So Your President Wants to Grow Online Enrollments ― Now What? An In-Depth Look at Your Enrollment Management Options - On-Demand

Webinar Transcript

Kathy:                         Good afternoon. My name is Kathy Bryan and I'm the vice-president of corporate marketing and communications here at SparkRoom. I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar, "So Your President Wants to Grow Online Enrollments – Now What? An In-Depth Look at your Enrollment Management Options." Before we get started, I want to tell you a little bit about SparkRoom and introduce Marcelo to everyone. SparkRoom is exclusively focused on education and is a proven leader in enrollment marketing and management. Through the deployment of award-winning technology and services, SparkRoom helps institutions of higher education grow and sustain enrollment. We offer our solutions in three formats as show on the screen: performance marketing technology, enrollment marketing, and enrollment management. Marcelo Parravicini is our presenter today.

As a seasoned executive with two decades of marketing, enrollment management, and operational expertise, Marcelo's experience includes work in all areas of business and institution management including strategic planning, organizational realignment, change management, marketing and communications, enrollment management, and more. Marcelo has a wealth of higher education experience from his ten years as CMO at ACPI University and Post University where he boosted online enrollment volume from 800 to nearly 15,000 students. Before joining the SparkRoom team, Marcelo worked with Johnson and Wales University as a consultant, advising them of how to build out an integrated enrollment management organization. As a result of that effort, online enrollment at Johnson and Wales grew by 300 percent. So thank you for joining us today and now I will pass it off to Marcelo.

Marcelo:                      Thank you, Kathy. Good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate you taking the time to participate in this webinar. Today, we're going to cover a number of topics, specifically what the current situation of what the online education landscape looks like now. What are the causes of failure? As many of you know, a number of institutions choose to introduce online learning and fall short of achieving their goals. So, what are tasks, on that note, success requirements? What are the operational challenges that lead to that failure? I want to discuss the options that institutions can have. Online Program Manager management partnerships. I want to also look into what are the pros and cons of those partnerships. We going to discuss building an internal enrollment management organization as opposed to partnering with an outside service provider and what are the pros and cons of that approach. And then how we go about making a choice with those two options.

So, getting into the current situation, as you know, many higher education institutions have turned to online education as a way of diversifying tuition revenue strains and mitigating traditional enrollment declines. But success is not always guaranteed, right? Almost every publicly held for-profit private education institution has an active online program and the not-for-profit sector is following their lead. The number of higher education institutions offering distance learning has grown by 74 percent over the past decade and more than half of the Top 30 schools ranked by online enrollment are actually not-for-profit schools. These are lists of some of the institutions ranked by online enrollment and, if you look at the Top 15 there, you'll notice that one of the largest universities is, in fact, a community college.

The takeaway is simply that the promotion of online programs and recruitment of qualifying students has become increasingly difficult. In fact, due to the increased supply of online programs, the marketing of Business Education is competitive and increasingly ineffective. According to SparkRoom Second Quarter of 2016 Higher Education Inquiry Generation Review, online inquiry volume was at 9.7 percent year over year but conversion rates have slid to 6.2 percent down significantly from third quarter 2014 peak of 8.4 percent. Therefore, a school using a traditional and time-consuming approach to online enrollment will most likely fail to realize any significant online enrollment growth.

And why is that? What are the costs of failure? First and foremost, it's important to realize that most schools that initially fall short of their effort to grow online programs and enrollments tend to rely on their existing operational structures and resources to manage all aspects of online program promotion, recruitment, and admissions. Though experience with recruitment and matriculated in traditional students, they are usually not familiar with other structures to respond to the demands of online students. And, specifically, traditional universities that enroll the students only in the Spring and Fall semesters have prospective student funnels that take at least two years to realize. And, in contrast, the level of competition for qualified online students requires systems that can process inquiring prospects into matriculations within two weeks.

