MMP2: Feeding the Hand that Feeds You: Supporting Enrollment Efforts

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You are listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Rob Leisland: All right, good morning. Things we’re going to cover this morning. First of all, we’re just going to give kind of a brief overview of the importance of enrollment at Xavier and at many universities across the country.

We’re going to talk about some enrollment trends; things that have been happening differently over the past few years and what role the web plays in those and probably will continue to play on into the future. And we’re going to look at a few different areas whereas web professionals, things that we can do to kind of help out with those and think initiatives that we can maybe help lead at our university and different ways we can start pushing things as we go forward.

And then we’re going to talk about some of the challenges we might face and even maybe open things up to some different ideas and things that different schools might be doing just to help share and get some different types of ideas out there.

We’ll tell you a little bit about ourselves and where we’re coming from. I’m Rob Leisland, on the bottom there. I graduated from Xavier in 2003 and I’ve worked there ever since. I worked there as a student and I really enjoyed working there. For the first three years, I worked heavily as a back-end programmer on our administrative system and then I worked a lot at admissions at that time. And then, for the past two years to a year and a half, I actually moved over to the web area where we worked a lot with admissions and supporting a lot of their efforts.

Kevin Lavelle: Good morning everyone. My name is Kevin Lavelle, the other part of this presentation. I want to apologize for my dress. This is how I started 9 a.m. yesterday morning in Cincinnati. My clothes are in Detroit but I am here in Springfield so I’m trying to manage as best I can. So I appreciate--I’ll probably switch out to the polo shirt that we all got this morning at some point just to change things up a little bit.

To give you an idea of my background, I began a year before Rob at Xavier in 1998 as an undergraduate student, graduated in 2002. I was heavily involved as one of our student ambassadors here in the previous session with Jeff. I was one of the students taking families and students around on our campus tour.

I then worked for five years in the Office of Undergraduate Admission at Xavier University; counselor, assistant director, senior assistant director, and a little over a year ago I transitioned to our web services team and worked with Doug and Rob and the rest of our great staff. My main role in the office is to coordinate projects. So I go out and meet with all of our clients, all the offices, departments, managers around the university to determine the scope of the project, what are your interests, help determine the best process in which to proceed and then work with our team develop the best website that we can.

Through my nine years as a student and as a commission counselor, I got to work with everyone at the university so that’s really where my expertise lies; in working with the people and the politics and all those sorts of things.

Why enrollment? One of the reasons we’re going to focus on enrollment is because it is the single largest most important thing for Xavier University. I would imagine that most of our universities are tuition-driven, Xavier University in particular; 78% of our operating revenue comes from enrollment, from tuition and fees. Keeping the lights on, paying our salary, providing opportunities for our students in trips, in projects, and all of those things, 78% comes from our tuition and fees.

So it is very important that we make our classes, that we meet our enrollment goals and enrollment initiatives so we can make budgets and we continue the things that we want to do. It’s just this past Thursday, we had a division-wide information resources meeting.

The first 20 minutes was our vice president talking about the importance of enrollment, what we do, whether it’s a library staff, the registrar’s office, we also have web services applications, the other group’s internal division; that was then followed by 50 minutes from the vice president for student enrollment, talk about the importance of what we do in the enrollment areas.

The leaders at our university are keenly aware of what we do, how we influence the enrollment areas so it is very, very important. So for us, getting paid, keeping things going and because we’re told it’s important that’s why it’s important to us. But I imagine it’s a very similar situation many of our institutions to meet our enrollment goals to be able to do things that we want to do as a university. Like I said, just as the university’s top priority from the board of trustees to the president on down, this is very important to us.

Just to give you an idea of some of the enrollment trends, some very basic things that you’re not as familiar with admission, you might have heard the term stealth applicants or our students being stealth. What that means is that in the past, the way the admission office would typically gather information about students is that students would self identify.

They would go to a college fair, fill out those information cards and get on the mailing list, or you may give a phone call or return one of the fliers that come on the mail. Students are doing that a lot less. They are out there, they’re looking at your university, there’s a lot of information available to them but they’re not telling you that they’re interested.

