The fifth of NewCity’s Seven Pillars of Higher Ed Digital Strategy explores how your website can help students imagine their futures with the sensory details of real-world outcomes.
To spark their imagination, prospective students need vivid evidence
“You’ve got to think about what you want for the future.”
“Education is the key to your future.”
“You don’t understand now, but in the future, you will.”
Kids hear messages like this throughout their childhoods from well-meaning family members and teachers. They understand that college is a path to a bright future, but that future is still an abstract concept. Generalizations like these do nothing to give this concept life and color.
Applying to college is the first step on their path. But the true promise of college is more than earning the degree. It’s about preparing students for a successful adult life, including a rewarding career, social mobility, health and wellness.
When prospective students visit your website, they come with many questions. Answering those questions, helping them imagine themselves there and awakening their imagination about where they’ll go after, is a powerful enrollment motivator.
The school that can spark a student’s imagination about the life they could lead after earning their degree, is often the one that wins a place in a their heart and mind.
Students respond strongly to stories and facts that show others much like them have done it, and have gone on to successful careers and bright futures.
We’re not just talking about a section on your degree program page that says “Students with accounting degrees have gone on to work for X, Y, and Z companies with these sort of jobs” (although this info is helpful too).
We’re talking about content that immediately puts students in the midst of a story, something they can’t help but picture in their mind. Alumni videos, student interviews and other examples of visceral storytelling show how others have gone on to do interesting and maybe even surprising things. This storytelling, combined with job placement data, numbers of internships available and school rankings – start to paint a very convincing picture.
Good news: this evidence is probably already on your website. It lives in your career services and alumni content where it assists graduating students with career planning. Or often, colorful profiles of successful alumni careers and achievements are printed in your alumni magazine and delivered to alumni. But who else really needs to see these bright and shining examples of possibility?
Prospective students!
Where to Start? Take a page from an alumni magazine
The glossy pages of university alumni magazines are full of stories of alumni doing interesting things. These profiles often focus on career, but also include the rich details of meaningful adult lives. Alumni backgrounds, childhood dreams, travel experiences, important mentors and personal passions. These are the real-life examples that can help spark a prospective student’s imagination for their own futures, and inspire them to start building their own.
Take for example this Rutgers Magazine alumni profile of Rutgers College alumna Stephanie Klemons, whose double major in dance and genetics/microbiology led her to a career in musical theater, as the assistant choreographer in the Broadway production of Hamilton in New York City.
Or this Pomona College Magazine profile of alumna James Davis ‘05, who said:
“Those classes,” he says, talking about the time he spent in college, “are what I think make my jokes different from the majority of my peers’. Those classes are what gave me a certain awareness about the world, to then use comedy as a platform.”
These impressive stories are intended to inspire. The problem is, most prospective students aren’t seeing them. A school’s alumni magazine isn’t one of the first places they come when researching schools. Usually they come to your website from a degree-motivated search query, and go straight to tracking down their program.
The degree program page is the first place we recommend you surface these stories.
We make the case in Pillar 2: Show Me the Degree, that your degree program pages are the hardest working pages on your site. Showing evidence of bright futures on these pages is part of what makes for a great experience – the kind that leads to applications and enrollment. And to do that, there needs to be a bridge built between alumni and career content, and the degree pages.
This is where a little forethought in how you model content relationships in your website content management system (CMS) can really pay off. By tagging alumni stories or career services content with the relevant degree programs or themes, you can automatically pull them into your degree program pages. You may still need to edit an introduction or summary that frames the story for prospective students.
As you select stories and details to show students, consider how they help you answer these important questions:
- Will the major, department and faculty help prepare me for the career I choose?
- Are there internships, research opportunities, study abroad programs?
- How active is the alumni network and how can I connect with them?
- Are there alumni here whose careers I aspire to?
- Can I expect to be employed shortly after graduation?
- Are there other extracurricular activities that will help develop me as a person?
Provide evidence in the form of storytelling and fact-sharing
1. Student Stories
Often we see excellent storytelling examples tucked away on a career services related page. Or in the “University News” section. Bringing these stories to degree program pages will help contextualize them as students are forming opinions about your school.
Personal stories from recent alumni are powerful because in one narrative, they can convey many truths about your school:
- what the degree might be like, including different formats or concentrations
- what kinds of internship or opportunities are connected to it
- what kinds of real career outcomes graduates can expect to pursue
- detail about student life, faculty relationships and extracurricular activities
Your admissions reps have probably also collected compelling stories about student outcomes they share with high school students. Ask them what stories they share that resonate most with students.
Creighton alumna Abby Kleespie’s story starts on the FinTech degree page, and links to its own page.
2. Alumni Interviews & Profiles
Alumni interviews and videos from more mature alumni can give a sense of career pathways, and an inspiring vision of adulthood. Is there a better testimonial than hearing a successful alumni say, “this school helped make me who I am, and was key to my success in work and life”?
Roanoke College’s Environmental Studies Degree program page features vivid storytelling of career outcomes for recent graduates, as well as this video of an alumna well into their career.
“…[Roanoke College] became a north star for where my career has gone, and where it will go in the future.” – Scott Segerstrom
3. Facts & Figures
While not personal, employment statistics and school ratings provide quantifiable proof of post-graduate success, and are the quality markers that reinforce your anecdotal evidence.
- Employment placement rates
- Loan pay-off rates
- Rankings
4. Show support they’ll receive along the way
Research reveals that Gen Z is more in need of support services than fancy amenities. This is even more true for first-gen students, military and transfers who often need to navigate additional obstacles or have a harder time adjusting to life in college.
You might not be able to share all the important support info on degree program pages- but you can mention it and then link to additional areas of your site.
Radford University is a good example of an institution prioritizing support for its diverse student body. Radford weaves its message of support throughout its IA and content strategy, and has a page dedicated to Resources, Services & Support in their main navigation panel. Students can explore twenty-five different school organizations that assist students throughout their educational journeys.
Applying this approach
Building great degree program pages requires your best efforts across content strategy, your CMS and brand. You’ll want to meet periodically with your counterparts in career services and alumni relations to look at content calendars together. You can jointly create a plan for how to share, edit and publish the kind of storytelling content that helps students imagine their futures.
We outline steps for collaborating with these teams in Pillar 2: Show Me the Degree
Conclusion
If you’ve gotten this far in the 7 Pillars journey with us, you already know that this approach takes time, effort, collaboration, planning and patience. We believe the benefits are always worth the work. Building a well-architected CMS that connects degrees with alumni and career content saves time and resources and supports long-term sustainable web management and growth. And a unified digital strategy across internal teams can over time result in real institutional success, as we’ve seen with some of our clients. Increased enrollment is only one part of it.
If you’d like to learn more about how to equip your teams to develop action-inspiring content strategies, reach out! We’d love to hear from you.
Nicole is NewCity's communications and marketing strategist. She has 15 years of brand storytelling experience.
