Graduate Recruitment & Yield
Each summer, I created/updated our academic year’s recruitment and yield calendar. In 2020, we refocused our campaign efforts following a series of workshops with DesignIntelligence, which led to our final positioning strategy. Our goal was to get a better, more realistic perspective of our audiences and our School’s brand identity. Below, I’m sharing some of my favorite recruitment and/or yield efforts from my time at Georgia Tech.
In my four years of recruitment and yield campaigns, I saw an uptick in applications and acceptance. The margin of improvement in our quantity was admittedly small, but we saw a noticeable improvement in the quality of the applications that were submitted each year and gradual acceptance rate improvements.
Graduate (Virtual) Open House
Prior to 2020, Open House was an in-person, yield-focused event for admitted graduate students. For both the 2020 and 2021 yield seasons, we moved to a virtual format. For all Open Houses, I helped plan the agenda, select participants, moderate the event, and in the case of the view linked below, edited the final cut of the video.
Welcome to Georgia Tech
I created with one of our graduate assistants to create this video using photos and videos we collected from the 2019-2020 academic year. This video was used to help build excitement for the incoming class of students. We used this video to open information sessions, convocation, and several other virtual recruitment and yield events.
Dear Future Architect Newsletter
I created a form on the School of Architecture website where prospective students could submit questions for our advisors. At the time, we did not have a CRM system, so I used this form to help provide us with more information about interested students who visited our website. I would use this email list and a list of email addresses from GRE exam email lists to create a short-term mailing list for prospective students in hopes of encouraging them to apply to Georgia Tech.
I called this campaign “Dear Future Architect” (in the case of students wanting to study urban design, I had a unique email titled “Dear Future Urban Designer.”)
Dear Future Architect was a series of five emails and two unique emails that specifically targeted minority students. I planned the content of these emails in our annual recruitment plan, usually beginning with a Letter from the Chair to add a personal touch to our campaign and to connect students with our Chair from the very beginning of our recruitment season.
The emails that followed usually focused on a specific topic within the School. This would include international education, connections to our student ambassadors, design and research within our studios, our annual lecture series and upcoming events, and application deadline information (as seen below.)
Sample image from a 2020 issue of the “Dear Future Architect” recruitment email campaign designed in Contact Monkey.
Archway Newsletter
Each spring semester shortly after acceptance letters were distributed, I wrote, designed, and organized a series of emails titled “Archway” using marketing/yield-based messaging to counteract the informational emails admitted students receive.
The Archway Newsletter was based on the School’s weekly, internal e-newsletter, BuzzworthySoA; however, the Archway was specifically tailored to the needs and interests of our admitted student audience.
The Archway was released as a three-issue newsletter between early March and mid-April, the timeframe between when students were admitted and their acceptance deadline. The first newsletter focused on inviting students to Open House. The second newsletter emphasized the reiterated the Open House invitation, included two additional special topic Open House sessions, and introduced our graduate ambassadors. The third newsletter emphasized the acceptance deadline. Each issue contained invitations to other upcoming lectures and events, as well as news from the School of Architecture.
Sample image from the header of a 2021 issue of the Archway newsletter designed in Contact Monkey.
Social Media Campaign
In the Fall of 2019, I, alongside our Chairs and program directors, worked with DesignIntelligence to create a positioning strategy for the School. Our goal was to better understand what differentiated us from other schools of architecture, better understand our audiences, and gain some new perspectives on how discuss our school. Following six workshops, we created a plan that included our recruitment and yield schedule and messaging to better position the School of Architecture with a focus on the Master of Architecture program.
I used the information from the final report to plan special topic information sessions, write content for our website, which was completely redesigned in the spring of 2020, create promotional videos, write articles, and plan social media campaigns.
Each semester, I worked with our office-assigned graduate assistants to plan weeklong, targeted Instagram campaigns for either recruitment or yield purposes. Instagram is where we had our best engagement with prospective and current students. We balanced posts and stories based on the differentiators noted in our positioning strategy.
The link below will take you to an archive of Instagram stories that reflect our positioning strategy and target both prospective and admitted students.