SAN JACINTO COLLEGE ENROLLMENT CAMPAIGN
Talk about extra credit
While our competitors were experiencing a dip in enrollment, we set our goal to see an increase of 3% for San Jacinto College. When the chalk dust settled, we ended up achieving 4.3%.
Our assignment
San Jacinto College was entering a “base year” for funding – meaning that their enrollment numbers for the year would impact the state funding the college receives for the next two years. We needed to increase enrollment by March 1, but also beat our competitors in the space so that the college would get a bigger piece of the pie. Funding is based on your percentage increase or decrease against everyone else.
CLIENT:
RESULTS:
3
Enrollment Increase Target
4.3
Enrollment Increase Achieved
Here’s how we did it
We focused our tactics on direct response. The media buy and creative executions were beholden to lead generation performance and not brand awareness – which had increased considerably during the previous year’s campaign. Of course this effort still supported building awareness for the brand, as it was a product of the sum of our exposures. So in essence, we built the brand while focusing on generating demand.
Tracking the digital media was the easy part – we have the formula down on tracking conversions and sending visitors directly to the application or enrollment pages straight from advertising tactics. Traditional media presented more challenges that we met with innovative use of partnerships. By teaming up with iHeart Media, we activated a #250 campaign, which added a call to action to traditional TV and radio spots driving listeners/viewers to call “pound two fifty” and say the keyword “San Jac”. From there, they were connected directly to the college customer service department and sent a follow up text message with a link to the San Jac website. To support all media, creative and email templates were updated to be direct response oriented. As the results show, we got the responses, the school got the enrollment numbers and everyone on the team got an A.
