Western University

Spring Conversion Campaign

Accomplishing this goal required a highly-detailed, sophisticated texting campaign. In the spring of 2020, the recruitment team put out a volunteer request for campus community members, with hopes of having a larger texting team capable of engaging 13,395 contactable prospective students. In the end, 460 faculty, alumni, and student volunteers signed up to text.
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From there, the recruitment team developed a complex segmentation strategy that paired the prospective students with professors, students, and alumni who best matched their interests. These conversations were unscripted, personalized and meaningful, with wide-ranging discussions on academic programs, life on campus, questions about how COVID-19 might impact the fall semester, and more.

One Statistic Stands Above All

Despite challenges presented by COVID-19, Western’s acceptance of admission rate rose 28% over the previous year. While there are many factors that led to increased confirmations and no direct causality can be determined, the team at Western postulates that this authentic and personal texting approach certainly had a positive influence on the students making their university decision.

Conclusion

The success of Western’s Spring Conversion campaign is a testament to both their exemplary planning, efforts to make the outreach as targeted as possible, and the university’s true sense of community.
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As Dayana Kilbids, Manager of Undergraduate Recruitment, says, texting presents a unique opportunity to scale connections. She notes, “With texting, one single person can have hundreds of meaningful conversations with students, but if you’re trying to do that over the phone you might be able to do 10 conversations in the same amount of time. Having the texting platform has allowed us to use the same resources we would have had to connect with more people because you can have many more conversations simultaneously.”
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Western’s text outreach was much appreciated — in a word-cloud created by Dayana after the campaign, the most-used word was “thank”, and one prospective student even gave Western a shoutout on Reddit after receiving a text. Texting not only gave prospective students the gift of a personal welcome, it also very clearly made them feel part of the strong Western community.