To improve the user experience of prospective students who apply to and attend CU Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences, we created recruitment “journeys” and tightly aligned our marketing and sales tactics.
About the project
In 2018, CU Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) created a marketing and recruitment team (i.e., marketing and sales) to increase the college’s enrollment and tighten their branding. I led the team through a journey mapping workshop to define phases of engagement and user barriers. We wrote a UX brand script and created a visualization to represent the journey. With the funnel in place, we aligned our marketing and sales tactics while also bettering our marketing and recruitment team members’ collaboration.
Challenges
A&S’s previous recruitment efforts relied on students feeling affinity to CU Boulder generally. While this proved effective for years, fellow campus colleges and programs began to intentionally market their individuality and saw stronger correlate enrollment several years before our team formed. Because we were “behind,” our team lacked opportunities to gradually grow our marketing efforts and experiment with tactics. Instead, we needed to rapidly develop strategies that had a higher likelihood to succeed.
Complicating these efforts is A&S’s size. The college encompasses 60+ fields of study, more than 40 majors, and typically enrolls +50% of the study body, or roughly 18,500 individuals. This creates a wide array of audience segments, each with varying priorities and concerns that drive their interest.
Solutions
We began with the journey mapping workshop to both define a recruitment experience and identify the tactics that were most likely to succeed. We followed Paul Boag’s journey mapping guidelines, specifically in mapping the tasks, questions, touchpoints, emotions and barriers our students experience while deciding on their college, choosing CU Boulder and beginning their first semesters. Our team brainstormed tactics and rated them based on the likelihood they would positively improve the experience for the largest number of people.
Using the workshop notes, we wrote a story script that walked one persona through the experience, including our tactics that alleviated barriers. Our team added content marketing and paid social/search strategies based on gaps. Critically, we established indicators to measure each tactic’s success moving forward.
Our goal was to rapidly create as much connection as possible with departments and the faculty, students and staff who make up those areas of study. In total, we employed 16 new tactics that offered increasing personalization based on prospects’ interests in major, research and other enrichment opportunities.
For the research phase, we needed tactics with personal touches to set our institution apart in the “noisiest” phase of the journey, in that prospects receive huge amounts of digital information during this phase. We focused on video meetings, hand-written postcards, social testimonials, personalized emails and more, each which included small pieces of information that helped prospects visualize their A&S experiences with greater clarity.
During the connection phase, we created opportunities to meet students and faculty. We also posted videos focused on student and faculty research, as well as campus life. Our goal was to illuminate what the A&S experience looks like in particular majors through our email, video and social campaigns, while also offering specific names of people who can help students get the most out of their college experiences from their first day on-campus.
Team
Jason Shelton
A&S Director of Recruitment
Tim Grassley
UX and Marketing Manager
David Aragoni
Scholarship Coordinator
Yazzmynn Martinez
Undergraduate Recruitment Coordinator
Zeni Whittall
Undergraduate Recruitment Coordinator
Tim Grassley 