Three Key Tips as You Build Your Enrollment Strategy

Strategy is about making choices, but good choices can’t be made until you have a deep understanding of your situation. Admitting your problems allows you to turn them into opportunities. This is the beginning of what can become a winning enrollment strategy.

All successful enrollment strategies I’ve seen begin with a common first step. The leader sits down with his or her team and takes an honest assessment of where they are as an organization. This involves being candid about the gaps, obstacles, and opportunities. This is why Albert Einstein once said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” Why is this step often skipped or hurried through?

First, it is more fun to ideate than reflect. New ideas bring hope, energy, and excitement while present realities reveal weaknesses and shortcomings. Second, it is difficult to do and think at the same time. Slowing down enough to fully think about the problem may reduce the perception that you’re making progress. People want answers and they want them today, especially when it comes to enrollment challenges.

Remember, you can’t get to where you want to be if you don’t really know where you are and why. And before you move to ideation, make sure you have a definition of the problem.

Here are three key tips as you seek to find clarity to start a turnaround strategy for enrollment.  

1. Think like your customer. Any worthwhile strategy starts by adopting the perspective of your customer; this requires you to overcome the curse of knowledge. When you assume people understand the things you do or think as you think then you are in danger of reaching incorrect conclusions. Students have changed and your strategies must adapt to their reality, not the other way around. Before moving to the ideation phase of strategy development don’t just empathize with your students but see things from their point of view. Ideation without a shared understanding of the actual problem is a bad recipe. To understand the problem, you must answer “Why are students not choosing us?” and “What obstacles are preventing students from buying what we are selling?” By working with your teams to adopt this mindset, you’ll be surprised at the valuable insights that bubble to the surface regarding student pain points and why your enrollment strategy hasn’t delivered the results you want. 

2. Get specific. Things are more complex than what you see on the main scoreboard. When looking at revenue or enrollment, it is tempting to stop before peeling back enough layers of the onion. If you have a revenue issue, is it across the board? Is it only in one high-margin graduate program? Is it a retention or incoming student issue? Resist the urge to jump to a conclusion based on the highest-level data available. In admissions, it is critical to evaluate your funnel on multiple granular levels. For instance, maybe headcount came in even this fall but when you look closer you find this class had 15 more tuition remission students and 35 more student-athletes. Next fall you could do the exact same things and come in 50 short. It’s best to know this before deciding how to move forward or make projections.

3. Take ownership. It is paramount to avoid placing blame and always focus on controllable factors. Blame is a culture killer and typically doesn’t reveal the root cause of your challenges. Maybe there is shrinking revenue at your institution, so it is tempting for a president to look at the enrollment leaders and determine this is the issue. Resist the urge to default to a “we have the wrong people” assessment. You might be correct with this determination but using a more rigorous approach will help you determine causation or correlation. Next, avoid blaming something circumstantial. COVID-19 is a prime target for ire at most institutions. The pandemic caused major disruption but to place all blame at the feet of the virus is ignoring the things on your campus that also led to your current situation. In most cases, COVID merely accelerated the realities that were already coming. High-performing teams come from leaders who act as coaches and avoid placing blame. All the best teams I’ve seen are aware of their challenges and focus on maximizing their people and the opportunities within their control. This point is especially important as leaders continue to worry about the “demographic cliff.”  

In strategy development, shortcuts equal shortfalls. Your winning strategy should always have a backbone of clarity, focus, and alignment. By incorporating these three tips from the start you position yourself to create the clarity needed to move forward on the rest of your strategy development. 

–Ryan Dougherty is the Principal Partner at TG Three with over 20 years experience building successful enrollment leaders, teams, and strategies. TG Three is a strategy company that helps Christian institutions grow their people and their enrollments through hiring, strategy, and coaching.