Engage families to decrease summer melt
Decisions are out, deposits are in. See you in the Fall, right?
Not quite. Summer melt reels its head in the space between decision and move in, often resetting just how close teams came to achieving enrollment goals. One of the best moves to help reduce the loss of once interested students? Engaging their families.
Why would communicating with families make such a difference? For starters, you build trust early on and connect the student and their family’s to the campus — perhaps before they’ve even set foot on it. In fact, 40% of families would like additional ways to be meaningfully connected and involved with their students’ institutions.
You want to empower families to support their students. “‘Nudging the nudger'’ or ‘supporting the system’ is the reason to communicate with families to help prevent melt.”
That was Nathan Cheeseman of New Mexico State University who joined us along with Lisa Simmons of Utah State University to discuss how their institutions are communicating with parents and families over the summer to improve the transition.
Their big wins and best tips? Read on to find out, or head down to the bottom of the page to watch the discussion for yourself.
Work with and build on efforts done by admissions
Admissions gets the ball rolling, but it takes the entire team to enroll a new class. As a former orientation professional myself, I know it’s the whole campus community that's involved in getting buy in and ultimately providing support to families and students.”
At Utah State, student enrollment, orientation and transition service, admissions, housing, and other departments meet every other week, especially to handle problems like their housing shortage and consolidate information and make it succinct and timely.
“There's someone in the admissions office who does a lot of posting to parents in part of the funnel to our prospective parents. Once the student pays the deposit, we consider them confirmed and then they come over to our office,” Simmons shared.
Cheesman’s meetings with admissions are even larger and include the international student scholar support office and housing and residential life. At New Mexico State, the admissions deposit is the same as the orientation deposit, which leads to more collaboration as admissions is engaged further into the process.
“We can share back with the admissions office: these students have started to communicate, they've started to sign up, please help get them signed up for orientation. We can then see with our platform who the family contacts are for those same students and communicate directly to the support systems as well.”
Share information that generates action, connection, and trust
Students and parents are being inundated with information from all sides, from the nitty gritty to the big picture across so many schools. How can you stand out? By being concise, timely, and focused in the types of content you are sending.
Message Type #1: Transactional. Deadlines, details, deposits, and other concrete information about what students and families need to do and when they need to do it.
There are a lot of actions students need to take: setting up student emails, housing deposits and choices, meal plans, registrations, and more. Parents are the people who will make sure it gets done.
Simmons added, “We've obviously been doing a lot about the FAFSA, but anything that we send out about scholarships, financial aid, paying for school, how to set up a payment plan, how to as a delegate of a student get in and help pay the tuition … those ones always consistently are among our highest clicks that parents really want to know about.”
At Utah State, Chessman described their push for decisions from students to enroll, defer, or decline. “We want them to take action on that and get in the correct recruitment pool for the future,” he said.
A simple survey emailed and texted to students and parents and utilizing SMS helps the university. “A lot of times students, when they decide on a college, also decide now they will just ignore everything coming from these other colleges. It's really helpful for us to know that they're not coming,” he added.
For those students and families that do enroll, he says, “We try to make sure that the families know about the support that they have in addition to the support that the students have.”
Which leads us to Message Type #2: Supportive (AKA helping families help their students)
You’re as much in a relationship with the student as you are their family, and there’s nothing that can be accomplished in any relationship without trust.
Simmons said, “We try to humanize the staff, make sure that they know that we're here for them. They contact us with a lot of our questions and start with, ‘I don't know where to start,’ or sometimes it's ‘don't let my student know I'm calling you, but I have a question about this, but I don't want them to think I'm meddling.’ We are not judging them for their questions, and we want to make them comfortable through that whole process.”
Message Type #3: Share the ROI & prove outcomes How will they know college is working?
One of the best ways to show students and families that your institution is right for them is showing them the success of current students or recent graduates. If it’s working for people like you already there, why shouldn’t it work for you?
“Having current student engagement really helps them see campus through a student's eyes when we do videos or pictures; what it's really like, what's the hands-on experience that we can show family members or even show prospective students at orientation,” Chesseman said.
Simmons continued, “At our in-person orientations, we do a student to parent panel — that's always our most highly rated section. Afterwards, the students have a line of parents wanting to ask them questions.”
“The whole family is a stakeholder in this journey, and they really need to feel comfortable with their student's decision to attend college,” she added. “We need to do a lot more to help parents understand the value of this education for my student, for my family, and for this particular school.”
Create multiple ways for families to engage during the summer
That period between admittance and move-in is full of excitement and anxieties for everyone at home. How do you get past the hurry-up-and-wait until August? For Utah State and New Mexico State, it’s thinking outside the inbox.
At Utah State, families can expect a parent handbook given to them at orientation or mailed to them over the summer. They can also opt-in to SMS notifications through CampusESP, or tune in to the Parent & Family Podcast.
“I need to get my information out to students and families, so it's nice to have a lot of little tools to get information to students and families,” Simmons shared.
At New Mexico State, families can join regular Ask Me Anything sessions online on a relevant topic for that time of the year.
“We typically have a session during the summer with housing and dining. A lot of last minute questions about move-in. We also do a session during the school year with academic advising prior to advising for the upcoming semester. So we collaborate and communicate with family members and our offices, both for prospective and current students,” shared Chessman.
Families also receive a fridge magnet with an FAQ of resources to provide their student. Chessman shared his staff’s brilliance: “We took some of the highlighted ways to support your student and got it on a magnet with a web address of a QR code, either to that information in a consolidated place, or directly to the offices that they as families can connect to. Now families can help because they know where those resources are,” he explained.
The bottom line: parent and family engagement impacts melt
Parents are your partners because they are students’ go-to for advice and support.
Families are advisors; students need the push to reflect and act when faced with new “adult” college decisions. “The students see their families as a way of getting information, retaining it, understanding it,” Chessman said.
Families are stakeholders; they are invested financially and emotionally in their student’s success. They already have confidence in the student; they need it in the school. “You need to find ways for parents to feel affinity to the university, and that they have resources and real people that they can connect with and talk to on a college campus.
And families are supporters; students rely on that shoulder to cry on and ear to listen. You’re also supporting the supporters, as Cheeseman said.
If all this feels overwhelming, start small. “I think parents are just happy for any communication, even if it's a monthly or weekly email from you saying, ‘here's what's upcoming, here's what’s what,” said Simmons.
Cheesman added, “But there's a lot of things that we do that could be done without a platform like CampusESP. And it might be harder. I love that CampusESP can automate a lot of stuff for us, but really, when we decide we're going to do something, we start with that and get that one thing accomplished, and then we see if we have the time and capacity to add another thing.”
But it’s worth it. “We are on their team. We have similar goals for their student.” Lisa, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.