Brb — Gotta Go Text Teens About College

Susan Ohnemus Hogan has her own tiny focus group at home — a son, now 21.

Several years ago, when Matthew was applying to colleges, she remembers asking him if he’d gotten an acceptance email from Bentley University, in Massachusetts, where she is associate director of marketing and communications for undergraduate admissions. She says he answered, "’I don’t know, Mom. I get 8,000 emails. I don’t read them.’”

Ms. Ohnemus Hogan was one of many attendees at the American Marketing Association’s annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education who spent much of this week’s conference discussing texting — the preferred medium of the latest generation of collegebound high-school students, and one that comes with pitfalls.

Conventional wisdom says that today’s teens are indifferent to printed recruiting materials and to emails. More and more colleges have begun trying to reach young prospects where they live — on their phones.

For many enrollment marketers, texting represents a promising new avenue to engage teens who are hard to reach otherwise. It also presents another communication channel to incorporate into already busy enrollment operations and, more daunting for some, a new medium to master. As Ms. Ohnemus Hogan says, “That’s where the fear is.”

Data indicate that colleges are using texting more often, and getting results with it. An annual survey conducted by Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a higher-education consulting company, found that 75 percent of private institutions and 48 percent of public institutions surveyed in 2017 were using texts to interact with students, up from 61 percent and 31 percent, respectively, in 2015. More than 90 percent of the private colleges texting found it effective, as did more than 75 percent of public colleges.

In a survey of teens conducted by the National Research Center for College & University Admissions and mStoner Inc., a digital-marketing company that works in higher education, 56 percent of respondents said that receiving a text from a college would “positively impact” their view of the institution. Yet 82 percent of respondents had never received such a text.

Colleges are right to be cautious about texting, however, according to Michael Stoner, president of mStoner. Texts have become a useful part of everyday life for many — say, a timely reminder about a dentist appointment or a message when your table is ready at a restaurant. But texts are more interruptive as a medium than emails, Mr. Stoner says, and unlike email or social media, are typically reserved for communicating with friends and family. If colleges start “spam texting about the wrong things,” he says, “they’re really going to turn teens off.”

Standing Out

Many colleges are turning to texts because, as Ms. Ohnemus Hogan puts it, “the old way isn’t working.” Since she began working in college enrollment in the 1980s, she’s seen email and the web revolutionize enrollment marketing, and then social media change it again.

But the rise of Generation Z has presented new challenges. Teens often disregard email and don’t participate as much on public social media as their millennial predecessors did. “It’s all a big a learning process for those of us who have been around for a while,” she says.

But texting isn’t new to the admissions process. Suzanne M. Petrusch started texting prospective students in 2009, when she was vice president for enrollment and marketing at St. Mary’s University, in Texas. St. Mary’s had a fairly traditional image, which was reflected in its enrollment-marketing strategy. She wanted to shift that, and saw texting as a personal means of connecting. Plus, it was how prospective students were communicating. St. Mary’s was the first customer for Mongoose, a texting platform designed especially for colleges.

Now vice president for enrollment and marketing at Presbyterian College, in South Carolina, Ms. Petrusch oversees an enrollment operation that, as at most colleges, uses texts chiefly in two ways. First, students can get personalized messages about forthcoming enrollment events and admissions deadlines, which impart specific information or ask a question. Second, students can interact with admissions counselors, by either contacting or responding to them by text.

An individual text may not make the difference in whether a student decides to attend a college, but Ms. Petrusch says she’s found engagement with text messaging from Presbyterian “extremely predictive” of serious interest. More than 90 percent of the university’s incoming freshman class this fall opted in for text messages from the institution during their college searches, and 46 percent of those who ultimately enrolled responded to text messages from the university at least five times.

Texting might seem more manageable at smaller colleges with smaller inquiry pools, but bigger institutions are using it, too. Colorado State University has been using its customer-relations management software to send reminder texts to prospective students who opt in to receive them for more than two years, according to Christine Campbell, interim co-director for the office of admissions and senior associate director for marketing and communications. Texting hasn’t supplanted printed materials, email, or other more traditional tools of enrollment marketing, Ms. Campbell says, but the university is always “looking for better ways to communicate with students in the methods that they prefer, and as those change, we need to adapt and change.”

‘Cumulative impression’

Texting may be the buzzy new thing, but it’s not the only thing. Mr. Stoner, the marketing consultant, says he has learned to be skeptical about silver bullets in enrollment marketing — remember Second Life, the virtual world that many colleges invested heavily in as an admissions and classroom tool? The more important thing is to make multiple contacts, says his company’s research. Even emails that go mostly unread can help create a “cumulative impression,” he says. Adding texting to the mix, especially if it helps prospects navigate deadlines, “is a really nice add-on.”

The lessons of past enrollment successes may, in fact, be inhibiting colleges from texting. After all, any senior enrollment administrator can recount how email went from killer app to often overlooked. Overreliance on email “watered it down,” Ms. Ohnemus Hogan, of Bentley, says, adding that she hopes colleges can be more judicious with texting “so that we don’t overuse it.”

As long as colleges use messages to send relevant and important information to prospective students, they shouldn’t worry that they’re relying too heavily on this means of communication, according to David Marshall, president and founder of Mongoose, the texting platform for colleges. “You have to keep in mind that these are people that send and receive thousands of messages per day,” he says.

Texting — or something like it — is here to stay, Mr. Marshall says. The current generation of high-school students is devoted to messaging, though not devoted to any particular platform — mobile texts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or whatever might be next. Young people are becoming platform agnostic when it comes to messaging, but they won’t stop communicating with each other, he says.

And communication is at the heart of why texts can work for enrollment marketing. Even in this terse, sometimes emoji-laden format, colleges can connect with students in ways that are both practical, and personal. A counselor who establishes a relationship with a high-school student through texts can create an important, and lasting, bond.

Ms. Ohnemus Hogan says she recently interviewed a prospective counselor who had established a connection with a student via texts at another institution the previous year. “It was October, and the student was still asking her a question about where to go to register for classes,” she says. “It does create a personal relationship.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.