Since we are primarily an online school, we would use our MegaMeeting service to host video conferences specifically for brainstorming.
David,
Brainstorming can definitely be a valuable tool. How does your team handle these sessions? This would be interesting for others to learn from!
Dr. Jean Norris
Our school is extremely small and we have a limited number of employees who take part in everything from marketing to admissions, student services, maintaining the physical plant. In short, we do it all. At our annual or bi-annual meetings we spend most of our time brainstorming about ways to improve communications and processes.
For student services, we developed simple ways to build employment services and resume services. Finacial aid (well we are not big enough to accept federal financial aid) but we developed low risk in-house loans we can offer students. We find scholarship opportunities to offer or need based funding. All of which were started because of brainstorming sessions.
We have discovered new lead sources as well new ways to overcome objections.
