Bill Berg

How mobile-friendly is your campus website? With increasing numbers of prospective students and their families using mobile devices to access college sites, it’s more important than ever that your site makes it easy for them to do so. Several years ago, there was a move toward the development of dedicated apps for smartphones that allowed access to the information students were most interested in seeing. Then, some colleges began creating separate mobile sites, making it necessary to maintain content on two or even more platforms, as notebook computers and tablets also came into use. Most recently, responsive design, which adapts the website layout to the device it’s being viewed on, has become the preferred solution to the rapid proliferation…Read more

It’s become essential for enrollment managers to use a collection of critical metrics – a dashboard, key performance indicators (KPIs) or some other set of measures – to monitor their institution’s progress throughout the recruitment cycle. These commonly include statistics like the number of inquiries, applicants, admits, deposits, campus visitors and FAFSA filers, as well as ratios like acceptance rate, yield, net tuition revenue per student and discount rate. Back in the days of the horse and buggy (when I got my start in admissions) the original dashboards prevented unpleasant surprises from hitting you in the face and they helped you to clearly see the road ahead – pretty much the same thing we’re using these statistical dashboards…Read more

Following a meeting with a group of campus administrators a while ago, I pulled several business cards from my suit coat pocket. I found I had been given three completely different cards from staff members representing this one campus – three different fonts, three different color schemes, three different logos. What was interesting was that several senior staff members from the campus had said they felt the institution was suffering from an identity crisis. My collection of business cards certainly supported that! These administrators complained that their various audiences viewed the institution differently. People in the local area knew it as one place, with a view that was heavily influenced by the past and what the institution might…Read more