And I have to mention that, every now and then, you run into a situation – you're in the conference room and you say to somebody, "You should be able to process inquiring prospects into registered students within two weeks, 15 days," and I have been told point-blank, "Impossible. That's not going to happen." And then the exact same person, six months later, will say to me, "We've done it. Well done." So, just to give a little insight – a little color – into what goes into coming to terms with the feasibility of that task.

I want to give you a couple minor examples of why institutions that rely on their existing infrastructure to serve the needs of a two-year funnel fall short. And one of them is very straight forward. Typically, traditional universities will not process an application until the application file is completed. And, when you're dealing with, let's say, a senior high school student, the probability of them actively managing their application process is, well, very small. So what happens is an institution may receive an application, and they have to wait for transcripts, then they have to wait for a FAFSA – or, I should say, the students submits the FAFSA and the institution now receives the ISIR – and, as additional application materials come in, it isn't until application file is then complete that any work goes into it to determine if the student is qualified, should be admitted into the institution.

Those organizations of those institutions that have the infrastructure in place to effectively manage the funnel of prospective online students are proactively – on an ongoing basis – managing all of the application materials that are received from the student. Most importantly, they will proactively communicate with students to ensure that they stay on top of what's required to complete that file. So nothing is actually on hold – institutions will proactively process and reach out to students to ensure that everything is processed on a timely manner.

So, on that note, what are the success requirements? Online enrollment both requires a dedicated, integrated online management organization, and synchronization. That's the type of organization that would allow you to achieve that two-week processing time, plus or minus. A school successful at enrolling students into their distance learning programs have created a faster and customer-oriented student-centered philosophies in which they proactively support a student from inquiry through graduation.

This is achieved through a process of information, operations management training, and this synchronization of efforts creates a business management system and culture designed to identify and remove the costs and processing effects while minimizing variability. So what I mean by that is, if you think about the synchronization of the various functional efforts that must work together to process an inquiring prospect through application and through matriculation as you integrate and synchronize those efforts you're able to identify efficient processes, remove defects, and minimize variability.

So what options do institutions without an educated, integrated online management organization have? What happens if this is not in place and you're trying to figure out how to grow online enrollments? Again, getting back to the title of the webinar – so your president came to you or this came to the president and the call to action is very straight forward: "We have to grow online enrollments or penetrate that market." There are two options. One is to partner with an Online Program Manager – or OPM – to address internal operations challenges and easily set about that task. Consequently, many institutions choose to pursue an OPM partnership. On that note, I will say that, for some institutions, that's perhaps the best choice but not the only choice. In fact, the other option is to build out a dedicated internal enrollment management organization designed to serve the needs of that online division and determine adult student population.

So, getting back to the OPMs, what are the pros and cons of pursuing that approach? First, I'd like to give you a little bit of background of where the OPM market is headed. It's been growing for a number of years now. In fact, the need for expertise – or I should say, the need for an online management expertise – related to the recent explosion of OPMs that help schools go to market immediately. In fact, by 2015 OPMs were generating more than $1 billion revenue and that's actually up 32 percent since 2011. Typically, two types of institutions considered OPM partnerships. Clearly, those newly offering online programs but also those with existing online divisions that have failed to realize any significant online growth. And both of them – both types of institutions – face the exact same challenge: lack of resources and experience.

So what are the pros of pursuing an Online Program Management partnership? OPMs simplify online program development, promotion, and recruitment. Right? Just like the title of the slide. It's very straight forward. When you hire an OPM, you rely entirely on someone else's resources to grow your online programs. Most importantly, there is no capital outlay required. OPMs come to the table willing to make an investment in your brand. They typically, from the marketing efforts, provide the stuff and cover all the required significant expenditures. And, as a result of that, institutions can lead online programs without making any noteworthy outcome investments.

