I feel the best way to encourage your student to share the benefit of attending school with you, is to ask many open ended questions related to the topic and having the student visualize and describe how features your school possess can benefit a need or desired goal the student may have or is looking to accomplish.
Theodore, Very cool. I'm curious though, how do you know if that benefit is important to the student? What type of conversation to you have with the student to see if it's important to them?
Dr. Jean Norris
At my school, we often will work directly with employers for employee training. We suggest sharing their stories with them as a way to encourage their peers to attend our school for professional development and training. We have an online student community where student-customers can post in discussion boards and interact with each other to share their best practices. These forums are open to non-enrolled student-prospects. Many of our student-customers become student ambassadors and can reach out to student-prospects to share their experience in a more direct and meaningful way.
Monica, Excellent. What do you think is the reason it's so important to have the student tell you why something benefits them?
Elizabeth Wheeler
We encourage our students to tell us about themselves their life goals and experiences. We give them examples of some prior students similar experiences or situations.
Stephany, There is another great way to show the benefits from the student's perspective--what is one way you can find out what they want to know?
Dr. Jean Norris
I do admissions for a Christian University. Letting the student know that they will be in a Christian environment is very encouraging. I always try to give them a tour and even walk them to the library for to see the books available.
Well that's certainly a great and unique benefit that you offer! How can you customize this great benefit to meet the specific needs of your prospective students?
Dr. Jean Norris
The biggest benefit of attending our school is that we are the only college in the country offering this type of degree program.
Breanne,
That's great! I'm curious - have you ever had a prospective student say they didn't know what they would be able to do or achieve? How do you handle this?
Dr. Jean Norris
Once we have completed our tour we always ask our prospective student if this is something he/she feels that they are able to do and achieve, most of the time by this time they are excited to begin our training.
You got it Huichi! I would even challenge you to dig a little deeper into that to determine what is the benefit of gaining "real-world" knowledge?
Dr. Jean Norris
It makes you appreciate the power of great customer service doesn't it? Thanks for sharing Trang.
Dr. Jean Norris
To answer this question properly, you should first find out which attributes that your institution has that have the greatest appeal to the prospective student. knowing this, you then show them how this could be a benefit to their future in the workforce. For example, left say one the attributes of your school is that your professors/Instructors are actively working in the field they teach, you can use this to convince the prospective student that they will gain "real-world" knowledge about the course versus just theoretical knowledge.
I agree, we get many of our students from recommendations by former students too. Even with student just enroll in the program bring their friend to sign up.
Word of mouth is an extremely powerful recruitment tool and it looks like your school is building a solid network to make that happen. Great work! Thank you for sharing.
Dr. Jean Norris
Our institution tries our best to "place" our candidates in the work field. Our director and staff members use our contacts to build a network of work places related to our programs. Whenever one of these work places have an opening they would contact us, and we will work to fill the vacancy with our graduates. "Word of Mouth" is a powerful recruitment tool, and we get many of our students from recommendations by former students.
What a great idea! How do you think this contributes to student success?
Dr. Jean Norris
We have group forums set up so that students can post pictures and discuss classroom and clinical experiences with one another.
By using testimonials from previous students. For some they just want to get away from everything and be alone while the next person may want to just improve their life financially. While alot of thing are similiar its better to get the testimonial after the student has been graduated for at least 6 months for it to really have impacted them on what really has changed. It's much more effective for a prospective student to read.
