Think you know your institution's greatest challenges? Maybe, maybe not. It's all a matter of perspective. That's something that has become clear to us here at Intelliworks as we began preparing a presentation for this week's UCEA National conference in San Francisco.
During our session, "Putting a Face to CyberSpace: Innovative Marketing and Recruitment Techniques that Work" we hope to explore the evolving adult student recruitment marketing landscape along with our co-presenters from Fresno Pacific University and University of Wisconsin-Extension.
Two points that we plan to highlight: How can continuing education programs take today's technology (combined with timeless best practices) to enhance their marketing efforts? And beyond that...what are the biggest challenges for these programs in achieving their recruitment objectives?
It's that second question that generated some interesting results in a poll we conducted for part of the presentation. Among the many questions we asked these continuing education marketing and admissions professionals was "What's your biggest constraint in achieving your recruitment marketing objectives?"
We thought certainly there'd be agreement across the board as to what the main challenges are (and for the most part there was), but it was interesting to see how those challenges were ranked differently depending on your role within an institution. We broke out our response to this "biggest constraint" question into three categories: decision makers, decisions influeners and managers.
Here's what we found:
There's no doubt that institutions are feeling personnel and budget constraints across the board. However, the disparity between those on the front-lines and those in the front office with respect to how they view "IT resources" is a bit surprising. Clearly, those on the front-lines feel like their technology needs are not being met.
Why? As with all things, it probably depends on a number of things, but I suspect it has something to do with these individuals not having (or at least feeling like they don't have) a seat at the table when these technology decisions are made in the first place.
Last month, Christopher Bucholtz wrote an article for CRM Buyer that focused on this very topic. He writes, "An astonishingly large percentage of companies build the [technology] selection team around the people least likely to use the system on a daily basis -- the IT director, the CMO, the CIO, and perhaps the vice president or director of sales. While the input of these players is critical, it's also vital to have input from the rank-and-file sales, marketing and service staff."
He goes on to add that it's vital to have input from the rank-and-file staff because they're the ones that ultimately have to use the technology to help the organization achieve its objectives.
According to Bucholtz, "Including them in the decision-making team will help spot issues, good and bad, that executives miss -- practical things about the way they use the system and about the kinds of data they know is vital to their jobs. Their buy-in also helps with adoption after the decision; they will not only help you select an application that they themselves will feel comfortable with, but also give you adoption advocates among their peers."
There are two lessons here:
1) Your reality is different than others within your organization;
2) Strategic decisions should be based on input from across your institution in order to truly identify your biggest challenges.
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