Keep Calm & Orient On!
It’s summertime, and we all know what that means. It’s orientation season! You’re hosting live and virtual orientation events, building up anticipation for welcome week activities, or giving enrollees a choice to attend an in-person event or complete orientation online. Some of you are tackling all three approaches.
Amid all the excitement, one thing is for sure: you have a versatile orientation solution that is welcoming and preparing new students and their families right now! Keep calm and orient on!
IDEAS IN ACTION
There was a time when students blindly flocked to colleges based on reputation alone. Today's generation of students and families are more discerning. They want colleges to show them the value they bring to the table. Now, the ball is in the enrollment officer’s court. The barrage of competing information and offers makes gaining students’ attention challenging.
You’re likely wearing multiple hats, from enrollment to orientation. It can be tough to apply abstract advice from every direction regarding enrollment marketing and new student recruitment. But here’s the bottom line: In today’s changing landscape, you need a unique, digital-first approach to s stand out, capture students’ attention, and drive them through the enrollment funnel.
Your task: Get their attention. Earn their trust. Win more students.
It’s time to seriously engage prospective students and their families with reasons to believe and apply. It’s time to gain a competitive advantage.
How students communicate has changed, and it's crucial for institutions to keep up. Brochures and email, once the go-to methods, are now considered outdated by younger generations. It's essential to think creatively and adapt our behaviors as they shift theirs. This means embracing communication channels that resonate with them, such as
While more static forms of marketing provide valuable information, they lack the emotional resonance that an immersive experience can deliver. Emails can be easily overlooked or forgotten, but engaging visuals and stories are stickier. They transport us to a different place, allowing us to hear student testimonials, virtually step on the campus grounds, see the buildings, and imagine ourselves walking along the pathways.
An immersive experience brings an institution to life, catering to the emotional side of decision-making.
Prospective students don't just want to read about an institution's offerings; they want to interact and visualize themselves there. This is why Advantage RecruitingTM takes an experiential approach, incorporating video-rich content, modern visuals, and interactive elements to foster a sense of connection.
Check out this demo from Florida Polytechnic University.
You know how great your institution is, but how do you help students and their families know it?
Imagine being a 17-year-old with dreams of pursuing higher education, excited about the endless possibilities that await you. You're eager to embark on this new chapter of your life, but at the same time, there's uncertainty. How will you know if an institution is the right fit for you? How can you truly visualize yourself thriving in that community?
Effectively communicating these differentiators to prospective students can be a challenge. A robust virtual engagement experience enables you to showcase your institution's value proposition in a way that leaves a lasting impression. By utilizing personalized, relevant content, you can demonstrate your institution's strengths, highlight success stories, and address the specific interests and needs of individual prospective students. This tailored approach engages students on a deeper level and influences their enrollment decisions.
Explore this example from Winston-Salem State University.
With Advantage RecruitingTM, you can easily engage with more prospective students and their families on any device, anywhere in the world, with a data-driven system you control. Showcase your brand, track engagement in real-time, and make data-driven offer decisions more efficiently. With Advantage RecruitingTM, you have the insights to understand what makes your prospective students tick.
It's a new era of enrollment marketing.
Are you ready to claim your competitive advantage?
Explore Advantage RecruitingTM. Share this information with your admissions and recruiting teams.
small steps - BIG IMPACT
Evolution—it’s the heartbeat of progress. The future of student onboarding and engagement strategies will continue to demand innovation and adaptability; fortunately, your Advantage Orientation® platform is designed to evolve with you, providing the versatility to create new opportunities and experiences for your audiences.
A recent example of this involved the University of Montana, which faced a shortage of space and scheduling inconveniences with its in-person model of new student orientations. It also dealt with the stress of students becoming activated and requiring counseling during mandated sessions related to sexual assault, consent, and bystander roles.
By selecting Advantage Orientation®, Director of Student Success Devin Carpenter said the school’s student onboarding process has evolved significantly in two ways.
