Top Trends in Family Engagement for 2024
Each year we kick things off with our most popular webinar — our Top Trends in Family Engagement.
This year Leslie Gale, PhD, our VP of Customer of Success, and I walked through the 5 biggest themes we see impacting higher ed when it comes to families, bolstered by countless data points from recent surveys, studies, and — for the first time — the data from our our platform utilized by 9 million parents across nearly 400 institutions.
Read on for what you need to be focused on this year as you adjust your family engagement strategy. Prefer to watch the jam-packed half hour? Skip to the webinar recording below!
Parents want to hear from colleges more than ever.
We share this stat all the time, and every time it still raises eyebrows. 85% of families want communication from their student’s institution weekly or more. We know this can feel like a lot — and what the right balance for your team and your families is may be different — but the bottom line is parents crave information.
We dug into our platform data to see when those families engaged the most with your communication, and like we’ve seen in previous years, saw another instance of a spike in August. That tracks: it’s transition season, and families are looking for details, how-tos, and reassurance their student is set up for success.
If you’re communicating with prospective families, another time to be thoughtful is in October; with the go-live of the Common App and most institutions’ applications opening, this is their first chance to interact with you and get information directly from the source about the schools their students are applying to. You open your doors for applications; they open theirs for information.
Parents want email. But more and more they want text messages, too.
Email is the king of engagement, but texting is the queen, especially for some of the populations we know you’re trying to better serve. We saw that Black and Hispanic families and those with annual income less than $60,000 a year more frequently select text messages as a preferred method of communication.
It’s one thing for parents to request this, but will they actually use it? The data says yes!
“One of the things that has always stood out to me is that Black and Hispanic families are particularly interested in text messaging,” shared Gale. “Our HBCU partners who are using SMS have a 65% opt-in rate, which is 3x higher than the average across all our SMS customers. That’s something we’re excited to see and see our HBCU partners leverage to reach the families of their students.”
From admission to enrollment, families expect personalized outreach.
With 97% of families being directly involved in their student’s college search, the importance of parent experiences during the enrollment process can’t be overstated. In fact when asked to rank the importance of experiences that would influence their students admissions decision, families ranked the quality of the institution’s communications with them as parents second only to on-campus visits.
The data shows that the content our partner institutions are sharing is resonating, with the highest engagement on articles around college readiness, financial aid, and advice for parents during the process.
Parents are crucial in the enrollment process — and the results show it. Students with family members receiving communications in CampusESP have yield rates 9% higher than average.
Students are stressed. Parents want to help. Students want that, too.
“I think that this generation of students in particular just really wants their parents involved and they want their support,” Gale said. “That’s who they’re picking up the phone to call whenever they have something on campus they don’t know how to deal with.”
So it’s no surprise that when family members request access to student information through CampusESP, their students are happy to accept. 84.1% of students approve the FERPA waivers submitted by their families.
It’s a good thing, too, because those parents can be a better advisor to their student when they have the right information at their fingertips.
Our data showed that some of the most accessed information includes next steps for admitted students, account balances, credit hours, and financial aid information.
“If the parent has the opportunity to see exactly what needs to be done, they can get on that path to enrolling for the next term and staying enrolled,” added Gale.
Again, the outcomes we’ve seen punctuate this. In our most recent study, student retention was 8.3% higher for a student when their parent or guardian received regular updates on student progress, compared to students with a parent who did not receive similar updates.
Higher ed professionals are being asked to do more with less.
“We hear from folks working in parent programs that there is a lot on their wishlist, but often it’s just one person, maybe one person and a student worker. Often, staffing is an issue,” Gale noted.
Limited bandwidth shouldn’t be a barrier to providing families with necessary support and facilitating better student outcomes. In fact, it’s where CampusESP can help the most.
With content curated just for your institution on a regular basis and helpful account managers ensuring you are getting the results you need, CampusESP is like gaining members of your team. And the lift of managing the system from your end is minimal — administrative users spend an average of 14 minutes a week in the CampusESP platform.
