Blog Recap:
If you’ve ever dabbled in college admissions, you know the magic (and chaos) that goes into getting students from “I might apply…” to “I’m definitely attending!” Luckily for us, we had Kelly Nolan, the Director of Admissions at the University of Montana, drop some serious knowledge on our latest Higher Ed Demand Gen podcast episode all about re-engineering anti-melt campaigns.
🎧 Kelly’s passion for higher ed shines through in her unique journey, from military spouse moving base-to-base to rocking the admissions world. Here’s her secret sauce for reducing melt and boosting yield:
1. **Start Early**: Kelly emphasizes that anti-melt strategies can’t wait until the summer. Building a solid funnel with the right-fit students from the get-go is crucial. She highlights using predictive models and tools like Cora to target students who are more likely to enroll.
2. **Collaboration with Marketing**: No one succeeds alone, and Kelly’s team aligns closely with the marketing department. By sharing insights and focusing on engaging, eye-catching materials, they ensure their message hits home.
3. **Empowering Admissions Counselors**: Training is everything! Kelly’s team is young and new, so providing them with rigorous training sessions, tools like the EAB yield survey, and robust CRM systems (hello, Slate!) is key to their student recruitment success.
4. **Removing Barriers**: Making it easy for students to say “yes” involves breaking down unnecessary roadblocks. From streamlining immunization record submissions to creating simple intent-to-enroll forms, every little bit helps.
5. **Effective Communication**: Kelly’s team utilizes a mix of texts, emails, glossy brochures, and digital communities like ZeeMe to keep students informed and engaged. Their mantra? Clear, consistent communication at every step. Kelly’s efforts are paying off, with early indicators showing strong student engagement and positive housing registrations.
While the final numbers aren’t in, things are looking up at the University of Montana! 🏔️
Read the transcription
Shiro [00:00:16]:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen podcast hosted by Concept 3 d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, and Google. My name is Shiro Torre, and I’ll be your host today. And I can’t wait to talk about reengineering anti melt campaigns to maximize yield. And for the topic, we have none other than Kelly Nolan joining us today. She’s the director of admissions at the University of Montana, which we may be mentioning as as well in short. And Kelly actually joined us on a webinar, 2 months ago on freezing the melt.
Shiro [00:00:52]:
So, this is gonna be a really great topic, and I’m excited for the conversation. So, Kelly, welcome to the show.
Kelly Nolin [00:01:00]:
Thanks, Shiro. I appreciate the invitation.
Shiro [00:01:03]:
Great. And I do ask all my guests this. As an icebreaker, tell me what you love about higher ed.
Kelly Nolin [00:01:08]:
So I love higher ed because of the purpose that it serves. I think educating people to participate in a democracy is incredibly important work. But specifically working in admissions, I love that we get to help students decide if they wanna go to college, where they wanna go to college, and helping them find a a good fit. I’ve never had a job before where I felt like I got to make a difference every single day. And I feel like the work that we do really accomplishes that.
Shiro [00:01:41]:
Thank you so much for sharing that. Well, let’s let’s move on to the topics here for today. Can you tell us just a quick brief summary of your current role and background? And I know your current role is, like, somewhat new to you as well.
Kelly Nolin [00:01:54]:
Sure. I’m currently the director of admissions at the University of Montana, and it’s a role that I’ve had for almost a year. Before that, I was in admissions for 14 years at Colorado State University. In terms of my background, I don’t think anybody, really goes to college thinking that they’re going to end up in admissions, and I I definitely was one of those people. I graduated from the University of Redlands and joined the military after I graduated. And when I was there, I met my husband who was in the air force. And so we’d move every 2 or 3 years, and every time we went to a new base, there was always a college or university near the base. And so it was easy for me to get my foot in the door, and I started out in a a temporary, part time position working and continuing education at Old Dominion University.
Kelly Nolin [00:02:48]:
I worked at Thomas Nelson Community College. Eventually, I ended up at the University of Denver where I was fortunate enough to finish a PhD in higher education administration. I worked at American University in faculty development for 6 years and and taught, which I absolutely loved. But then we moved to Fort Collins in Fort Collins, Colorado. And it was during the recession, and they weren’t doing a lot of hiring. But one of the jobs that was available was an admissions counselor. And I thought it would be fun to talk to students about going to college, and, I was fortunate enough to get the job. I was a lot older than your typical admissions counselor when I started.
