Recruiting and Retaining Adult Students
Learning Resources Network, Spring 2023
Welcome to Recruiting and Retaining Adult Students
1. Purpose. To provide strategies and techniques for creating and implementing diverse methods for recruiting and retaining adult learners.
Course Objectives
• To provide key principles that underly proven best recruitment strategies.
• To deliver advanced and practical strategies that work across customer audiences and products.
• To outline the work of some of the most successful recruitment and retention practitioners.
• To illustrate advanced concepts with practical situations, objectives, and methods.
• To provide learners with a basis for improving their recruitment and retention efforts by employing some of the least understood and most overlooked concepts that work.
Learning Outcomes.
• Design techniques to enhance communication with prospective adult students and generate registrations.
• Master techniques for integrating traditional print as well as digital communication to effectively recruit and retain adult learners.
• How to measure the effectiveness of print as a recruitment tool and how to increase the impact of print media in recruitment
• Understand the relationship of print communication and digital communication and how these two techniques enhance the effectiveness of each other
• How to integrate communication strategies to create engagement and stimulate participation by adult learners
• Have a more in depth understanding of advanced important recruitment concepts that are the foundation for improving enrollment results.
• Be able to apply advanced recruitment concepts to the practical how-to practice of creating both digital and print communication.
• Increase your confidence about the effectiveness of your own recruitment efforts.
• Know how to provide the rationale and customer behavior reasons behind successful marketing strategies and why they work so well.
• Possess the knowledge to apply the best practices to marketing campaigns and efforts.
Course Description
This course will be offered in three 4-week units. Students start the course with any unit. The units are not sequential and include:
• Advanced Recruitment Concepts, February 6 – March 3; April 3 – 28
• Successful Print Brochures, March 6 – 31; May 1 – 26
• Recruitment Best Practices, April 3 – 28; June 5 – 30
USD-LERN Credits: 3.0 for three course segments of 4 units each (total 12 weeks).
Descriptions of Individual Courses:
Advanced Recruitment Concepts
Acquire expertise in R,F & M Analysis. Understand the 80/20 Principle. Better know the impact of price on sales.
Take your knowledge of marketing to a new level. These concepts are what the best marketers use for designing marketing strategies that improve performance and return. Gaining these advanced marketing concepts will enable you to develop more effective marketing campaigns and results.
Instructor: William A. Draves, CAE, CPP
Unit 1
Analyzing Customer Enrollment Decisions and Demographics
-R,F & M Analysis
-Calculating Customer Lifetime Value
-Key Demographics to collect, and why
-The 80/20, AIDA, and 3-30-3 Principles
Unit 2
Pricing Concepts
-Market pricing, price points and listing prices
-Clustered versus diversified pricing
-Price increase, and decrease, impact on sales
-Raising prices: guidelines for when, and how
Unit 3
Identifying Your Seven Primary Recruitment Targets
-Boston Consulting Group’s Stars & Dogs
-Repeat customers versus new customers
-Determining your seven primary market segments
-Strategic marketing by market segment
Unit 4
The Top 10 Advanced Recruitment Concepts
-The 5 experts you need to know, and why
-Researching recruitment best practice
-The best resources for recruitment strategies
-The top ten advanced recruitment concepts you must know
Successful Print Brochures
Gen Y embraces print. Gen Z likes print even more than Gen Y. Amazon and eBay are both producing print catalogs. Find out the secrets to success in the almost forgotten but still remarkably effective area of print, including catalogs, direct mail letters and post cards.
Acquire the techniques to produce print promotions, starting with catalogs, brochures and flyers. Then learn the powerful words, phrases and how to write a direct mail letter. You can use these effective techniques in writing your emails as well. Finally, catch on with the hot new trend in post card marketing, including positioning and choosing images that send a visual as well as written message.
Come away knowing how to plan, write and create successful print promotions
Instructor: William A. Draves, CAE, CPP; Research and articles contributed by Julie Coates, Senior Vice President, LERN.