At Xavier, 35% of the students who applied at university are stealth applicants. The first time we ever knew that they were interested in Xavier was when they submitted their application for admission. Traditionally, we would have found out the sophomore and junior year and build the whole communication streams around print and email and all of that to communicate with those students. Not anymore. The students are out there researching us, finding out who we are, but they’re not telling us who they are.

Online application. I think many of our universities use some sort of mix of print and online applications. Some universities have gone to strictly online applications. We still do offer the print option. We make our online application free for students to utilize.

This past year, 99% of the students who applied to Xavier used our online application. Students are not just looking for the online application for admission but inquiry form to tell us who they are. If they found that they’re interested maybe on a specific program, they want to fill out scholarship applications. They want to be able to do a lot of those very functional things online and not looking for paper and return this in the envelop. They wanted to do all the functional things online.

And students expect more online, to be honest. A lot of the information that’s available to students is impressive. When I just think back to when I served the admission process in 1997, an online application then I can go to a website and I can download the PDF and I could fill it out and I could mail it back in.

My cousin, Catherine, who’s the same age as me, she is on a group in Seattle and went to the University of Portland. So if I was in my high school in Cincinnati, Ohio and I was interested in going to University of Portland, there is really no shot that my high school guidance office had a Viewbook or other informational materials about the University of Portland. I’d really had to go out of my way to find information about that school.

Now, students can be sitting down here on a whim, find out all the information that they want online about the University of Portland. They might be interested just browsing and finding out about schools in Hawaii or overseas universities. There are so much more information at the fingertips of the students and it’s easily available, quickly available, but if they are not engaged, they don’t have information available to them that they are interested in, they’re going to move on very quickly.

So we want to talk about some of the practical examples of what we’ve done in the enrollment area to try and engage students to support these, sort of, levels of the enrollment process. If you haven’t seen this graphic before, it’s a very, very basic one. At Xavier University, in the undergraduate area, we usually refer to the admission funnel.

In working from the highest level, the volume of students who maybe expressed interest in the university, this past year there are around 50,000 students who were inquiries, who have an email or a phone number or a mailing address on those students who were able to communicate with them.

Those students have just expressed interests, then wheedles down from there the number of students that are interested, then go on to apply for admission. At Xavier, this past year is around 7,000 students who applied for undergraduate admission. Beyond that, out of the 7,000 who applied to university, around 4,500 were admitted at the university. And then beyond that, out of the 4500 that were admitted, we had about 865 who actually enrolled in the university.

And so, knowing just some of these basic framework of the admission funnel working from your largest group to applicants to admits to enrolls, it’s really how we tackle the undergraduate admission area, trying to find specific pieces that will influence various levels of that admission funnel.

One of the first projects that we had undertaken was redoing our virtual tour. It was, I’ll say, outdated to be kind. It was probably created 2001, 2002. There were still buildings on there that had been torn down. The photography looked like it was from 2001, 2002 and it was a very functional virtual tour of our campus. Building by buildings and photos, a little description of what goes on in that building, and we wanted to move away from that idea of a virtual tour. So the building by building tour of campus and the warm and experience of our university.

And so we built a new, what we call the Xavier Explore Site, which really talks a lot less about specific buildings and more about what goes on in those specific buildings. So a lot of the photos to this is our student union, our student center, and here’s the description of what goes on and here’s some photos of what the building looks like; talking more about student organizations that meet there, talking about the services that are available there.

So, again, a lot of those buildings, a lot more experiential incorporating videos, incorporating student feedback from our current students and trying to talk more about the mission of the university, student testimonials; again, more about the experience than about the facilities. This really strikes that the idea of having 35% stealth applicants. If those students are out there trying to learn about the university and the only thing they can really gather in terms of the tour or virtual experience is from the building by building look at the university, there’s no reference point.

If I’m sitting in Boston, Massachusetts and I know that Albers Hall is right next to the library, that means nothing to me. So we’re trying to do more of the experiential side of things so that they can gather a good sense of who we are before they might apply at the university.

