Putting Your Brand to Work: Retention and Student Engagement
Education
In the “Putting Your Brand to Work” blog series, I’ll explore four of the most important uses of brand in higher education, and some best practices for each.
When colleges and universities utilize their brands to communicate with students, most often they do so in the context of recruitment. But institutions would be wise to keep their brands front and center even after their prospects are officially enrolled, as a strategic tool for student retention and engagement. Student retention is among the most complicated challenges in higher education because so many factors impact people’s decisions to leave college, from finances and family health to campus culture and academic success. You might think that brand has little connection to the work required to help students navigate these challenges. However, assuming that your brand captures the core values and promise of the education that your institution provides, it can offer a powerful organizing framework for evaluating and improving your ability to support and retain students.
First and foremost, since your brand is a messaging platform, you should be utilizing it to communicate with current students in ways designed to help achieve your key strategic outcomes related to student success. As with recruitment, this requires a bit of thoughtful work to translate your brand into the kind of messaging most likely to resonate with students. Knowing that most students are hyper-focused on the personal financial value they can achieve by earning a college degree, universities can leverage this desire to encourage students to engage in the full experience of higher education.
This includes ensuring they take advantage of the help available from campus advising, financial aid, university counseling, and other student support, all of which have a direct impact on their success, and all of which were likely already paid for by their tuition dollars. It should also include encouraging students to participate in co-curricular events, seek an internship, play a sport, or join a club. We have years’ worth of data demonstrating that the more engaged students are in these kinds of non-curricular activities, the more likely they are to stay in school and graduate. Every college and university does its best to advertise the benefits of the support and opportunities they provide, but the more you can frame these appeals in the language of your institutional brand, the better you’ll be able to differentiate your institution.
Second, and perhaps even more important, your brand can help your college or university to fine-tune how it supports students. Obviously, as marketing and communication professionals, there is only so much influence you have on the strategies and programming employed by your student support colleagues. Still, the more you can help them to frame their work in terms of your institutional brand, the more likely they’ll be to employ tactics that align with and help to fulfill the brand promise. For example, there are dozens of strategies a university might employ to increase student retention. But if you prioritize only those tactics that align closely with your brand—that help students to live the brand they were promised—you can help to position your institution in the ways that matter most, through the daily experiences of students and the tangible support they receive.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to work with university leaders to maximize the impact of your brand, let me know. Email me at [email protected] and we can talk about best practices for helping your college or university to genuinely live your brand. Or you can visit BVK’s Brand Academy for Colleges and Universities to explore how to develop and leverage your brand.
We also offer a free presentation called Beyond “Telling Our Stories Better”: How to Work with University Presidents, VPs, and Deans. You’ll receive practical, step-by-step guidance for how to engage your campus leadership in ways that build trust, broaden their understanding of marketing and communications, and yield genuine partnerships that facilitate your work. To learn more, download our Presentation Overview below.