In fact, OPMs have everything covered. They are comprised of large teams, inclusive of online education admissions professionals, instructional designers, learning management system administrators, marketing and equipment experts, technical resources, student support professionals, and so on. So, because of the large teams, schools can rely on an OPM from start to finish to plan, launch, and maintain and online program. Lastly, it's fast. OPMs have the funding, the infrastructure, and the team already in place. As a result, the go-to-market timeframe is a fraction of what most institutions would achieve on their own.

But what are the cons? So there are a couple of items here that we should discuss as well. Right? Which are what? First and foremost, demanding tuition revenue demands – although not necessarily the most important one – but, in any case, OPMs don't work for free. Right? So they are far from it. Tuition revenue sharing agreements vary but the rate going to the OPM can be as great as 70 percent. And I could tell you from experience that, more often than not, it is 70 percent. Most schools partnering with an OPM provider, in fact, they could get only a small portion of their potential online income.

That, followed by the fact that OPMs make long-term contracts – and they have to because OPMs invest significant resources at the front-end that allows the growth of online programs. Right? So they often require lengthy contracts up to ten years so they can get their return investment on the back-end. These contracts lock the schools into terms despite changing climates, complications, and internal resource capabilities so, really, it does not matter how the situation may change over time. The schools are, for a number of reasons, tied to that long-term contract and I'll get into more detail on that in a second.

But another item that we should cover is that, when a school's engaged with OPMs, they release much of their authority regarding how and what programs are promoted so the institution has a lack of control in a number of variables. So using their funds, OPM providers typically manage the end-to-end recruitment and admission process, decisions are made based on the need to be successful with the programs that they manage, and do not necessarily factor in what is of greatest long-term benefit for the school or its brand. Now, getting back to long-term contracts, that, in itself – the fact that the OPM provides the infrastructure, their resources, and long-term contract results in an ongoing dependence. What happens upon the expiration of an OPM contract? Frequently, the schools are left with nothing. So, typically, everything that was done by the OPM through programs, to systems, to teams, is owned by the OPM and, upon contract expirations, a school have only two choices: either renew the contract or start anew.

So now let's talk about the pros and cons of an internal organization. And, clearly, what I discussed earlier is that an effective online management structure requires an integrated, scalable organization capable of supporting and sustaining all online enrollment growth and has to be able to support the student success from inquiry through graduation. And, if that's the case and institutions are currently relying on their existing infrastructures and falling short of achieving their goals, how do you first approach the challenge of building something internally and what are the pros of having that in place?

Well, the pros are very straight forward. The internal organization maintain all of the control of growth. So an internal enrollment management team is responsible for everything and then reaps every bit of the eventual rewards. The downside of that is that you don't have someone else upfronting all the capital. Right? Excuse me for a second, please. But anyway, getting back to taking complete ownership. An internally built online management organization is 100 percent owned by the institution that created it. There are no expiring contracts that cause operations to go back to the starting line and organizations are structured to succeed.

The structured integrations facilitates improvement in a highly competitive setting. Integrated involvement management organizations are customized based on the internal and external environments and can be regularly evolved to ensure ongoing success. This is the point I was making before in cons: no tuition revenue sharing but it means that the upfront capital investment – and we'll get into that in the cons – belongs to the university. However, the tuition earned by online programs is not split. Everything you earn is yours.

Complete operational control – institutions that internally manage their own process make all of the decisions regarding equipment and admissions practices. Every choice can be selected based on what is important to the school now and in the future. And, as a marketer, I have to say something that's equally important to lots of institutions that run inquiry and prospectives. Your internal team makes the marketing decisions. Third-party actions that focus on a fraction of the school's portfolio are alleviated.

So let's talk about the cons a little bit and, as I was talking about the pros, I mixed the two up a little bit because I think they are intertwined to some degree. Again, one of the pros is no tuition revenue sharing but that, in itself, means what? There is an upfront capital investment. Building out a comparative online management organization is challenging. You have some capital investment getting back may important – not prohibitive, but important – although the expenditure will be significantly less than the multi-year loss of one's revenue-sharing agreement – it costs so much and it's getting an online quota and it's significant. And, because your institution is investing all the capital, all of the financial risk, now you are exposed as well.