Another project that we undertook with the Office of Undergraduate Admission is a website that coordinated with one of our largest print pieces with our admission Viewbook. We still printed traditional 28-page yearbook that is mailed out to many of our inquiries. One of the goals this year was to use that print piece to drive prospective students to go online to learn more about services that are available at Xavier, to read profiles of our students and our students and faculty, so it’s a basic profile and the Viewbook that you can go online to learn more.

There’s links to other stories about that subject area or photo galleries, videos, music; those sorts of things. So using the print piece to drive web traffic, from a very functional standpoint, we also build and settle at the full admission Viewbook was available online. We had a really nice utility to be able to view that print piece online. The admission office had a 50,000 increase, didn’t want to mail a $4 Viewbook to 50,000 students; a $200,000 job for one mailing is pretty expensive.

So what they decided to do is mail a print piece to 30,000 students and they’re going to follow up with a little postcard which costs significantly less, give them the address of this website allowing them to view the Viewbook online to learn more about the profiles and students, to start off the opportunity to request information and join our mailing list to apply right then and there if they’d like to. And since we’re qualifying those inquiries, there’s less 20,000 inquiries and saving ourselves about $80,000 in the process.

We've seen a lot of success from this. The only place currently that that web address is printed is in that print piece. There are no other external links. So we know that all the traffic that comes to that website is driven by the brochure. That will change a little bit when we mail out those postcards you’ve seen. But it’s an interesting concept. It’s really to save money but really trying to combine with the print aspects and the web aspects since we’ve got success from that.

Rob Leisland: The next big piece that we’re going to talk about comes in at the applicant stage of the funnel. At that point, our goal is basically to bring in as many quality applications as we can. This is going to be our second year going into our new online application. We’ve had one out there about six or seven years?

Kevin Lavelle: Seven years.

Rob Leisland: And it had been the same basic format for the first few years, first generation, up until last year was actually our first year through this. And basically, what we looked at, first of all, just making it more pleasing to the eye and making it more friendly, and we try to make it as easy to fill out as possible. And we were able to identify a few key areas for the online application where people had trouble.

The biggest issue and the issue that we’re still running into is that as part of the online application they are required to submit an essay. And certainly an essay requirement isn’t going to go away. But moving forward, that’s what we’re going to be looking into is how we can maybe make that easier to fulfil.

We found that people who worked that way through their application and then we’d look at the data and maybe find out if they were missing the essay. Another thing that we found out sort of anecdotally from the students is that they’d like to know what was coming out of the application.

Just like if you had a piece of paper and you could flip through it and see all the different things that you’re going to need to know, it’s not only just nice to know but also it will help you prepare just like with your taxes so that you know what’s coming out, you know what forms you need, you know what information you’re going to need to know about your parents, you know what information you’re going to need to know about your high school guidance counselor, things like that.

So the way we set it up here is with tabs across the top. And they can click on each tab and they can see that entire tab what else are going to be required, all the way up to the end.

And then as soon as they start to fill anything out, they are required to either log in or create their account at that point. So what that allows them to do is see the whole thing so they know what’s coming up and we found last year that it really worked and there was a lot less anecdotal evidence from the students about it.

With this, there’s so many factors that influence their application. It is hard to get at some good statistics on it. The one thing we’re coming in to this and the one thing that we reviewed that for the first year was looking at the data, looking at where they stopped, trying to figure out where they stopped, trying to figure out why they stopped, and that’s really been the key for us for the application.

We are pushing those people this way. As part of this, we send out reminder emails if we want to, we can tell when a new student has started their application and maybe not visited it for two weeks, or maybe they created their account and they never filled anything out.

So that’s pretty much the gist of the online application. Trying to make it easy, trying to keep it quick. Yes?
Audience: How do they submit the essay?

Rob Leisland: How do they submit the essay? It is one of the tabs. It’s just an open text box. But some different option for looking at different options for different programs used. For instance, our psychology, our graduate program, they have an online application and they also require an essay so that it’s easier to get the application in, they don’t make the essay part of the actual online application.

