Print & Web Communications for Education
Communications Audit
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia, a “Southern Ivy” with an enrollment of more than 30,000, first sought our assistance with developing undergraduate admissions communication strategies and concepts for recruitment materials, especially those effective in attracting and retaining top-quality minority and out-of-state students.
Subsequently, we worked with the UGA Health Center as it opened a new facility on campus. Our task — to make sure it reached its student market with effective, targeted messages, fighting a perceived fiscal threat from managed care plans.
In each case, we surveyed pertinent communications strategies and tools (and competitors’ approaches), interviewed key staff and conducted focus groups with the various constituencies. Then we prepared a set of strategic recommendations for each area — menus for marketing communications success.
The strengths we found that UGA admissions specialists should emphasize — in every format — are academics, location and outcomes. Each had been neglected in previous communications to a significant degree. We also targeted some effective techniques to communicate with minority students — and to get across UGA’s continuing commitment to their recruitment in the face of court decisions overturning admissions policies designed to enhance diversity.
The best technique for the Health Center, we discovered, was simply getting information about convenient hours of service and fee structure to students in an effective way. They loved the Health Center, and once they knew how, they used it.