Public Relations Information and Marketing Association of North Carolina

Keeping Emotions Stable in Turbulent Times – Dr. Kathi Swanson

Thursday, April 11, 2019

9:30 am – 10:40 am & 10:45 am – 11:50 am

Room 104

Description:

Each semester Community College Leadership “watches enrollment – we are literally watching it every day trying to figure out where we are and trying to figure out where we'll be, because it does have a big impact on our budget.” Many community colleges continue to see enrollment declines in these turbulent times and look to marketing to solve the problem.

While marketing professionals understand that increasing prospects, converting prospects to applicants, and ultimately to enrollees, takes time, multiple touch points, and money, they generally have little control over the process. But through collaboration between enrollment services and marketing, enrollments can remain stable and actually grow!

This session brings together a national consultant on community enrollment focusing on best practices from a national perspective and a seasoned enrollment professional that led a dramatic enrollment turnaround at Guilford Technical Community College with success! Learn from these presenters the key metrics needed to define your market opportunities, strategies for increasing applicants, converting applicants into enrollees, and assisting in retaining students using traditional and digital strategies in the “student journey” through your institution. We will focus on bringing together the marketing professionals at your college and the enrollment professionals in a collaborative team.

Explore key strategies for:

• Understanding the key metrics to provide guidance to your College’s enrollment team for expanding current

  markets and defining new markets

• Increasing applicants at your College by fine-tuning your marketing strategies

• Increasing the applicant conversion rate at your college by more effectively communicating with the applicants

• Increasing current student enrollment and completion

Kathi Swanson, Ph.D. President, CLARUS Corporation, understands how community colleges operate and shares that knowledge nationally with humor and insight. She continues to be on the cutting edge of new technologies used in marketing.

Kathi has been working with community colleges for nearly 30 years – helping then stay current with their advertising tactics and assisting them in understanding their markets. Her work with more than one-third of the community colleges in the country provides insight in to best practices in marketing for community colleges.

With a Doctorate in Marketing from Texas A&M University, Kathi brings fine-tuned information gathering skills as well as a wealth of information regarding best practices for community colleges across the country.