They have the whole online application submitted and then the essay is turned in later. And that kind of works with just getting the students’ foot in the door. Once they made the commitment of filling out the online application, they are a lot more likely to complete those kind of the more difficult, the less convenient required steps if they already made that initial commitment.

They’d figured “Well, I’ve already spent the time filling out this whole long form, I might as well write the essay,” whereas if the essay is part of the form, they might feel like, “Ah, I don’t know if I want to complete this long form. Maybe I’ll go make a sandwich or something of that sort.” And there are certain things we looked at and certainly every year it’s an ongoing process evaluating where the students are stopping and why are they stopping and looking at what we can do to make it easier.

One of the biggest changes we made this year was on how they can search, how undergraduate students can search for their high school. Before they either had to know their high school zip code or their Z-code, and then nobody knows that about their high schools, and then they have to go look, and then basically they would leave the application at that point. And we don’t ever want anybody to ever leave.

We want them to be able to sit down and fill it out. So we added the ability to be able to search by name. In the past, we’re even hesitant to do that because one is that the old way was written, and two because we were worried that students--their high school might be like at Saint Thomas and there’s going to be Sts. Saint. But we just added some build in logic to check for that type of thing.

And overall, we found that that’s been going on very well this year. The other type of application we got online that he mentioned is we’re trying to get more and more of our scholarship applications online. That’s a big piece of making Xavier affordable for a lot of students.

And in the past, it had been a kind of link down like PDF. Last year when we did this we put a few of the major scholarship applications online. This year, we’re looking at expanding that not quite up to the full range of applications but any applications that’s going to have a certain threshold of admits.

We’re just looking to get out there just to make it easier, make it quicker, and to help make the admission process a little bit more interactive online. We found that they are already spending a lot of time online so we can get the application where they want it. And we still have the PDF available if they want to print it out and submit it that way.

Now, we’ll move on to the admit stage. We’re going to have a few slides here on website. We have called Road to Xavier and I’m actually going to have a poster tomorrow about who wrote the bigger--I would say it’s sort of the crown jewel of our web services office. We spend a lot of time on it. We have 10 people in our office and when it comes--most of the year, a lot of us have been working on a lot of different things but when it comes on to this, we sort of bond together and pull things, pull it, all collaborate on this.

We first started this--I think we’re going in to our fourth year now so we have three full rounds of this. And this comes in at the admit stage. When a student gets admitted, they get what will be their Xavier user name if they enroll, and then they can come to this site and sort of create their account.

Their account is already there but they just sort of have to opted and get a few things wanted. What we try to make available here are a few different things. One of which is the functional piece of their financial aid. We call that the money matter section.

We no longer send out paperwork unless that it’s specifically requested. That’s the time we just send them to this segment. What that allows us to do is as their work is updated which all of us do, when they are initially accepted, they get maybe a scholarship and then after they complete them, they might get some more additional funding.

That allows us to keep things updated online. They can be notified when their awards have been updated and then it also allows us to tell them by the date last updated when their award was most recently completed. We also have some functionality here as part of Road to Xavier to help put them into some of the staff in Xavier.

On the money matter page, for instance, they have their financial aid counselor right there. So maybe they are not comfortable. Maybe they don’t even know that person so it’s harder for them to make that call. You know, they can see a picture, they can just send an email if they are more comfortable doing that; just try to make it feel a little bit more comfortable for the student.

We don’t have a slide to this but we have an inbox over there at the bottom left corner. And as part of that, they also have an inbox message from their counselor to kind of get that same--or from their admission counselor to give that same type of feel so they can contact them and maybe be more comfortable if they want to be.

Audience: So you are contacting them through email and this gets updated each time depending on the award?

Rob Leisland: Yes, our financial aid office manages that mail. They will send them email and say your award has been updated and that they know to go there. And we have found it’s been very effective because the site gets a lot of traffic. Another great piece of the site...yes?

Audience: I just want to verify, so you don’t give the number and the emails that forces them to just see...

Rob Leisland: Sometimes it depends on the situation but usually we try to drive people to the site as much as possible. Because aside from the business needs that we try to take care of in the site, one thing we try to do is that as soon as they are admitted is bring them in to the Xavier community and try to make them feel a part of the community.