Kelly Nolin [00:03:28]:
I was 39. But I feel like that helped me because I had a lot of good life experience. I finished my education. I had a a different perspective, and I could, you know, I worked I felt really well with parents and students alike. So I love my time in Fort Collins, but last year, I had the opportunity to accept a position in Montana and move up to Missoula. And since my husband and I enjoy whitewater rafting and hiking and camping, Montana is just a really good fit for us, and I’m excited to be at the the university at a time when we’re we’re actually on the the rise and seeing our our numbers improve. So to be here at this time is, really a privilege.
Shiro [00:04:12]:
That’s fantastic. I actually didn’t know about your background before, CSU or Colorado state, so that’s super fascinating and, love that you spent some time in Colorado too because that’s where I’m based out of too. So that’s fantastic. Montana is beautiful too, and I know it’s It is. Growing as a population as a state, so that’s exciting as well. Well, great. Well, let’s let’s move on to some of the topics. So, you know, similar to our webinar we had 2 months ago on on, anti melt campaigns.
Shiro [00:04:43]:
I liked your perspective on just, like, the psychological mindset that’s necessary to really maximize yield and decrease melt for a successful first day of class. Can you tell us a little bit more about your approach to decreasing melt?
Kelly Nolin [00:05:00]:
Sure. So I really believe strongly that you can’t wait until the summertime to think about melt, and it actually starts when you are building the funnel. I think that we really need to focus in on finding our right fit students, and that’s something that we’ve done in the past year at the University of Montana. We’ve used some predictive models within Cora in particular to find students that were, at the had the highest likelihood of yielding. So that gives us at least, we hope, a running start with students by building that funnel. We also buy a lot of names early so that we’re communicating with students starting their sophomore, junior year. I think building that relationship is one of the mindsets that helps us with yield down the the road. So we’re focusing in on the students that could actually end up at our institution.
Kelly Nolin [00:06:01]:
I’ll say that I think it’s also vitally important to have a positive working relationship with the marketing department, because if we don’t have good materials that are exciting, interesting, eye catching, if they don’t communicate the proper messages, then it doesn’t matter how many names we have in the funnel or what kind of work we do. Like, they’re telling the story of the institution for us. And so getting them on board so that we can be responsive to things that come up in the funnel is incredibly important. And then I’ll also, say that right now, it’s super important that we equip our admissions counselor with the admissions counselors with the proper tools. I think for a lot of teams I’ll do well, sorry. I’ll just speak for our team. Our team is very new and very young, and they don’t have a lot of experience with, yield campaigns. And so to expect a new admissions counselor as a new territory manager to just know what they’re supposed to do in order to, get students to confirm and take the next steps and actually end up on campus.
Kelly Nolin [00:07:14]:
That’s unfair. And so we need to make sure that they have the right training. We need to get them, tools that help them do that work, whether it’s, clean data or we use the EAB yield survey this year so that we could narrow down the students that we were working with. I feel like if you can support your counselors in this work, it you have a higher likelihood of being successful.
Shiro [00:07:43]:
Amazing. I and you mentioned some tools there, like like, the AB, report. Like, are there other tools that have been successful for you in your tenure in the past, whether it’s with Montana or with CSU? Mhmm.
Kelly Nolin [00:07:57]:
I would say, in my previous experience at CSU, we had a really robust version of Slate. And so we were able to use the data. We were able to segment communications. We were able to really personalize the messages that were going out with out to students, which I do think makes a difference, acknowledging students where they are in our process. When I got to the version of Slate that we have here, it it’s not very good. It was, honestly, it was built by somebody with that admissions experience. So it doesn’t do the things that we need it to do, but we’re in the process of getting a new instance. And so we’re actually giving our our counselors, our our visit team the opportunity to use all the best practices and to ask for the the tools that they want in Slate.
