The Intellitimes

At times, higher education professionals need to look outside their institutions to seek inspiration and professional growth. Usually, they find those development opportunities at annual conferences. But what's a higher ed professional to do when conference season ends?

This month's featured client found her inspiration on Twitter, and has quickly built a community of passionate enrollment management professionals that meet every week to discuss the latest trends in the world of higher education recruitment, admissions and enrollment. We're proud to feature Jennielle Stother (@HigherEdGirl), Executive Director of Enrollment at Seminary of the Southwest. Jennielle is a long-time Intelliworks customer and one of the founders of #EMchat, which was recently featured by InsideHigherEd.

We spoke with Jennielle recently about her motivation for starting #EMchat, and how professionals at niche institutions can benefit from participating in discussions with their counterparts at larger institutions (and vice versa).

INTELLIWORKS: Can you give us some background on your career and how you got involved in enrollment management?

STROTHER: I spent the first part of my career coaching collegiate volleyball, and when I was ready to hang up the whistle I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do next.  However, I realized that through coaching, I actually had a lot of experience in recruiting students and understanding what motivates students to choose one school over another. 

When I moved to Austin, Texas, I had an opportunity to work in the graduate department at Concordia University Texas.  Eventually, I became Director of Admissions at Concordia.

Three years ago, Seminary of the Southwest contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to join them to help them with their enrollment. 

INTELLIWORKS: How did you start #EMchat and what motivated you to get involved? 

STROTHER: Let me start by saying that Twitter has literally changed my life professionally over the last few months.  I have found a network of people in the higher education community that I’m able to connect with on a regular basis.

However, several weeks ago, I began to realize that there were very few organized discussions on Twitter around the topic of enrollment management.  There were regularly scheduled chats on topics such as student affairs (#SAchat) and higher education web development, but nothing for folks working in admissions or enrollment management. 

So I began to talk about this with Alex Williams (@AlexMWilliams_) who also had been asking about it.  And finally, after weeks of looking, he and I just decided to start something on our own.  The next week we started and just a few weeks later we had close to 40 participants on our last chat.

INTELLIWORKS: So what exactly is #EMchat? 

STROTHER: As higher education professionals, we go to conferences like Noel-Levitz and Stamats and we come back so inspired because you’re in an environment with other people that are experiencing what you’re experiencing and you’re able to learn from each other.  However, what happens when you leave those conferences?  Sometimes the burdens of professional life start to weigh on you and you need a jolt of inspiration, but that next conference is still several months away. 

#EMchat is an attempt to bring some of that motivation back to the admissions and enrollment management community by providing a regular forum to share questions and best practices about the profession.  For me at least, this fills that need to hear from other people in higher education that are experiencing the same challenges and successes.

The list of #EMchat topics has included:

- Expanding the admissions role

- Motivating your staff, including admissions "road warriors"

- Tele-counseling

- CRM

- First-Generation student recruitment

-  First-Generation student retention

INTELLIWORKS: You work for a rather niche institution.  How are you able to bridge the gap between your experience and that of more traditional undergraduate enrollment professionals?

STROTHER: That’s an interesting question, because I actually have a graduate degree in enrollment management and when I first graduated I thought that I had to work in traditional undergraduate or my skills would be lost.  However, what I’ve found is that I’m able to apply quite a bit of what I learned about traditional enrollment management to the work I’ve done in graduate and seminary enrollment.

Last year, I sat in at a session at the Noel-Levitz conference conducted by Gary Fretwell, Senior Vice President and Principal at Noel-Levitz.  Somebody asked him, “What are the benchmarks for graduate institutions?” And he said, “There are none.” 

That’s one of the most frustrating things about working in graduate admissions, and especially for a small graduate seminary.  It’s very hard to compare how you’re doing to other institutions because we’re all so different. 

However, that’s what makes #EMchat so unique.  We don’t try to limit it to traditional or non-traditional because we think that there are things from both that can be beneficial to anyone working in higher education enrollment and admissions.

There tend to be more undergraduate professionals on Twitter.  However, with the growing importance and financial impact that graduate and non-traditional enrollments are having at many campuses, you’re going to have to see a lot more graduate and non-traditional enrollment professionals getting involved and sharing their stories.  It’s critical to their success as professionals, but also the long-term success of their organizations.

At the end of the day, you all have an enrollment funnel and your goal is to get prospects through that funnel.  While stages and challenges are unique for each institution, there are certain things that can be shared across institutions to help them move students down the path towards enrollment.

INTELLIWORKS:  As an Intelliworks client, how are you connecting with prospects and what can other institutions learn from you?

STROTHER: At my institution, I’m not only dealing with the prospect, but often times with the prospect’s spouse and children so we become much more than just enrollment managers, we become (in some cases) realtors, counselors, mentors, etc. 

We’re a small institution and one of the benefits that we pitch to prospects is that they’ll be part of a small community, so if I can’t remember their kid’s names or their spouse’s name then I’m not fulfilling that promise.  We’re fortunate to have a system like Intelliworks to help us keep track of all these conversations with students and their families.  But that’s something that a lot of graduate professionals need to take into account when they’re talking to their students, there are often other decision-influencers involved that need to be cared for as well.

A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of participating at the UPCEA Marketing Seminar in Las Vegas.  We got to party like rockstars, but we also were able to share a few best practices. In this session, we set out to determine whether your system is underrealized and why, and how to optimize so it really sings! Many institutions approach CRM with an urgency to meet a specific business challenge, but then find they don’t have the luxury to spend time evaluating and optimizing other processes that may be considered secondary or not mission critical.

Organizations may not even realize that they have inefficient lead qualification or followup approaches, or perhaps they are struggling with user adoption, or maybe they are using the system but not responding and optimizing their relationship practices based on the actionable data being provided?

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Hope College previously used a home-grown Microsoft Access solution with limited functionality. The web-based Intelliworks system encourages better communication and captures notes about prospects to directly affect correspondence with them. Folks with their finger in the recruiting process (admissions, athletics, and faculty) are all using the solution. Prospect data is housed in Intelliworks and later moved to Banner once a student has moved to applicant stage.

Although Hopkins realizes a lot of factors go into an institution’s success, since moving to Intelliworks in 2009, Hope College has had the highest number of applicants in history and full classes, as a school with capped enrollment.

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