And how we do that is each student has a profile that they can fill out. It’s similar to a social networking, Facebook-type idea. It’s a lot more basic and the Road to Xavier itself is not very interactive. They can search for other students. They can find students based on their city or state or major or some of these interests at the bottom. And then there’s also a section where they can link out to maybe their MySpace page or these things, seems that they tend to use Facebook more often.

And what we found is that students would find each other through this site and then they would go to those external social networking sites and network out there. But overall, accomplishing our goal, trying to create that community earlier through the social networking piece.

After the admit phase, so it used to be that Road to Xavier would pretty much wind down once they had deposited, the goal that was to get them to deposit. But one thing we’re finding now, one thing we’re using it for now, is to try to reduce that what we call summer melt. Those students who for whatever reason becomes disconnected and they decide, “You know what? Xavier doesn’t quite feel right to me. I think I want to go somewhere else.” And so one thing we’re doing is trying to keep them on Road to Xavier longer, to keep them as part of that community, keep them interacting.

What we’ve done is taken some processes that used to be done on paper, also cost money and send out the mailings and they would have to mail it back and then the offices would have to handle all the paperwork and use some of those processes to be online as part of the same community. And an example we have up here is the housing contract.

They can come here and fill out those regimen database, I dump it right into our housing database where somebody in our housing office used to enter it all by hand and they were thrilled this past year to have it done this way.

And there’s a queue different process we had from our two different orientation type things and it allows us to get people some more individual specific information earlier on just so they feel a little bit more of that community and it helps people engage.

Kevin Lavelle: I would also say from an admission standpoint as a former admission counselor and I was the admission point person for the Road to Xavier as it started out. This past year, 57% of our admit students created an account on the Road to Xavier. Students who end up enrolled in the university, 97% of them were on road to Xavier; so only 3% of students who ended up enrolling were not on this site.

So up front, we can really focus on 57% of our admits who come to this website and really focus our records on them because we know that they are the most likely to enroll The flip side of that is that there’s 43% of our students, over 2,000 of our admit students that we don’t really have to focus on that much, that’s very, very nice.

As the admission counselor, when I was working then there were maybe 800 students knowing that I can focus on these 300, not the 400 much clearer, give us much better indication. For students who created a profile as part of the illustrated section, as Rob said just a second ago, those students who log in to these websites came back to this website on average about 18 times.

For students who ended up enrolling, they came back to this website 38 times. They logged in 38 times. There’s 38 different sections. A traditional admission print screen on the print side of things would be a letter this week, in two weeks we’ll follow up with a letter from the dean, and a week after that, we’ll follow up with something specific about their interest whether it’s music or fine arts or close sports or what-have-you.

It’s a very week by week or by-weekly process. This is a constant engagement. We also know from the back-end statistics that the most popular traffic time here at Xavier website is between 6 p.m. and midnight. The most popular time within that is 9 to 11.

So students are not engaged with us that much during the business hours when our admission counselors are typically available. So sitting down as a family, our student is looking at the money matter section and trying to do the financing as a family and say we have $10,000 to contribute. I have another $12,000 in scholarships. We have a balance of $15,000. Here are the different financing mechanisms to make it available to us and say I have a question about this.

They can just say capture all of these information and email my financial aid counselor and then begin a one-on-one conversation with the financial aid counselor, and take a screen shot of exactly what the student might be able to be looking at in terms of the dollar amount that they are putting in for family contribution and email the counselor who can then begin that one-on-one conversation because that’s where we’re really going to be able to make influences and help students and parents individually on the finances.

Because to be honest, there aren’t any colleges that are inexpensive anymore and certainly we’re not at that level. So there are a lot of data points that we can gather that really influence the way that we develop the site, the way that we might communicate with the students, really have those engagements throughout the admission student process and then try to continue that engagement through the summer and very, very important to us cause we find students want to do that. But we’re not always available to do that in tuition methods. Please.

Audience: The Road to Xavier and all the back-end, the work with the housing contracts and you track management. Did you guys write that for granting in-house or was that done by another...?

