Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where this finds you. Thank you for joining us today for a quick, but I think really effective conversation that I’m excited to have with Erin Mall, my colleague here, about driving yield and really enrollment through authentic connections, which is not, Erin, something we talk about all that often. A couple of housekeeping rules before we get started. One, we are taking questions along the way. So if you do have a question, I would encourage you to add that into the Q&A tab that’s below on the bottom of your screen. And also, just as a point of reference, we will be sending out a follow-up to this webinar in an email. We’ll have the outcomes from some survey questions we have from you and also this recording so that you can either watch it later or share it with others as you see fit. So with that, Dr. Mall, would you like to introduce yourself? Yes. Thanks, Dawn. Hello, everyone. My name is Erin Mall. I’m a Senior Vice President here at PeopleGrove in partnerships. But prior to my time at PeopleGrove, I’ve spent over twenty years on two different campuses leading enrollment efforts and also consulting around areas related to enrollment management, so admissions, financial aid, marketing, and delighted to spend a little bit of time with you today to talk through how authentic connections can really help assist you as you build your class. That’s great. And my name is Dawn Hiles. I’m the CEO of PeopleGrove. I won’t have Erin tell people how many years I’ve been in higher education, but it is more than twenty. For the purposes of today’s conversation, what’s probably most important for my background is that I served as a Dean of Admissions and a Vice President for Enrollment Management. So this is a topic that, while I’m not in this space every day like I was before, it’s something that I can really appreciate the challenges people have in recruiting really good students, getting them to yield and through to become enrolled students. And that is a Herculean effort. It always has been. It probably always will be. But what I’m excited to do today is talk about some of the ways that people could think about this differently. This isn’t the same “how do we just send them another email,” or “can we have another direct mail piece that goes out,” or some kind of swag that’s going to be the difference. So as we start talking about some of these options that exist today that we want to make sure you’re aware of, we thought it would also be good just to ask you as the attendee, what’s the biggest challenge that you see. So as you go through, we’d love to hear from you. And there’s no wrong answer here. Right, Erin? So anything that you’re feeling, please put that down. And like I said at the beginning of the hour, we will share that information back out with everyone so that you can kind of get a sense. Chances are you’re not alone, but it’s good to have the data behind that so you can see where your perceived challenges match up against how other people are feeling with the market as well. Right, Dawn. I think, you know, when we put this question together, I think what’s interesting about the five different challenges that are options is they’re actually all symptoms of what I would consider to be the same underlying shift. And then let me explain a little bit about what I mean by that. Let’s just imagine a student. Let’s call her Clara. And let’s say she’s been admitted to your institution, but also five others. So she’s got basically six options. And on paper, those schools look pretty similar. Similar rankings, similar programs, similar price points. And so now she’s trying to answer the question, why your school over others? So if we think about the options that we shared on this survey, from Clara’s perspective, everyone is sort of saying the same thing. Every school has great outcomes data, percentage of alumni employed, great faculty who care, a great community, but it all starts to blur together because, again, everyone’s saying the same thing. From the cost to recruit, because of that, your team now has to invest more, more events, more travel, more campaigns, and it’s getting harder to influence her decision because of all those different points that she’s hearing from throughout the process. From an engagement perspective, you’re sending emails, texts, invitations, but Clara is candidly skimming most of them, and it still feels like marketing to her. It’s not something that’s built for her. Then we think about your admissions team. They want to build real relationships. They work hard, but they simply don’t really have the time to do that for every admitted student. And so the conveying of your value proposition often gets done somewhere else. So Clara goes to maybe Reddit, social media, or friends of friends because she’s looking for something that she trusts. And so the core issue is that the decision is no longer entirely being based upon what you say, but it’s being based on the experiences that she can validate. And one of the things we talk about at PeopleGrove all the time is that oftentimes you talk to students, but talking with them is really the key to unlocking that experience and the validation of that experience. And so again, five different options, all could