How Towson University ensures smooth arrivals, maximizing orientation success
About Towson University
Towson University offers students the best of both worlds. TU offers the academic programs and exceptional faculty typical of a large university coupled with the close-knit community and personalized approach of a small college. TU’s wide range of extracurricular activities contribute to a dynamic student experience. Students can pursue diverse interests and cultivate undiscovered talents.
The Opportunity
Towson University was seeking to improve the orientation for incoming prospective students. Understanding that “getting there” is a big part of the stress, TU wanted to build a pre-arrival plan that ensured students had all of the information they needed when they arrived to campus while also ensuring they had every opportunity to have any last minute questions answered.
The Approach
In partnership with PlatformQ Education, TU developed a pre-orientation video that was delivered via Q-Mail e-mail automation and Q-Message SMS the week ahead of each student’s orientation week. Because their team was short on time to set up the process in their CRM, they leveraged PlatformQ’s marketing support, ensuring the invitations to students were sent on-time.
TU produced a quick and pre-recorded, 2-minute, video gave students everything they needed to know once they arrived to campus … including a map to parking, directions to check-in, key reminders of what to bring as well as an overview of what to expect.
Leveraging the Campus Connect chat tool within Conduit, TU also made orientation leaders available to students to answer any questions they may have. Of course, the video produced by their team was so well done impactful there were very few live questions to field. TU understood that a short and high-impact video was the best way to engage their incoming “GenZ” population!
The Outcome
In total, Nearly one-in-three future TU students engaged with the content ahead of their scheduled orientations. By enabling the content to be live and then continuously available on-demand, TU saw an even split of students viewing the content at the scheduled chat time and on-demand at the student’s convenience.
Most importantly, TU saw how easy it is to leverage this tactic and incorporate a similar approach ahead of future campus events like open houses and specialized visit days to boost attendance and convenience for their prospective students and families.
"Candidly, we weren’t truly leveraging our investment in Conduit because we thought the process of leveraging the tool was a little overwhelming. We liked the ability to send broadcast text reminders to students, but our team was more comfortable with other tools for things like webcasts that were not fully integrated in to our overall work. The team at PQE helped us take a step back and evaluate our goals and helped us craft a meaningful strategy to minimize melt which has helped us to identify creative ways to build. Additionally, all of the data for interactions with our pre-orientation reminders can easily be fed back as interactions in to our CRM. This has made the process of building, executing and measuring our plan so much easier." Jennifer Ziegenfus
Associate Director of Admissions
Towson University
You CONDUIT Too!
Contact us to learn how Conduit + PlatformQ Eduction’s expertise in online engagement planning and strategy can support better conversion throughout the entire cycle.
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