So what are these financial risks and what is the upfront capital investment? Now, let's take a step back and talk about the pros and cons of the OPM. One of the advantages of the OPM that I failed to mention up to this point is that, ultimately, they are compensated on performance because it's a tuition revenue sharing business model. If they fail to realize enrollments, they don't make any of their money back so they're sticking their neck out, technically speaking. In this case, the tables have turned. The institution will stick its neck out but they're trying to invest in long-term which the risk is, by far, much greater and the advantages of it in an operational control are advantageous or very important to many schools.

So let's talk about some of these upfront capital investments – what are the capital requirements? It means that you do not have a dedicated enrollment organization so you have to hire and train people. You may have to engage with an agency or a consultancy to help identify what are you operational needs? What are the people who could be hired? Process need to be integrated or coordinated. You will upfront all the marketing costs so OPMs typically pay for marketing because it will make their money back and, in your case, you will hire, train, and build the organization from the ground up and upfront the marketing costs.

So significant resources are needed and integrated online management then consists of more ventures, marketing, and additional stuff. You're looking at financial aid, financial aid evaluators, application processors – just to name a few. In addition, institutions may need to hire dedicated instructional designers, learning management system administrators, technical resources, and student support professionals.

Now, more often than not, institutions already have many of these resources in place so the capital investment may be minimized in some areas. What will be required, instead, is that reapplication, retraining of resources. In any case, lastly, one of the costs of an internal organization is it's a slow implementation. So building it from scratch takes time but many schools have successfully achieved a five-figure online enrollment within less than a decade.

And, on that note, I'd like to cover on how you go about making a choice. Business decisions are all about trade-offs. The harder you work and the more you invest, the greater your success. So, before you make any decisions, outline your short and long-term objectives, review your current practices, and identify internal gaps, and, finally, set yourself up for success. We provide an online management operations consultant that can help institutions identify what is the best path moving forward. Like, I said earlier on in the presentation, not always that this always translates to one option versus the other. There are situations where we go in and, as you can see, we'll conduct an operational assessment; we'll conduct a competitive analysis.

Based on the findings of both the operational assessment and the competitive analysis, we'll formulate a school analysis that leads to the operation strategy and then we outline a technical execution plan. As we do that, sometimes, we come to the realization that, for this particular institution, an OPM may be the best option. For other institutions, to build an internal online management organization may be the way to go. There's one challenge, though – sometimes you come to the realization that building the internal online management team is the way to go but that's going to take a little bit of time to get off the ground so what do you do in the meantime? What do you do to get the ball rolling as you build this team?

We assist institutions with not exactly OPM partnerships or relationships – We have an OPM-like short-term option that allows universities to go to market and get the online enrollments going as we build the internal organization. But, ultimately, begins regardless if you choose to engage in a short-term OPM engagement without tuition revenue sharing, without long-term commitments, leading to an internal online management organization or, if you choose to go straight for an OPM partnership, the approach we take is always the same: the operational assessment, competitive analysis, operational strategy, and tactical execution plan that helps institutions determine on their own what is the best path moving forward.

And the goal, ultimately comes down to how do we get to two weeks? So, on that note, I will mention that I have had worked with institutions where they partner with an OPM – regardless if it's a short-term engagement or long-term commitment – and, for whatever reason, failed to address what the original challenge is. So you will find institutions where, if you're unable to figure out how to streamline the processing of, for example, application materials, it really does not matter how efficient your enrollment management organization or your OPM partners is – you will fail to effectively compete in the online education landscape where, ultimately, when all is said and done, if you're unable to process and inquiring prospect through application and matriculation within approximately two weeks, you are going to fall short to what your competitors are capable of doing today.

