Neuger Communications Group

Score & Segment: Enrolling the Mix of Students You Want

The Situation:

Butler University is a venerable Indianapolis institution with an emphasis on the liberal arts and sciences, and offering schools of business administration, education, pharmacy and health sciences, and fine arts. The university sought to grow its applicant pool by focusing its efforts on students who are most likely to apply and students who are most likely to be receptive to additional, targeted communications.

The Communications Challenge:

Prospective students are expensive; developing and sending everything from viewbooks to e-mail sequences requires significant resources. In addition, few if any colleges have the staff they need to contact every student inquiry directly. So how should an institution prioritize its communications efforts?

Strategy:

Using historical data collected in Butler’s institutional data system, Neuger Communications Group was able to identify and score student attributes that are the greatest predictors of a student’s likelihood to apply and enroll at Butler. Almost 98% of Butler’s applicants and over 99% of their enrolled students came from the top 30% of their prospect pool.

Results:

It would be a mistake to assume that past patterns are fixed; one of the points of effective communication is to change behaviors. The segmentation Neuger Communications Group completed for Butler allows them to continue their successful efforts with those students who are most likely to apply, conserve resources from those students who are unlikely to consider Butler, and to concentrate on growing their applicant pool by focusing on those students for whom additional, targeted communications should have the greatest impact.