be struggles, but really symptoms of a larger shift that’s happening in the enrollment cycle. Yeah. I think everyone, Erin, can relate to what you said about more. Nothing is going off anyone’s plate. Every person on this webinar, I’m sure, could raise their hand and say yes, I feel like there’s always more. So I think it’s a good segue into thinking about the shift in what’s happening. I think it’s important before we even get into how we’re thinking about addressing these issues in a really nice scalable way. I think the work we’re doing is really an outcome of where we are in the current situation. So if you think about it, we all have savvy buyers. It used to be that students’ parents would come to an institution, and Clara would come and already know, like, I want to go to college. This is inherently something that we want and we’re going to do. And now that’s no longer assumed. They’re really looking at that value equation. If I pay this much in tuition, what is the outcome going to be for me later? How much debt am I going to have as a result of this? And so that really has changed how buyers behave. They’ve become much more savvy and ask questions around outcomes. I also don’t think those buyers are taking our word for it from an institutional perspective. They want outside validation, whether it’s talking to other students or alumni. I have a friend whose daughter is valedictorian of her high school going through the search process. And for her, the number one thing that tipped the scale was a connection she made with an alum at a visit day. It wasn’t any of the materials. It was that personal connection. She loved that, and it really did change where she ended up going to college, which is really interesting. So you’ve got these savvy buyers, but you also have increasing expectations. They’re not comparing us to other universities, they’re comparing us to Netflix and Instagram. They expect curated experiences. They don’t want to sift through everything. They want exactly what’s relevant to them. That’s very hard to do. But to meet those expectations, we have to move from group-based messaging to one-to-one messaging. And that’s difficult to scale. And as you mentioned, that creates higher cost to recruit, not just financially, but in time. I was talking to a dean of a pharmacy school, and they said they connected every prospective student to an alum, and it almost killed them. That’s a heavy lift. And that’s where technology comes in to help scale this. One of the things we love at PeopleGrove is that your alumni are your biggest differentiator. They are your outcomes. But it’s hard to scale that trust and authenticity, which is why this moment feels different. So when we think about this, if you have a savvy buyer, they demand proof points on outcomes. And outcomes aren’t just percentages anymore. They want specifics. To scale messaging, you need data and insights about students. And to scale personalization, you need technology. This is where tools like AI can help take work off staff and allow them to focus on human connection. Families are questioning value more than ever. Cost importance has increased significantly, and students are prioritizing ROI over rankings. But it’s not just about cost. It’s about value tied to cost. Even if you have strong outcomes, the challenge is scaling personalized messaging. We know personalization works, but few institutions have implemented it effectively. Only a small percentage of students feel communications are personalized. So the opportunity is to focus on two-way communication, not just sending information, but engaging in meaningful dialogue. Instead of ten touchpoints, maybe it’s three meaningful ones. This applies across undergraduate, graduate, and online programs. For graduate programs especially, outcomes and networks are critical. So how do we meet those expectations? We leverage tools like the PeopleGrove Engagement Hub. We’ve seen campuses increase deposits significantly using this approach. Students who engage have much higher yield rates. The Engagement Hub connects prospective students with current students and alumni. It uses AI to match people based on shared interests. It integrates with your CRM and provides analytics on engagement. It also includes PathwayU, a career assessment tool that helps students explore majors and align with outcomes. This allows institutions to not just talk about value, but demonstrate it. So instead of ending this conversation with “good luck,” we want to show that there are scalable solutions. We’ll take one last question. How does the Engagement Hub work with existing alumni platforms without causing fatigue? Great question. The platform is customizable. You can control engagement levels, limit interactions, and select which alumni participate. Best practice is not to include all alumni, but a selected group who opt in and are interested in helping. That helps prevent fatigue and ensures quality engagement. If there are no other questions, thank you for your time today. We’ll follow up with resources and the recording. If you’re interested in learning more, we’d love to connect. And Erin, thank you for your expertise today. Sure. And best of luck to everyone as you approach May 1 and finalize your class. Thanks, everyone.