And, on that note, I will also say that I've oftentimes run into situations where institutions will not understand the competitive landscape and tend to make the assumption that not all institutions compete directly or indirectly with their institutions. And I assure you that, as you engage and complete a competitive analysis, you will realize very rapidly that you compete with a much larger set of organizations than most institutions believe to be their primary or indirect competitors.

So how do we get to two weeks? Another few things that I want to highlight, well, first and foremost, you got to take the burden of the application off the student and make it your own. How do you process inquiries in real-time? These are questions that come to me oftentimes and I can tell you, when I find myself having conversations about operational and integration synchronization, it doesn't take long for people to fall back into this state and say, "Hey, we can't do this."

We understand that, of course. So we get Financial Aid to work together with Admissions and Admissions needs to have someone who manages the prospects process – that's part of their team and so on. That's very straight forward. But, ultimately, that's not the operational challenge in itself. While the functions that must work together and synchronize efforts to effectively process and competitively process these applicants from inquiring to application and registration in two weeks, it's important – what most institutions don't understand is the various steps that integrate team – that state where you show that seamless integration and synchronization.

So how do we process inquiries in real-time? How are inquiries delivered real-time to an Admissions rep? So, just to give you an idea, most online institutions that have integrated systems in place are able to deliver an inquiry to an enrollment advisor in pretty much real-time and, on average, most institutions that have their operational act together will call those inquiring prospects back within minutes of having received the inquiry.

So, if you have an admissions system in place that is incapable to, on average, return an inquiring prospects call, or email, or request within a matter of minutes right off the bat – priority of conversion – then your probability of scaling your online programs is at a serious disadvantage. So, once you receive an inquiry – so I keep thinking about how this whole process works – once an inquiry is received, if you're able to get back with that inquiry as soon as humanly possible, how many phone calls are you going to attempt on Day 1, Day 2? How many emails? How are you going to coordinate those efforts? How do you manage the outreach efforts? Right? How do you integrate, synchronize application materials management?

So, again, institutions taking up to two years to make their full numbers – they can sit on an application just because the file is not complete but, in this case, if you have your competitors processing inquiring prospects in two weeks, can you afford to have, let's say, a prospect received by the institution that isn't processed for a couple of weeks? And one of the institutions that I recently helped, I can tell you that they were taking about 72 days to process an applicant for registration. Four weeks were spent on working or finalizing a degree of it after transcripts had originally been received by the university.

So if we have an infrastructure or bureaucratic system in place that results in a very low application that there is processing and you're unable to integrate, synchronize that application materials management, you will not be able to achieve two weeks. So, how you do that, that's where we'll come in – that's where we help institutions. We provide insight on how to integrate Admissions with Registrations processes and, lastly, Academic Support.

So I mentioned earlier that the short-term OPM engagements – now I jump a little bit ahead of myself in relation to this slide – but, ultimately, that's what it means. Right? And there are a lot of institutions that are ready to move forward – they want to do it, they don't want a long-term engagement, they don't want tuition revenue sharing. When that's the case and when we deem that that's the right option for an institution, we will offer a short-term OPM engagement on a per fee basis so you don't have to worry, again, about tuition profit sharing but that leads to an internal team taking over. Now, typically, but not always – depending on the degree that we have that collaboration and buy-in in an institution – the short term OPM engagement can be as little as six months and up to 12 months.

Kathy:                         Alright. Thank you, Marcelo. So we're going to take some questions from the attendees. If you have a question. Please type it into question box on your webinar control panel. If you can't see the control panel, look for the orange box with the arrow. Click on the arrow and the control panel will expand, allowing you to type in your questions. We received a few while Marcelo was talking so we'll start with those while more are coming in. So the first question is: "What can I do if I'm in a contract with and OPM and the enrollment is disappointing?"

