William & Mary scores time savings and increases open rates with custom family newsletters
With more than 330 years of history to uphold, William & Mary leans a lot on tradition — the Virginia institution is the second oldest in the United States. But time-honored heritage doesn’t have to mean antiquated processes.
When Heather Deere, William & Mary’s Director of Family & Parent Programs, took over the office last summer, she wanted to find a way to bridge some of their classic approaches with streamlined automation and time savings. Her answer: relaunching the university’s beloved monthly class-year newsletters in CampusESP. With a system designed for parent communications and an improved process, she’s been able to reduce the time it takes to create the newsletters by 65% while improving open rates by 4% … and growing.
Thanks to their innovative thinking, smart use of CampusESP features, and dedication to putting out family content that builds community and engagement, we’re thrilled to name William & Mary our CampusESP MVP Award winner for Q4 2023!
The struggle to provide tailored content with a small staff
Originally, the Parent & Family Program team launched a series of monthly newsletters for their families — one for the families of students in each class year. Designed and sent using Constant Contact, the goal was to provide information and updates applicable to exactly where a student was in their college journey.
“The benefit to us and to our families was that we determined what, at each time of year, in this family's journey, should they care about,” explained Deere. “They didn’t have to wonder how to support their student because they knew what was happening in their student's experience and what should be top of mind when talking to their student.”
It was a great idea and was well received by parents. Each edition opened with a personal note by that year’s Class Representative parents and then dove into happenings on campus, upcoming deadlines, and university news.
The concern, though, was the time it took to pull together these four different editions every month. When Deere first started as an Assistant Director in 2019, she estimates it was taking her and a student employee 40+ hours over the course of the month to pull everything together.
“We were splicing content, re-writing content, formatting, updating images, etc … and that would take a significant amount of time.”
The switch to automated family engagement
In February of 2023 William & Mary launched CampusESP for Family Communication, creating the William & Mary Family Connection. The new approach featured a parent portal where all family-focused content could live, and an interface that allowed for class-year information to be promoted to the applicable audiences. In addition to options like email announcements and ad campaigns, the system also had an automatically generated newsletter digest that would go to families’ inboxes every two weeks.
With the CampusESP launch the Parent & Family Programs team ended their custom newsletters. The time savings was instantly a win, but something was … missing.
“Our families had become really used to that newsletter, and they missed it,” said Deere. “It was a priority for me when I came back.”
Best of both worlds: newsletters in CampusESP
Deere became the Director in July 2023 and began looking at how she could bring back those custom touches but still rely on the automation CampusESP provided. She found the answer quickly in CampusESP’s Advanced Designer feature.
By creating a template in the system for each class year’s newsletter, Deere basically created a plug-and-play format that could be quickly updated each month. With the help of a staff member she decides on the most valuable topics for each audience, creates a post for it if it’s not already in the parent portal, and then updates the headers and links in her templates.
“Honestly, it takes maybe two days to pull together now,” said Deere, calling attention to that 65% reduction in effort. “It cuts down time because I don't have to mess with formatting. Instead it allows for more intuitive newsletter building. It also helps me better understand what parents care about because I can see the clicks on those posts.
“This summer I want to look at the year of engagement we’ve tracked and see the results and rethink what’s included for the next school year. That information will also really help our campus partners determine what’s truly important to parents and families.”
And the new format is still a hit with families. In fact, open rates for first-year families were at 73% and are now at 77%.
Newsletters or digests. Why not both?
With the relaunch of the class year newsletters, one might think the team wouldn’t need the built-in digest newsletter feature in CampusESP. But Deere says they are still an important part of her strategy.
“There are real benefits to having and using both. For me, the class-year newsletter is a student development strategy. I make sure it’s tailored to their year experience and highlights the resources they really need right then.
“And then I use the newsletter digests to share all the great William & Mary news that may not fit into a class year but is still important. Awards, research, alumni features, campus activities — our families love those articles, and with the portal and digest it’s all there for parents to engage with. Our communications strategy is more robust because I can offer both of these channels … and it doesn’t require me additional time.”
Deere says this balance has been a true win for her department — she now has more time to revamp Family Weekend and dig into research and strategic initiatives. But it’s also been a real win for William & Mary families, enabling them to get even more important information and become stronger supporters of their students and the institution. Both options see high engagement, with an average open rate of 69% and click rate of 8.4%!
“Our parents feel like their communications with us are more frequent and personalized than ever before,” said Deere.
Doing more with less — a challenge so many of us face and that William & Mary has knocked out of the park. Congrats!