Kelly Nolin [00:08:47]:
So this time next year, we will have that robust version of Slate. So I I think that’s probably one of the the primary things. And then we’ve also done a lot of training for our counselors. So we did a session on yield and how to actually ask students where they are in the process and to be comfortable asking for the business. I mean, nobody likes to say that admissions is sales work, but that’s really what it is. And we have to be willing to ask for the student and the family to commit to us because they’re going to make a huge investment. So how do we have conversations with students where we become not afraid to say, which schools are you looking at? What is what’s keeping you from choosing the University of Montana? Those types of things. We also did a a workshop about the nonconsumption market.
Kelly Nolin [00:09:37]:
So the excuse me. The percentage of students that are choosing not to go to college at all is increasing. So how do we talk about our value proposition in a way that makes sense, that makes family that makes families feel comfortable making the investment in higher education. So I feel like those those things combined have been incredibly helpful.
Shiro [00:09:57]:
That’s amazing. And and going back to your point on, you know, making friends or making close alliances with marketing teams, like, can you give me some practical examples of what you mean there? Like, one I thought of was, like, you mentioned the audience creation by doing research. Right? Are you sharing that data with marketing and saying, hey. Let’s tackle this audience together and see how it performs?
Kelly Nolin [00:10:18]:
Yes. We’re absolutely doing that in a very general way, and I can give you a more specific example. Halfway through our recruitment cycle, we noticed that our applications from male students were trending way below where they’ve normally been. And so we decided that we needed to do something to target male students a little bit more. So once we knew that that was a problem, we talked with marketing about that. And there was, a guy in the marketing department who pulled together a small focus group of male students to ask them, why did you choose the University of Montana? And they said that the reason they came up here was, you know, the things that you would expect, the location, the rivers, the mountains, the hunting, the access to skiing, hunting, all of that. And so, those were things that we weren’t emphasizing in our marketing materials. So we decided that we would, add some more traditionally masculine images, and, you know, we don’t wanna stereotype and just assume, like, all men like football because we know that that’s not true, and there are lots of women that like football.
Kelly Nolin [00:11:22]:
So we didn’t only send to male students. We tried to really just broaden our perspective, for who we were communicating to. But we did send everybody a link to our, we have a video about wild sustenance, which is a hunting class that is conducted here at the university. And it can have a broad appeal because it focuses on the mechanics of hunting, but also, the ethics of hunting, and it can have a conservation message. It just it it appeals to a a wide spectrum of people. And so we sent that to everybody. And, you know, again, I I don’t want to to fall on the stereotyping and saying that just adding some images of men made a difference. But if we’re going to say that we’re inclusive, we have to be inclusive of everybody.
Kelly Nolin [00:12:20]:
And so that is the line that we’ve been trying to balance on, appealing to a wide spectrum of students. Because, ultimately, students choose a campus because they find their community. They feel like there’s a good fit there. Hopefully, they feel comfortable. It’s a place that’s gonna be a home for maybe 4 years. And so being able to to talk across a a wide spectrum is incredibly important, and our marketing partners were super responsive in that. Also, they were really great when we saw that our numbers of FAFSA filers, was down. As as you know, this year has been a struggle, with the FAFSA and with financial aid.
Kelly Nolin [00:13:04]:
And when we noticed that, we hadn’t had as many students submit the FAFSA as we had in previous years, they our marketing area really stepped up with postcards and emails and just, we really flooded the court, I think, in order to to really up our our FAFSA submissions. So that’s work that we wouldn’t be able to do without them.
Shiro [00:13:28]:
Is, so I know the FAFSA filings have bounced back for the average have bounced back quite a bit for the the whole national average. How have they been at
Kelly Nolin [00:13:39]:
Mhmm. We’ve also seen some improvement. We’re still struggling a little bit with continuing students, but overall, that that is improving. So it’s positive.
Shiro [00:13:48]:
And, to your example with, noticing enrollment or admissions were down from your male students, what were the changes? Like, is it too early for to talk about results?
Kelly Nolin [00:14:00]:
I think it is too early to talk about results. Anecdotally, our, percentage, our gender split in the spring summer, we’re definitely a little bit closer to being equal, but it’s too early to tell for the fall for sure. Although, our housing office did tell us that they’re out of rooms for male students. So, I’m gonna take that as a positive sign.