Kevin Lavelle: When we first engaged in this process, the Road to Xavier a few years ago, Xavier works with an outside company to develop the website and to develop all the back-end processes so the large staff working with that staff. Last year, we bought everything completely in-house. We wrote much of the code, all of the back-end processes, and this year, its’ going to be actually completely new form.

I would say we are scrapping the website and starting from scratch because we struck some legacy from those first few years and wanted to do something completely different. We’re going to be doing a lot more directly interactive things with students. We’re having current students on our Twitter feeds, we will have just snapshots from around Xavier’s campus, a little come on to the website so the students come back to the site or inbox messages and flicker fee the most recent student to update their profile, all of those looks new because of this.

So it’s not the same thing as all have logged in three days ago and that’s going to keep students coming back because it is different every time. So we’re playing some new things but it’s all being done in-house for the last year plus.

Audience: You kind of answered but just to take it a more further so you talked about ways to keep that new start fresh and you mentioned previously your kind of communication stream with the emails or whatever topics. Does anyone generating that type of contest or articles about student life or whatever, that kind of content, or is that on your main side are you doing anything?

Rob Leisland: We do have some of those almost static that sounds at the wrong turn but we do have some basic static information. If you’d scroll a little bit further down, we have information about academics and study abroad opportunities and more of the students stories. And then throughout the year, we work with our undergraduate admission office and have some inbox messages that might be targeted to a particular student or particular regions, letting them know about events.

If I was hosting reception for mid-students at the Cleveland area, there would be in messages that would go directly to students from that territory. So we do those sorts of more targeted things and more general things throughout the year to try and keep that concept fresh.

We also know that parents are an important part of this process. We also have two areas that we worked with other of parents. One were we worked with the Office of Parent Relations. This, I would say, focuses more for parents of current Xavier students, providing access to a lot of the online programs that we have for parents, a calendar of activities throughout the year, access to various parents or part of our parents’ counselors who agreed to fill questions from parents of prospective students.

As a follow up to that, we also have a concurrent parent Road to Xavier website which I would say is somewhat a slim down version of the student Road to Xavier website. We wanted to keep them separate because the student site has a lot more of the social networking engagement piece, and we didn’t want students to be intimidated or turned off by knowing that if they logged in or if they had they had their profile printed, mom and dad calls if they logged in and seen all of that.

We wanted that student interaction happen in the student’s phase. We have a parent Road to Xavier website which is very similar to student minus the social networking aspect. But it keeps the money matters, the financial aid information important next steps during the admission process for specific dates of submitting housing contracts, all of that. And we have a few more parent testimonial and parent profiles; just like parents connect with parents. Please.

Audience: A few question. One is, is this mostly have links out or do you post about material with it?

Kevin Lavelle: I would say for the most part, all of our contents are within the Road to Xavier sphere. There are few areas where we dynamically pull in students major--some information about that major faculty contact with their picture and their email address and all of that. We will link up to public website for analogy department because there’s no sense in creating a whole separate space for the department when you already have it but most of the things are in-house.

Audience: And is there any way that you keep parents out of the screening section because I know students who don't know their credentials.

Rob Leisland: Yes, no. I get a lot of calls from our admission office about this can’t get logged in and oftentimes it’s not the student that can’t get logged in but the parents trying to log in to the student’s site. And they always get their password mixed up and something were always struggling with this. How can it be simpler for them to log in to know which site they were logging into but still keep them in totally separate routes because we just don’t want to feel that the parents are breathing down their neck so that’s something that we always try to figure out.

Kevin Lavelle: Definitely a challenge.

Audience: How do you deal with privacy issues with the parents?

Rob Leisland: Right. What we’ve looked in to in a lot of this, we ran through our registrar’s office by dealing with FASA and things like that. And a lot of it has come down to and this is how we interpret the law. If we’re going to go to jail, please let me know.

[Laughter]

None of the students who are on this site are actually enrolled in Xavier. Our registrar doesn’t consider them enrolled until census day which for us is I think September. And so there aren’t many restrictions. We actually aren’t putting any academic information out here except for the major that they have, that they have submitted as part of their application, and we do put financial aid information out of the site that the parents have access to.

