Let’s face facts: during on-campus events, checking students into individual sessions involves more work.
(With GeckoEngage, tracking session attendance needn’t involve too much more work, but more on that later.)
For many Admissions teams, just knowing that students have shown-up (or not) is good enough. But here are 3 arguments why going the extra mile — and tracking session-level attendance — could pay dividends.
In short, you’ll be able to:
- Segment — and action — post-event feedback.
- Create more-impactful post-event comms.
- Reverse-engineer which sessions correlate with increased enrollment (so you can double-down — or divest).
Let’s start by defining what we mean by “tracking session-level attendance.”
During most open houses (or admitted student days) students can select which sessions — or presentations or tours or classes or one-to-one meetings — they’d like to attend. Events like these aren’t single-track — students can tailor their agenda to suit their needs. And as such, each attendee experiences your campus in their own way; often based on which sessions they attend. Ergo, the only way to start getting a true glimpse into how students experience your campus is to track which sessions they attend.
If your institution only logs when students arrive on campus — meaning you don’t track which individual sessions they attend — then you’re missing out a treasure trove of actionable data. This session attendance data can boost the impact your events have on this year’s enrollment cycle, as well as providing a platform for continual improvement across all future enrollment cycles. Here’s how.
Segment and action post-event student feedback
If you’re like many of GeckoEngages’s partner institutions, you’ll frequently be making decisions on the future-viability of every individual part of your open house (or admitted student day) itinerary.
Gathering feedback on how individual sessions impacted your attendees’ experience is an integral part of that process. And the best way to do that, is to track which students attended each session and then automatically feed that data into a short, specific feedback process.
With data showing that, for example, a student checked-in to a student aid presentation, a campus tour, and a one-to-one meeting, you can automatically trigger an email which links to a dynamic feedback form. This form can ask the student specific questions about how those individual sessions impacted their opinion of your school. And this needn’t be generic rate-this-presentation-on-a-scale-of-1-5-type questions — you can really dive deeper and gather granular feedback, such as “How did Dr. Johann’s presentation affect your understanding of how we can help students with the FAFSA process?”
Most teams fail to gather sufficient feedback for two reasons. Firstly, the process isn’t automated. “I forgot to send out the post-event survey again”. And secondly, the feedback forms are way too long (and we all know that shorter forms have a higher conversion rate). With GeckoEngage, the whole process can be automated. And we can keep your forms super-short. How? By dynamically tailoring the form to match the sessions each student attended, and then by eliminating unnecessary fields (like name/email, because we can identify who they are if you’re already emailing them!).