Agenda
Unit 1
Why Print
-Multichannel delivery systems
-The emotion of print
-How print sells
-Trends in print marketing
Unit 2
Catalogs
-Designing covers to Attract
-Writing Product Descriptions
-Creating action-oriented purchase info
-Tips on designing flyers
Unit 3
Direct Mail Letters
-The power of the letter
-Instilling fear and greed
-Making the pitch
-How a P.S. is so effective
Unit 4
Post Card Marketing
-Determining size and postal costs
-Targeting post cards to mini-audiences
-Creating the visual image
-Three Steps to Making the Message Work
Integrated Recruitment Best Practices
Enter the fascinating and emerging field of integrated communication. Explore how to move potential students from one medium to another, increasing their interest and likelihood of enrollment. See how different media complement each other. Take home an Integrated Recruitment Model to help you choose what’s best for your institution.
Put it all together with a one-year integrated plan that engages your potential students, moves inquiries to students, and projects a positive image for your organization and efforts.
One Month Course
Instructor: William A. Draves, CAE, CPP; Research of the LERN Integrated Marketing Model led by Joseph Miera, Vice Provost for Educational Outreach, University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Agenda
Unit 1.
Moving Inquiries to Learners
-The purpose and uniqueness of Integrated Recruitment Strategies
-Some 25 recruitment options. Choosing the best for you.
-An Integrated Model
-All paths (almost) lead to your website
Unit 2
Developing Inquiry Campaigns
-Choosing your methods
-Generating inquiries
-Following up with inquiries
– Hidden Engagement with ‘Contact Us’
Unit 3.
Your Best 5 Digital Communication Methods
-The hot 5, and why they work
-Picking your best 5 digital contact methods
-Trending Up
-Why multiple channels can reach different audiences
Unit 4
Integrating Digital with Print
-Following digital with print
-Using print to engage your website
-What goes in print; what goes online
-The 3 most effective engagement techniques
Course Requirements
Required Textbook. There is no required textbook for this course. However, there will be required reading materials which will be provided by the instructor in online format for each unit.
Course Content: This course is presented as three separate one-month learning modules. Each of the three modules is divided into four units. The total amount of time you should expect to devote to complete this course is 48 hours.
Discussion Board: Each unit will consist of a presentation prepared by the instructor with audio and visual materials. The presentations are asynchronous so you may view them at any time convenient to you. The first expectation is to respond to the postings of the instructor. The second expectation is to respond to the comments of at least two of your peers in your class. The responses to your fellow students need to be of a substantive nature, adding to what was said, challenging the comment with rationale, or agreeing with comments and rationale. As in all communication, there is a certain etiquette when discussing online. These are referred to as netiquette expectations. For example, do not use sarcasm, keep the discussion professional, and read the questions and postings carefully before responding. Your responses should be timely and posted during the dates covered by the presentation for the unit.
Meeting discussion expectations will account for 35% of your grade for this course.
Quizzes: There will be a unit quiz for each unit of the course. Students will be required to pass each quiz with a minimum of 80% correct answers in order to receive full credit for the course. Students may retake quizzes if they fail to pass with 80% correct answers.
Quiz scores will account for 25% of the grade for this course.
Paper or Project: Each student will be required to complete a paper or project, develop a recruitment and retention plan, or provide a plan analysis of the existing recruitment/retention strategy being used in their workplace with recommendations for improving effectiveness in overall recruitment and retention.
The final paper/project will account for 40% of the grade for this course.
Grading Scale:
94-100% A
84-93% B
74-83% C
64-73% D
Written work will be graded for correctness, clarity of thought, evidence of analysis, depth of understanding, and evidence of reflective thinking. Note that a final grade of “I” may only remain incomplete for one calendar year, at which time it converts to a grade of “NCI” and the course must be repeated (and repaid) for credit.
Registration
Price: $995
To register call 800-678-5376 or email info@lern.org