Your Parents Council Playbook: a 7x fundraising ROI in just 4 months
The Catholic University of America joined the CampusESP family in August 2019. After a quick implementation, they launched their parent portal (known as “The Family Nest”) by late September with close to 5,000 users.
Now, only a couple of months later, Catholic University is being recognized as our Q4 ESP MVP winner for outstanding use of their Parents Council community.
Kyra Lyons, Senior Director of Student Experience and Family Engagement, has secured several in-person visits with potential new members of the interest community. They already brought in over $100,000 (a 7x ROI on their CampusESP investment) in just 4 months!
CampusESP helps streamline Parents Council recruitment and communication
Through CampusESP’s form functionality, higher ed institutions can ask parents questions during the portal registration process, which places them into special tracking groups called “communities.” Catholic University took advantage of this capability by creating unique tracking communities for current Parents Council members and parents interested in joining the Parents Council. Adding these two customized communities has allowed Catholic University to send targeted messaging to these groups and find potential new members.
Their form is set up so that when Catholic University parents respond “yes” to the question “Are you interested in joining the Parents Council?” they automatically get placed into the Parents Council Interest community. With over 130 members, Catholic University’s Parents Council Interest community has an overall open rate of 69%, making it one of their most engaged groups.
Kyra and Steve are also able to cross compare specific user engagement levels in the portal with information recorded in Raiser’s Edge, a fundraising and donor management software, to find potential new Parents Council members.
“The Parents Council Interest community has been my go-to source for recruitment for the Parents Council. It provides me with prospects who have already indicated an interest, and it gives me a great reason to communicate with them and visit with them. I had hoped it would be a good starting point, and it has really proved to be that. The Family Nest is also a great way for me to communicate easily with our current members and track their engagement.”
- Kyra Lyons, Senior Director of Student Experience and Family Engagement
CampusESP makes it easy to collect and manage accurate contact information
In addition to collecting Parents Council interest data, Catholic University also collects parent contact information during the registration process for internal reporting. The built-in contact information form can include important fields such as address, phone number, and relationship to student. If anything ever changes, parents have the opportunity to edit their information, which keeps parent data regularly updated.
"The Family Nest gives us a centralized system to communicate directly with all parents and family members. Prior to having CampusESP, we had multiple parent email records that each had problems with accuracy, being up to date, and whether they were even being managed. This solved that problem.”
- Steve Kreider, Director of Campus Activities
Early results are promising...and looking forward, there is more room to grow through CampusESP!
Through engagement statistics calculated directly in the portal, Kyra and Steve already see high open rates (over 50%) for their newsletters. Kyra adds that this impact has allowed them to think more critically about how they want to design their engagement strategy for Catholic University parents.
“We are looking to continue working with other offices on campus to share more information with families about important deadlines, updates, etc. We are also looking at expanding the CampusESP system to include the FERPA and Pre-Enrollment modules to better connect with our parents. Finally, we are excited to manage our Family Weekend registrations for next fall through CampusESP.”
- Steve Kreider, Director of Campus Activities
We are excited to have Catholic University as one of our partners and look forward to seeing what they do next!
Is your university interested in getting more out of its family communication strategies? Speak to CampusESP today to learn about improving newsletter open rates, fundraising and donor goals, and more.
