Recently in Student Recruitment Category

• The Department of Education is most concerned about misleading advertising when it refers to outcomes such as employment promises and income earnings.
• If advertising didn't cause substantial harm (as in getting people to spend money based on misleading employment claims), deception itself isn't likely to be noticed.
• No matter the deception, an expectation that schools pre-approve of everything done by lead gen firms if done for a collection of schools is less strong than when an action is taken on behalf of an individual school. (This Pell Grant effort was done on behalf of many institutions who might have later received leads after screening.)

• I was "prequalified" for a $5,550 award only because I am a U.S. citizen. The firm sending the email had no idea of my income or my education costs at a future school. Technically accurate for some, but quite a stretch overall.
• The call to action was to "click here" to apply for "this amazing opportunity." But once I clicked, there was never a mention again about Pell Grants or what it took to receive one.

• December 21... similar to the first three.
• December 23... a "Second Notice" reminder from one of the original senders about "Your $5,550 Pell Grant."

Easier to Cancel Future Emails

The earlier emails had "unsubscribe" information in small type toward the end of the email. This one did a better job, with a visible link to unsubscribe just after the email message.

Do You Know Where Your Lead Generator is Today?

A thought comes to mind. Do the colleges that use services like this to generate and screen initial responses before sending them on to their clients know about these campaigns in advance?

New Department of Education regulations just might make colleges and universities liable for advertising activities done on their behalf by third party companies. More on that later. For now, see the review of the regulation provided to members by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities in October in PDF format, "The Misrepresentation Rule and Third-Party Vendors."

• "Deadline Soon: Get a $5,550 Pell Grant. You Prequalify!" (December 14)
• "Your $5,550 Pell Grant. You Prequalify!" (December 16)
• "Your $5,550 Pell Grant. You Prequalify!" (December 19)

Follow the link "to apply" and you'll see the names of six schools participating in this lead gen effort:

• American Intercontinental University
• Westwood College
• Colorado Christian University
• Liberty University
• ITT Technical Institute
• Virginia College

• Be honest: at least 50 percent of the content on the website of any large organization including higher education isn't needed. Website content is often added, seldom removed. 
• The holy grail for "mobile" is creation of a single website that people can use equally well from a smartphone or a laptop or desktop computer. Is that really possible? Maybe, but not if you try to stuff everything from your "regular" website into a mobile environment. "Mobile" is a great reason to kill content that's been around for far too long and adopt a new focus on the "top tasks" that people using sites actually want to do. 

• Jakob Nielsen got it right in a recent Alertbox: for mobile, "short is too long."
• Mobile will increase the value of web content editors. Not only do we have to focus on top tasks, we also have to reduce how much we say about them and do an even better job of using subheads and bullet points to break up dense blocks of text.http://www.customercarewords.com/what-it-is.html

• Review and download my workshop session at the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference.
• Register for a new September webinar on "Task Completion: the Key to Higher Ed Marketing in the Mobile Environment."

• If we are talking about the recruitment cycle, we need first to define when and how in the cycle social media is most important in the marketing communications mix. For traditional students, this is from about the mid-point on, let's say after a person has visited campus and certainly after they have been admitted. 
• We need to focus first on how to use 2 related elements: video as per YouTube and conversation as per Facebook.
• Some people place inordinate emphasis on ROI. I'm not one of those. We do need to monitor and measure what's happening so we can adapt how we use social media, but there is no doubt in my mind that it is a mandatory element, similar today to the way people once used the telephone. (And the telephone of course remains important.) Fact is, few people in the past 25 years have had very precise ROI measures for things like view books and high school visit programs.

• We need more emphasis on first identifying the "top tasks" that people want to complete on a website and then designing the IA to help them get those tasks done. 
• The tasks of course will vary with individual audiences and that will complicate the "design and development" process. The top tasks define the "content strategy." If something is not a top task for someone using a website, then why should it be content on a website? (Reasons might exist, but the design should not place mandatory content that is little used in a place that hinders task completion for people in your most important audiences.)
• The "top task" approach is also useful in deciding what content to remove from a website. In the "design for mobile" era, content culling becomes important as mobile design must be more straight forward and direct than design has so far been for most traditional websites.

• University of Oslo student services site for international students.
• Penn State World Campus site for online programs.