Shiro [00:14:24]:
That’s fascinating. Well, this is great. I know you you mentioned a little bit about the tools and how you’re restructuring or reutilizing slate to something a little more robust, but are there other things you’re doing, in your, you know, almost 1 year tenure at in reengineering yield campaigns and anti melt campaigns?
Kelly Nolin [00:14:45]:
Sure. I I think one of the biggest things that we’ve done this year is to make it easy for students to say yes to us. So, again, along the the lines of asking students for their business, In Montana, we’re not able to ask for an enrollment deposit. None of the schools here can do that. And so we’ve always relied on things like the housing deposit or, course registrations to kind of get a sense for who’s coming. But this year, we created a form where students could tell us their plans, tell us that they were coming. And so then we would we started working those students who told us that they intended to enroll. We’ve also removed a lot of barriers to enrollment.
Kelly Nolin [00:15:35]:
We found that last year and the the couple of years prior, so many of our policies and procedures were getting in the way of students enrolling. So an example of that is, students needed to submit their immunization records, but they had registration holds until those records were submitted. And so that meant that a lot of students didn’t make the connection, couldn’t couldn’t really see themselves on our campus until after they’d done that step. And a lot of them, the process was difficult. The there weren’t clear instructions. And so we saw that a lot of students were just falling out of the process at that point. Once we removed the barrier so that there wasn’t a registration hold, our registrations have been up significantly. So we suspect that we have more registrations early rather than more registrations, but everything does seem to be heading in the the right direction.
Kelly Nolin [00:16:35]:
We’ve also really focused in on communicating deadlines to students. So every step along the way, we have given them the opportunity to know what the next steps are, in at every single, juncture. So when it was time for them to apply for housing, we, you know, made sure we sent them tons of messages. We have told them about what they needed to do to register for courses. Now that orientation is starting or the sign up process for the orientation experience, which happens the week before classes start, we’ve seen significant registration numbers there. We heard this morning that we expect a class of between 1314 100 students, and so far, almost 1100 students have registered for orientation. So, and it’s they got one message, and they, they’ve had 1 week to sign up. So that feels very positive because we’ve been telling them all along, look for orientation sign ups.
Kelly Nolin [00:17:37]:
This is when you can do it. And, our students have been taking those steps with us.
Shiro [00:17:43]:
Oh, that’s fantastic. So, yeah, I mean, just just I know the final numbers aren’t here yet until fall rolls around, but having that early confidence, like, must mean a lot. Right? Because it’s probably something you don’t usually see, so that’s fantastic. In terms of communication channels, have you switched anything up? Is email a primary channel or I’ve heard, like, with deadline stuff. So I’ve had another guest on. They’re testing out text messaging a little bit and so, like, the the way you write that has to be different, but, like, it can be more direct. You know, like, hey. Your deadline for housing is this day, like, period.
Shiro [00:18:16]:
Here’s your link. I’m just curious if you’ve tried any new communication channels.
Kelly Nolin [00:18:21]:
Yeah. We definitely text. We have been old school with our we sent, a yield brochure that was super glossy and pretty, but it had a tear off checklist at the back that had all of the dates in it, and we imagine that, you know, that could end up on a family’s refrigerator so that, parents and other supporters could hold their students accountable. We followed up with emails. We did text to say that those were, you know, the the last days that they could apply for housing or pick a roommate or or that kind of thing. One channel that’s been super helpful for us is ZeeMe. We use that as our admitted student community, and it really helps students connect not just to the institution, but to each other. And we do a lot of, events in ZeeMe, whether it’s just surveys or, last month, we did a scavenger hunt where people were posting pictures.
Kelly Nolin [00:19:22]:
It’s just another opportunity for them to to build those relationships and find the right fit.
Shiro [00:19:27]:
That’s amazing. And in in terms of, like, launching Zeeami, is that owned by your department, or is it, like, a shared responsibility across, student affairs as well or other departments?