Marcelo:                      Well, common question. Not always happens but, occasionally, that happens. The first thing I would recommend is conduct in some sort with the organization, the consultant's organization – and I'll conduct an operational assessment. I think, oftentimes, in terms to all service providers, it's very easy for an institution to go ahead and hang a hat on the OPM partner, or the agency, or somebody's not working, or something's no working, or what they propose is not working. And, if the operational processes are not integrated, not synchronized, it really does not matter what you have at the front-end, and OPM or even a small Admissions team able to effectively process inquiring prospects into applicants. And, once the application comes in, if it takes 72 days as the original I was talking about a minute ago to process that application, you're going to fall short of making your numbers and, most importantly, you will not be able to effectively compete in a highly competitive online education marketspace or landscape. So, again, I would begin with an internal operational assessment.

Kathy:                         Okay. Some questions are coming in now. Can you explain what an operational assessment would include and what an institution can expect to gain from the tactical execution plan?

Marcelo:                      Yes, so the first step – maybe not the first step – one of the most important steps is that we'll become prospects to your school because there's only one way to really gain in-depth insight into what may be the operational challenges and that is to look at it from the perspective of the prospective student. So what we'll do, oftentimes, is, as part of the operational assessment, have someone apply to your institution, request information first, go through the admissions process, apply, and to one or two of your competitors and do the same and benchmark practices. Okay?

As we do that, we identify areas that need additional exploring, if you will. So we'll come into the institution, interview institution stakeholders, functional managers, and analyze processes in place to identify any challenges or process improvement opportunities. As we do this, we start building the foundation of – together with that competitive analysis we talked about and, if you think about it, right off the bat, we are applying to not only to your institutions but also your competitive institutions.

That, in itself, the beginning of the competitive analysis. So we look at operational challenges and investigate, analyze those challenges and we interview and engage with your institution's stakeholders, then conduct the operational assessment. We'll start framing that analysis that will give us a pretty good look at the trend and the internal strengths and weaknesses – mostly operational speaking – and the external threats and opportunities – meaning what are your competitors doing in the landscape, in the marketplace to begin with?

That, in itself, becomes a foundation of a tactical or an executable plan, meaning executable plan will walk you through each and every step you need to take to achieve that level of integration and synchronization. In addition, we will provide you with help to hire, train, how to do Admissions and other functional area employees. If you are relocating resources internally, we will also provide you with interactions as far as specifics on how to retrain internal resources because that is something that is information – when you transfer people internally from a culture, an infrastructure that manages students over a two year cycle and expect them to now figure out how to manage something over two weeks, you will run into cultural challenges so we provide specific examples on how to challenge or how to address cultural challenges, as well.

We'll provide you with point-by-point instructions on "This is how you manage inquiries," "This is how you talk to inquiring prospects," "This is how many calls you make," "This is how many emails go out," "This is how you write the communications," "This is how people answer the phone," "This is how people make phone calls." Okay? "This is how you process a transcript," "This is how you process an applicant," "This is how you process and ISIR information to the application process." How everything is synchronized is detailed so that, at no given moment, anyone working in that integrated synchronized organization has to wonder, "What do I do with this?"

Kathy:                         Excellent. Now, I've seen the final documents and they are extensive.

Marcelo:                      Yeah.

Kathy:                         Okay. Next question: "Our president wants to increase enrollment in our online programs but we have only two intakes – January and August. We are looking at beginning seven-week courses. Are you telling me that won't work because a student can't begin their classes every two weeks?"

Marcelo:                      No. No, that's a very good question. I thank you whoever put that out. That comes up a lot, especially at traditional universities that don't necessarily want to engage in offering accelerated degree programs – meaning not necessarily in the length of the course itself but rather having several starts per academic year. Right? No, the two-week cycle really has nothing to do with how often you start or the length of your term. The two weeks has to do with your competitor's ability to process an inquiring prospect within that amount of time. Okay?

So think about it this way – let's just say for the sake of argument that you have a single start on September 1st. So your recruitment cycle for all online education, typically, you will realize about 80 to 90 percent of your enrollments from inquiries received over the prior 90 days, plus or minus. So you have, basically, three months to process your funnel and to translate that funnel into prospectives to applicants and then university students. Right? As you do that, you have competitors engaging in conversations with your same prospects. These competitors will proactively manage the application process.

