Page 15 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

RETENTION
Return on Investment
By now the college has become a practiced player in run- ning the calling campaigns, which have proven highly suc- cessful semester after semester. After that initial test, which involved reaching out to about 10,000 students, Mesa has undertaken additional campaigns for every semester since.
About a month prior to the start of the term, the campaign kicks into gear. In an engagement snapshot Giddings shared in an Educause presentation last fall, he offered these numbers: Over the course of three sets of calling campaigns — fall 2016, spring 2017 and summer 2017 — Blackboard made contact with 12,247 students, resulting in 7,584 students enrolling and a total of $969,932 in additional revenue.
In fall 2016, for example, 2,126 students completed their applications following the calls; 586 students re-enrolled. That generated $416,522 in tuition revenue. During spring 2017, 1,531 students finished the enrollment process and 211 re-enrolled.
Just as importantly, across those campaigns, the college has seen a 12 percent increase in persistence rates among both current and prior-term students. That’s where an even bigger payoff comes — in stop-loss prevention and recovery, which has generated $3.74 million in tuition revenue.
How accurate are those figures? As Bullock observed, a
certain percentage of students would have enrolled even if they hadn’t been contacted by Blackboard. Teasing those numbers out of the total was done this way: During the cam- paign, a certain number of students who are called are clas- sified as “unreachable.” While Blackboard will attempt up to five phone calls on the same individual, some of them have incorrect, outdated or disconnected phone numbers in the SIS. In other cases, a household member other than the stu- dent is reached. Among all of those individual students, some enrolled in class “without a nudge or contact,” said Bullock, producing “a baseline for the percentage of students who would have enrolled anyway.”
Across all three sets of campaigns, the Blackboard ser- vices cost about $149,000, generating a 900 percent return on investment based on enrollment growth.
Now the college is considering another expansion of its work with Blackboard to encompass a coaching option. That would involve assigning a Blackboard person as a coach to make “repeated contact with [a student] over a period of three months,” for example, “to ensure they’re following through with their applications for enrollment,” said Bullock. “They’re not acting as advisers, they’re not acting on behalf of Mesa; they’re just adding to the student success.”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018
LESSONS
LEARNED
Numbers matter. The third-party call center approach probably wouldn’t pan out financially for smaller subsets of students (say, up
to a thousand) due to the startup
costs, time requirements and
intense academic adviser demand,
said Christine Bullock, IT project
manager for Mesa Community Col-
lege. “If a college wants to go after
a small focus group of students — all the honor stu- dents or all of the international students — that might be more cost-effective to do in-house with a group of academic or student services employees who are Mesa’s subject-matter experts.”
Your internal staff could become more effective. In the Mesa setup, where Blackboard agents handled tier-one level requests, the college’s internal support people were able to be more respon- sive. Because they were getting “the questions with the background, they could do the research to answer the students in advance of calling them,” added Bull- ock. “It was very focused and more rewarding for our staff to assist them in that exact response.”
Expect diminishing returns. The pool of stu- dents to call will get smaller with each campaign. As Bullock noted, “You’ve contacted a lot of the previous semester’s students already. So you leave out the ones for the next campaign who have already said they’re not interested in returning to the college.”