Kelly Nolin [00:19:40]:
So it has traditionally been run by our marketing, office. Okay. But this year, we’ve tasked our visitor services with creating the, regular events that will happen so that we can get them scheduled and communicate about them. So it is a it is a partnership and a a shared responsibility.
Shiro [00:20:01]:
That’s amazing. So what I’m hearing is you’re you’re giving students an opportunity to build their own community and get a sense of belonging, like, virtually even before orientation.
Kelly Nolin [00:20:12]:
Exactly.
Shiro [00:20:14]:
Oh, that’s fantastic. I’m curious. So what are some of the things that have not worked in the past in terms of, with, yield day strategies?
Kelly Nolin [00:20:24]:
Yeah. 7000 cold calls to students who haven’t taken any steps in our direction doesn’t work. That’s what the university admissions office did last year, before I arrived, and it had a real toll it took a real toll on our admissions counselors. As you can imagine, students who haven’t taken any steps towards us weren’t always very nice in those phone calls, and, it was also super stressful for our counselors who felt a lot of pressure in order to bring in the class. So we knew that that was something that we didn’t want to repeat this year. That was one of the reasons why we did the yield survey so we could focus on the students who still needed help making their decision, who maybe needed extra information, or who said yes and just needed to know about next steps. I would also say that buying just a sheer large volume of prospect names doesn’t work. Like, I you know, going all the way back to what I said at the beginning about how you start working on yield when you build your funnel, we definitely don’t subscribe to just spending tons of money.
Kelly Nolin [00:21:38]:
Like like a lot of schools, our budget is limited, and so we have to make sure that our name buys count. So really focusing in on the areas where we’re likely to yield students, I think, again, is something that we do. And then I think one thing that happened last year that was not good was, our counselors seem to take a lot of the the blame for the class not and to be clear, the class was the same size as it was in the previous year. It had one more student than the previous year. But because the goal had been set so high and it wasn’t a realistic goal, there was a lot of disappointment and frustration, and a lot of that was, heaped on to our admissions counselors. So now that I’m here, making sure that my counselors have those right tools, making sure that they’re not, under the spotlight because, ultimately, it’s my responsibility. It’s our vice president’s responsibility to make sure that they’re equipped in the way that they need in order to be successful. Our admissions counselors work so hard, and so I see it as my responsibility to to make sure that they feel valued and supported because, otherwise, we see high turnover, and that has all kinds of implications.
Kelly Nolin [00:23:06]:
So, you know, those types of things, making sure that our counselors are doing very specific work with a a, clear purpose and expectation is important. And, I think, ultimately, celebrating our victories where we see them is very important. So every time I see that we’ve met one of our intermediate intermediate goals, you know, like, I’ll I’ll put it out there on our teams or, you know, we’ll celebrate it in a in a meeting. Because the other thing that I always want our counselors to remember is that even though we watch the numbers constantly, each of those numbers is a student and a family who’s making a decision that’s going to change their life. And how often do you get to participate in that process? So, just keeping in mind that students and families are are stressed. And even though our numbers are important, ultimately, making sure that those students feel cared for and respected and make the decision that’s right for them. If we do that, then we’re successful even if our our numbers don’t quite hit our our goals that we’ve set.
Shiro [00:24:17]:
Thank you for that. Thanks for sharing all that. I mean, you mentioned at the start of the call, like, your your team is, you know, pretty new in terms of in their career. And so I imagine, like, efforts like that setting goals that from the start aren’t achievable, do risk, like, turnover and churn. So that makes a lot of sense.
Kelly Nolin [00:24:37]:
Yeah. We actually set 3 goals this year. We had an aspirational goal, a middle goal, which is where we wanna where we really wanna be, and then, like, a drop dead goal, which is just one more than we had last year.
Shiro [00:24:49]:
Awesome. Well, you know, it’s been great having you on the show today. I’m wondering where our listeners can follow-up with you to understand the good work you’re doing.
Kelly Nolin [00:24:57]:
Sure. So they can find me on the University of Montana’s website, which is just umontana.edu.
Shiro [00:25:04]:
Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining, and thanks for our listeners for tuning in today. Catch us on the next one.
Kelly Nolin [00:25:09]:
Thanks.