So, for example, someone has engaged with your brand – they have applied. Okay. And you say to them, "Well, have you attended any other colleges and universities?" The answer is yes. Then you'll say, "Well, we need to ensure that we get those transcripts sent to us as soon as possible." Now, let's assume for a second that that inquiry came in two or three weeks out from your start date and that person is also speaking to one of your competitors. And, upon submitting that application to a competitive institution, they get contacted and they're asked the same question. And, if then, the applicant replies, "Yes, I have attended other institutions," well, "Then you need to send us the transcript but we will do that for you." This is part – I'm not going to get into the specifics of how that works but, ultimately, that's the difference. Right?

It's not so much about how often does it start or what is the length of the term – it's the fact that each and every one of your prospective students are going to be speaking or engaging with other brands, other players in the landscape, that will take the burden of the application process off their shoulders and, effectively and proactively, manage that process. And, in doing so, they're capable to, within two weeks, not only tell the students, "This is how you're going to apply. This is how you do your application. We can help you with your FAFSA. We can help you with everything else. And, by the way, this is how you're going to pay for college."

That student or representative will engage in that brand which simply means to you that, even though that person engaged with you to begin with, because you were unable to effectively compete in that landscape and manage the process the same way – now your conversions suffer. And now institutions begin to ask themselves the question, "So do we have an Admissions problem or do we have a Marketing problem?" Because, if your conversions suffer, that means your cost per start, your conversion metrics, is not looking all that good.

But what's an operational challenge and what's because the traffic wasn't qualified? And 99 out of 100 is an operational challenge because your competitors are able to process that person in two weeks – not because you start twice a year or you only have seven weeks or eight weeks. That's not, in itself, important. What's important is your ability to effectively manage that application process. I know I was repetitive there so thank you for bearing with me.

Kathy:                         So I just want to confirm – so it's about getting the commitment with them in two weeks, not getting them to start the program?

Marcelo:                      It's not the commitment, necessarily. See, the students are always committed. Once they engage with a brand by submitting an application, the commitment is there. The degree to which you proactively ensure that the application process is simplest and, frankly, easy, to a student is what determined which institution the student is most likely to commit to or commit to saying they'll start with. Yeah.

Kathy:                         Right. Okay. "With so many OPM vendors out there, some of them have attractive terms but little experience. How does one select a partner?"

Marcelo:                      Well, OPM partners, you have to look at the portfolio of institutions they currently worked with – that's going to be gold. I can tell you that some OPM partners specialize on, let's say, Admission Departments in about 20 schools. Right? So, if an OPM partner is used to working with national brands – like, for the sake of argument, Georgetown University or Notre Dame University and so on – and you're a liberal arts university out of Idaho, I will highly recommend not to pursue or have a relationship with that OPM because the complexities of marketing and promoting an original liberal arts university in Idaho are, by far, more than the complexities of promoting a national brand or a powerhouse. Right?

So the first thing I would do is take a first look at the portfolio of universities currently being served by that OPM and request references. You want to have detailed discussions with people at the institutions that are working with that OPM and, specifically, you want to ask questions about enrollment growth, conversion metrics – and, when I talk about conversion metrics, it's funnel metrics and those are inquiry to application metrics, application to acceptance metrics, and acceptance to registration, and registration to start. The devil is in the details and I can tell you that, oftentimes, you'll run into institutions that will promise very attractive conversion metrics and are rapidly disappointed when they realize that reality of how difficult it is to achieve competitive metrics in this landscape.

Kathy:                         Excellent. "For an internal organization, are you recommending that everything is done in-house or does it make sense for schools to outsource some things, still?"