But it’s our understanding that because of the students have actually enrolled at Xavier yet, that it’s within our rights to share that information.

Kevin Lavelle: And because of the life cycle, this site, and the students beginning their freshmen year, the students would then be enrolled for the site to be over, and it continues to that - where at Xavier, this continues before census turns officially considered enrolled. Please.

Audience: This is probably doesn’t really have to do with enrolments but where do the students go after they become current students? Is there a similar site that they have that they can know about their class schedule or those trying to.

Rob Leisland: We do have a portal for our current students and one thing that we do is when they get access information for Road to Xavier, we give them the same user name that they’re going to have throughout their life at Xavier. And we even at a certain point roll their password from here into our my "xu" portal.

As first year students, it’s a luminous system. It’s a luminous portal and there’s tabs at the top for all first year students gets a special tab used the class of 20, 29 or whatever we’re on right now. And it kind of helps to ease them into kind keeps the same look and feel and also eases them into the other main portal, the most that our students are using.

Kevin Lavelle: Just to talk a little bit more beyond the undergraduate admission, we have done things to square other areas of enrollment, other levels of enrollment, at a very basic level for graduate admission. As we agreed on, many of our department pages here is an example from our MS center nursing program.

In addition to just a general content for a particular program, we have these little component boxes over here in the right-hand column. This one for the grad department’s graduate services so direct links to applying online for that particular program, requesting more information about that particular program and scholarship financially for graduate students and also graduate services whole page.

One of those conditions sort of tasks the graduate students are looking for immediately accessible because other graduate students for the most part are looking at the university that might be interested in particular major.

Graduate students as you know are very program specific. They are looking for Xavier’s MSN program and not thinking, “Well, I might do education or I might do nursing.” They know what they want and so they got into the department page and they want to make that admission information, enrollment information immediately accessible.

So that’s in all of our undergraduate and our graduate getting our admission information out there.

Rob Leisland: Another thing that we did just like with the undergrad app, we updated our graduate application. We try to streamline it. We try to keep it kind of as simple as possible. One thing that we don’t do because for undergraduate there is basically one online application that everybody is going to fill out for the department heads. For the graduate application, depending on which program they appoint or if they have a different requirements, so we don’t do that tab site interface so they can see you had because of that type of thing.

But as I mentioned before, as part of that one thing that’s allowed us to do is for instance, with the psychology program, they don’t require their essay as part of the application and they require it afterward. But we still do have that online application out there, we still try to have it easy. They don’t have the Xavier turn functionality as the undergrads do because it is so much simpler.

Kevin Lavelle: I also would talk briefly. We are very lucky. Over the last year, this conversation started before I joined the web services group and accompanied with a lot of work this past summer, as Xavier once have a university homepage and second year design the beginning of August. And one of the things that we had done throughout our work, through our web analytics that we’ve looked at, we organized our website a lot more around users and the task that user are looking for and the information that they are looking for.

And our top 30 websites, the content really fell on the three major categories. Academic programs, admission, enrollment information, and student organizations, so that obviously influence the tabs, it’s a little dark here but academic admission and campus life in front and center in terms of navigation along with alumni and athletics.

The other big change that you’ll see along the right-hand side here are direct links again for a lot of those very specific enrollment tasks that our students are looking for. We know that the largest group of visitors to our public website are prospective students whether the undergrad or graduate level. And so we wanted to make that information immediately accessible right here on the homepage.

So we have applied with direct links to undergrad, grad, MBA, and Med. Financial aid, undergrad, graduate and financial aid forms, majors and programs so it's direct list of undergrad majors and graduate programs and then visit the opportunity to get direction to campus and schedule your campus visit as all of our new virtual tour that we talked about earlier.

We wanted to put all that information to front and center and we see really good returns from that. There’s positives and negatives both to your web traffic. In some ways our traffic stayed relatively steady but you can also look at that and say we use to take three or four clips to find the financial aid form section and that takes one place. So all of our traffic is as lot better than the traffic total in terms of uses and references.

