In spring 2020, Texas A&M hosted 14,000 families–virtually–across unique orientation tracks designed for first-year, transfer and Spanish-speaking families. And they set it all up in two weeks.

Early results from our Student Enrollment solution are overwhelmingly positive, especially at the top of the funnel. In the 2019-20 enrollment cycle, we saw that parents of inquiries opened over 2x more emails than their students, and their students were nearly 3x more likely to apply.

Over the past several months, CampusESP partners have crushed the crisis communication game. We’re seeing parent activity ten times higher than normal as colleges and universities send out COVID-19 updates!

We’ve gathered top best practices when it comes to managing your crisis communication strategy, and we are happy to share our tips with you!

CampusESP is happy to present Arizona State University with the Q2 ESP MVP Award.

ASU had one of the largest launches to date, with over 97,000 families during their initial implementation in July 2020. They have continued to grow and now have over 101,000 families in their portal!

We surveyed over 3,800 parents of college-bound students and asked how COVID-19 has impacted their student’s enrollment plans for Fall 2020. Here’s what we learned.

Our 2020 Q1 ESP MVP award goes to Penn State University, in recognition of their outstanding crisis communication and portal expansion to 20 commonwealth campuses.

Here’s their story.

Catholic University is being recognized as our 2019 Q4 ESP MVP winner for outstanding use of their Parents Council community.

In just 4 months, they have brought in over $100,000 (a 7x ROI on their CampusESP investment).

We recently launched a new set of features designed to help you reach families of prospective students. With support from five innovative pilot partners, the early results - such as an 80% email open rate - are in. This blog will give you the what, the why, and the “wow” from our pilot... and introduce you to our new enrollment management solution.

Each year we survey parents across all our CampusESP partner schools. The process is managed by our Customer Success Team and is free for all our customers.

This year the survey was completed by 7,991 parents from 50 participating colleges and universities. So what did the survey find? Let’s get to it…

GUEST POST by Brian Watkins, Director of Parent and Family Affairs at the University of Maryland and former President of the Association of Higher Education Parent/Family Program Professionals (AHEPPP).

With an aging database on life-support, and a desire to engage families with a more robust email platform than MailChimp, our office needed a tool that could better meet our needs.

After partnering with CampusESP, we’ve increased our overall campaign reach by 8x. 

We know that helping parents help their student get off on the right foot is critical. That’s why we’ve pulled a list of our most popular content, classified by type, to share with families of first-year students. We analyzed over 261,000 clicks to help you best support your first-year families.

In December we sent our annual customer satisfaction survey to more than 200,000 parents. These are our key takeaways.

Student debt is at an all-time high: $1.5 trillion. Parents represent the fastest-growing demographic absorbing student debt, up 71% in just 5 years.

We partnered with the good folks at Ovum to release a compelling infographic that connects the increase in student debt to the increase in parent involvement. Ovum is the market-leader in data, research, and trends in higher education.

What kind of information do parents actually care about? And when's the best time to share it? Based on real content performance data from more than 300,000 parents using CampusESP, we have the answers. 

We've analyzed thousands of clicks on student success news, deadlines and advice to map out your content calendar for the next year.

GUEST POST by Katie Matthews (Parent Program Specialist at Baylor University)

The Baylor Parents Network started using the CampusESP parent portal in June of 2018. From prospective parents to parents of current students, read about their experience.

Student persistence can increase by up to 15% when students share key aspects of their academic and financial record with parents.

Student Persistence Increases with Parent Engagement features findings from a study about parent engagement and student persistence based on 993 students enrolled at Abilene Christian University (ACU) in the Fall of 2016.

GUEST POST by George D. Kuh, PhD (Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Indiana University and a member of CampusESP's Advisory Board.)

It stands to reason that the right kind of partnership between institutions, parents, and students will help more students thrive in college and complete their educational program in a timely fashion.  It is hard to imagine a more promising, cost-effective, and personalized approach to increasing student success.

Parent contact information is a hot commodity in higher education. Parents can help you reach your higher ed goals… if you know how to reach them.

Students whose families are involved with CampusESP are more likely to persist. 

CampusESP sponsored an analysis of parent engagement and student retention at CampusESP partner institutions. The more frequently parents “connected” with their student through CampusESP, the more likely the student remained enrolled and made progress toward completing their degree.

It's hard to look past benefits gained from parent engagement, whether you have a dedicated parent engagement department or not. Here at CampusESP, we like to call it 'nudging the nudgers': keeping parents informed and up to date can only help students stay on track to graduation.