Marcelo:                      It depends on the institutions. There are some – We have institutions build internal management – or, excuse me, internal enrollment management decisions. What we do not currently do, for example, is provide institutions with assistance on instructional design and online course hosting. Most institutions have those capabilities already in place but those that do not may need to engage with third party service providers. We do partner with a number of third party service providers and are able to introduce our relationships to our clients, as well.

Kathy:                         "So what does a school do if they want to build out an internal organization but they don't have a call center?"

Marcelo:                      We recently completed an engagement like that. You build it from the ground up. Ultimately, I think people, oftentimes, tend to overcomplicate what it means to build an internal enrollment management organization – especially when it comes to online application, people – There are two sides of this. Service providers will position the need for a call center organization in such a way that institutions will think, "Well, this is the only way you can do this. You have to have a call center organization with an integrated phone system, and so, and so, and so." I have seen organizations, institutions; grow enrollments without integrated phone systems, without an integrated lead management system that's in place.

The question is what are the organizational goals? That's first and foremost. So, if an institution comes to us with, "We currently have a couple hundred online students we're looking to start. We're looking to get to 1,000 or 2,500 online students. We need to build up a call center," I'll say, "No, you need an integrated enrollment management organization. Granted, Admissions counselors and other functional resources will need access to a phone, okay, but the processes can be managed in such a way that you achieve your results without necessarily having an integrated phone system that is a high capital investment decision to begin with.

Kathy:                         Makes sense. Okay, last question and lots more coming in while you're answering: "When you were at Post University, what were the first steps you took to ensure online growth and how long did it take you before you started seeing significant growth?"

Marcelo:                      Oh, good question. There were two first steps – one was to define the Admissions goals. Right? Because, ultimately, it does not matter what you're able to do on the Marketing improvements side of the equation – promotion side of the institution – if your Recruitment aren't, your Admissions are not well trained and placed in a position of success. Right? And what I mean by that is, again, think about what I was saying a minute ago – a lot of vendors are invested in the idea of "Hey, you need a call center." Right? Now, I'm going to take you to Post University Day One. We don't have an integrated phone system. I don't have a way to deliberate inquiries real-time so I built a call center organization. Is it really a call center? No, it's four people in one room with four phone lines. Okay?

Inquiries come in via email from our various marketing sources. We print those emails and hand deliver those handouts – via those emails – to each one of these four people who are working on simply a phone line and they call people as soon as possible. With that, we achieved a response time of less than a half an hour within the first six months of operations. Once we had that in place, I set out to maximize my, if you will, online share of voice. I mean by that is I took a look at the online landscape, competitors, what was being done on additional marketing and any other type of market channel and figured out how to maximize my share of voice so that I could maximize the number of inquiries coming my way.

But that was not done until we have a simple process in place to deliberate inquiries so we could respond to them as soon as possible. And, if you think about what I just said to you, there was no integrated phone system, no ability to deliver inquiries to the reps. And, with that infrastructure, we managed to grow enrollments from 800 students to nearly 2,000. We offered that until we cause a total student enrollment of about 2,500 students that we decided that, frankly, to be honest with you, we're making a little bit of money so let's buy an integrated phone system. Okay? But the reality is we made it to nearly 2,500 students, close to 2,000 students, without an integrated phone system and without an ability to have any form of inquiry distribution in place.

Kathy:                         And how long did that take?

Marcelo:                      That process took – It began in March of 2005. It was place by plus or minus March/April of 2016.

Kathy:                         2006?

Marcelo:                      Thank you.

Kathy:                         Yeah.

Marcelo:                      2006. Yeah, 2005 to 2006, we were up in running at that time.

Kathy:                         Fantastic. Well, that wraps up the questions we've received today so thank you to everyone for joining us today. If you still have questions or if you'd like to learn more about how SparkRoom can help you determine the best path toward online enrollment growth, reach out to us at the phone number on the screen – 877-423-1766 or email webinars@sparkroom.com. We wish all of you great success in your future ventures. Have a great day.

Marcelo:                      Thank you, everyone.