Rob Leisland: We just want to talk for a minute about some of the challenges because we realized that at various institutions, there’s going to be a lot various different challenges to this. It could be something like organizational structure, it could be the size of the institution. One of the great advantage that we have is that Kevin comes from admissions, Doug, our boss, who gave us our introduction comes from admission.

They know the admissions people. We have a lot of credibility with the admissions people and we can work very closely with that. And so in some institutions, it’s going to work, it’s going to be a challenge to maybe to build up that relationship.

But one thing that you can do is look at their site and not be passive about the content that’s on their site; maybe try to start working with them more, make some more suggestions, look at the different things that you can do, and maybe be a little bit more active in their site.

Kevin Lavelle: I also think understanding is the basic premise of admission and how it works at your specific university because we’re a small private university, our admission processes are very different than any school that might be occasionally focused in large state university and community college; every school can be very different.

So this is the basic foundation of who we are and the basics of enrolment in general. But think about how it works in your institution and what’s the process, what’s the flow of it and where might you make so that that specific touch point to improve the process.

I’ll say just one quick story that Doug had shared a few weeks ago. There was an online discussion amongst web people about an online form and the number of students who were filling out the online inquiry form had gone down. So they are asking the web people what’s wrong with this form.

So then the web discussion amongst all of us is, “Well, did you require birthday? Did that make people skittish about .doing it?” And the answer is just back up. If you were kids who are using that online inquiry form, if you are kids that’s telling us about it, so it’s not really on us, it’s about understanding the admission landscape and enrollment landscape and what’s going on because in engaging in conversation in your admission enrollment areas is important to understand what they are dealing with so that we then best fit in to that process and help improve it.

Audience: Question. It's something similar to another one and it sounds like you spend a lot of time on admissions works. I was wondering how many universities have a person who is dedicated 100% full-time to regular admissions? Cause we feel we usually have at least one person who does admissions work all the time and so organizationally it doesn't make sense to hire.

Kevin Lavelle: Sure. We are sort of small enough, a small enough shop. Actually, our office of undergraduate relations does have their own technology person who supports their database system.

Rob Leisland: So we’re running out of time here, obviously, and we’ll be hanging around if you have any questions. We always love to talk about this stuff. Just some things we want you to kind of think about as the conference continues specifically for enrollment. It’s going to be what are you doing, what would you like to do, what are some areas where you can make an impact.

Kevin Lavelle: Another side of that. Enrollment is the big thing for us for Xavier University but it might not be the same for every university. It could be research, it could be very college-specific. One of the specific areas that are important to university or to your goals is to make sense as one of the university’s goals and how you’re going to get in line with them. But for us, it’s admission and enrollment.

I think a lot of the universities, it’s admission and enrollment but if it’s not that for you, what is it and how are you going to get in line with those goals and how can you improve those process. Something important to consider especially hearing all these presentations, gathering lots of ideas is important framework to work in.

Host: There are not any sessions that I’d like to wrap up but some sort of the same office back to your point. This past year alone, our vice president of enrollment was looking at a tool to be able to use for their applications across the board and maintain of the system yet a budget of $100,000 to be able to do that.

He wanted to create an upgraded sort of network kind of thing that had a budget of around $40,000 or $50,000 to do that. When we said it was a shot to be able to do that for you and oh, by the way, keep that $150,000 and use it some other way, guys have a god. And it helps to justify some of the things that we do.

Enrollment at our college and primarily in most institutions is that single biggest line item and if you can align yourself even in the web office with that top university priority and be a key player, there is not a meeting that we’re not a part of at the highest levels at our campus because of the alignment that we made by saying that the things that happen on our website and even in the surrounding pieces are critical to your success, we have to be there.

People wonder how we went from a staff of two about three years ago to a staff of ten today. It was really because we changed our whole alignment and our goals of really what we were going to focus on. And I think that, primarily, I am completely jealous of these two guys because that thing that they showed you the Road to Xavier in 2006 that was made by the Web Marketing Association as the single best website in the country.

These two get pretty much built at all. And so with that, thank you Kevin and Rob.

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Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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