For many Higher Education enrollment marketers across the country, it is more challenging than ever to manage evolving perceptions about college - not just about their institution, but about the value of higher education as a whole. We recently sat down with Sol Jensen, Vice President for Enrollment Management Marketing and Communications at Northern Illinois University, to discuss how NIU has addressed these challenges by strategically leveraging their graduate outcomes data.
For our full conversation with Jensen, check out our DataU Podcast Episode: Marketing the Value of Higher Education: The Role of Data in Enrollment Marketing at NIU
Jensen shared that there are currently a number of factors impacting the world of enrollment marketing, including recent FAFSA challenges, new regulatory requirements, and a decline in the traditional student population (a.k.a. The Enrollment Cliff). There’s also what Jensen calls a “second enrollment cliff”: the students who are choosing not to attend college at all. “They’re making decisions to forgo college, for several different potential reasons, but what you hear in the media quite a bit is they don’t have a strong perception of the value of a college degree. And so when they put the cost next to the benefit of that college degree, more and more students are starting to opt out of colleges.” This means that marketers now have the added responsibility of not only marketing the value of their institution, but of communicating the value of any college degree.
At NIU, it became clear that Career Readiness is a critical key to combating this challenge, and showcasing the value of a college degree: “Career readiness has become that much more important of a selling point… students and especially their families want to know and make sure that their students are going to get a great education.” The results of a 2019 NIU brand survey drove this point home and indicated that career readiness was one of the most important factors across all audience groups (prospective students and families, current students, alumni, faculty, staff, etc.).
With these results in mind, Jensen and his team began building and executing their Strategic Enrollment Management Plan (SEM). To successfully execute their strategic plan, Jensen shares that data is an extremely critical tool: “But no matter what, everything in there is related to data in some fashion. On the strategic side of how we're making the initial decision on what our plan should be, but also on the analytics and the metrics we have to track everything to see how we're progressing, and are things even working? Especially if we put any sort of financial commitment towards those, we need to make sure that they are working. Otherwise, the data would also tell you that you stop and pivot and try something new. So in terms of importance, I would say [data is] up there about as high as you can with most other things.”
Jensen shared that NIU’s partnership with Steppingblocks has been hugely helpful in meeting their strategic goals, and has allowed them to “finally find the data that we have been missing.” With Steppingblocks graduate outcomes data at their fingertips, Jensen and his team got right to work in implementing the data in as many areas as possible: “we are trying to incorporate alumni outcomes data in almost all of the messaging that we have.”
First, Jensen and his team in Enrollment Management Marketing and Communications put together a print brochure that they used for an admissions open house. They made two versions: one that provided an overview of alumni outcomes data for all of NIU, and then a version for each academic college with program-specific information. These brochures included information such as most common job titles, average salaries, geographic outcomes, top companies and industries, and more.
Then, they decided to revamp all of the web pages for their undergraduate academic programs. For all of their 70+ undergraduate programs, they created a template that included Steppingblocks data such as average salary, top skills of alumni, top job titles, top industries, and top employers.
For example, check out NIU’s web page for their undergraduate Kinesiology majors. 
Jensen’s team has also integrated Steppingblocks career outcomes data into their admissions presentations, as part of their email and print mail marketing strategy to prospective students, and into their financial aid presentations to demonstrate the value of an NIU degree.
And they’re not done yet! Jensen hopes that they hope to continue putting career readiness and graduate outcomes data at the forefront of their work. Their future plans include a communication campaign to students and staff about the student-facing Digital Career Counselor, updating their marketing materials for their graduate programs, engaging with their top employers, and utilizing Steppingblocks’ Graduate Insights platform to recruit their Bachelor’s degree alumni to return to NIU for an advanced degree.
Jensen also acknowledged that the uses for graduate outcomes data are not limited to folks working in Enrollment Management and/or Marketing and Communications: “this outcomes data is information that honestly could be used by almost every unit in some way or another… there are so many other ways to utilize this data as well beyond just marketing.”
How are you leveraging data to ensure institutional success?
For more on how you can leverage graduate outcomes data for Enrollment Management and Marketing and Communications, check out these resources from Steppingblocks:
eBook: Communicating the Value of Higher Education
Handout: Best Practices for Leveraging Outcomes Data in Enrollment Marketing
Handout: Maximizing Graduate Insights for Admissions & Marketing
DataU episode: Marketing the Value of Higher Education: The Role of Data in Enrollment Marketing at NIU
Interested in how you could leverage Steppingblocks? Explore now.