Stage-gating and Enriching the Overall Onboarding Experience
As you know, your Advantage Orientation is effective for the delivery of crucial preliminary and procedural information in an engaging digital experience. Carpenter saw this as an opportunity to evolve his in-person welcome event into a more transitional, immersive, and peer-led program.
“Overall, this has really allowed us to continue crafting the Big Sky Experience into a highly engaging, almost no-presentation type of program,” Devin said. “And so, this [Advantage Orientation] is filling a need of information transfer … in a really beautiful and also engaging way.”
A student survey at the end of Montana's online orientation substantiates Devin’s assertion: Asked whether they felt better equipped for the first day of classes, the following groups agreed or strongly agreed:
Such data confirms the value of simply having Advantage Orientation® as an integral part of your onboarding and engagement strategy to drive student satisfaction and lower melt rates.
Always Innovating to Solve Emerging Issues
During the orientation’s development, Devin raised concerns about student activation during the bystander training. Advantage Design Group® worked with his team to create a “Community of Respect” module within the experience and originated a new idea – an “Exit Button” – that students can select anytime during the training to leave and gain access to support services if they desire.
“The ability to work collaboratively to custom-design an extra section for the Bystander and DEI content, with the new feature their programmers built just for us, was essential to moving forward.”
A Partnership Built for the Future
As you face the challenges of student onboarding and engagement, you have a powerful online orientation that can be scaled and adapted to any future need. Complete the form on this page to schedule a consultation with your Client Success Specialist today to keep your retention and persistence strategies evolving!
ADVANTAGE ONDEMANDTM
A subscription to Advantage OnDemandTM is the fastest and most affordable way to add high-quality video to your new student experience. Whether inside your Advantage Orientation® or on your website, the demand for Advantage OnDemandTM video content is rising, and for good reason.
That’s an instant savings of $350! Your subscription includes access to scores of titles covering essential topics for a fraction of the cost of a single video.
There’s nothing like an explainer video to simplify complicated topics. It’s got to be engaging, with just enough information to introduce the idea and show the viewer how to take more confident action. Here are the videos topping the leaderboard so far this year:
It’s the Perfect Time to Get Started!
Schedule a consultation with your Client Success Specialist to take advantage of this limited-time offer!
SUPPORTING YOUR SUCCESS
When you reach out for a little help to manage your online orientation, each training or support call is a real pleasure. You are an enthusiastic and resourceful group of professionals, passionate about what you do. Showing you how to improve and expand your orientation platform is all about the future, with a focus on providing the best new student experience you can imagine. Each member of your Client Success team is privileged to support your efforts at each step.
“We have been extremely pleased with the quick customer service and support we always receive when we reach out. I’ve asked several questions in the past couple of months. Bryan and Sally have been a big help with getting our orientation revised to reflect the new information we want to include. We’ve even added some new slides so that we could offer an optional Orientation to our Transfer and Re-admit student types. I could not have gotten that going without them!”
Kellee Collins, Coordinator for Orientation & Communications
Walters State Community College
“I'm always telling people how great your training and customer service are. Truly Fantastic! I am going to look at the platform as we begin to put in this year's edits and will probably ask for a training session or two for some changes we want to make. First, I'll review what we did last year in the training videos!”
Anne V. Brown, Assistant Director, Communications
NYU Stern School of Business, Undergraduate College
“It's a great product. It's been really user-friendly for us to learn how to use it. Everyone at ADG has been great, jumping right in and figuring things out immediately. We've been able to resolve any issue quickly.”
Sarah Dorsey, Associate Director of Enrollment Operations
Mount Wachusett Community College
With Advantage Orientation® as your online orientation solution, it’s all about the value. However, if you launched your platform more than five years ago, you may be missing out on technological advancements currently available.
Learn how you can earn an instant $10K Credit
Our story is about you and your success in providing virtual experiences to welcome and prepare more students than ever. You're all heroes and deserve to be celebrated. Here are some of the most recent, popular posts from across the social sphere featuring your successes. Follow, connect, share, and engage! #OnlineOrientation #DigitalExperiences #VirtualOnboarding #CollegeRecruiting
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