Guest Blog: Ann Bezbatchenko, Loyola University, Chicago
Bio—Education from University of Dayton, B.A. in English; Catholic University of America, M.A. in English; at Loyola for seven years
JS: Why did you choose to be in Graduate Admissions?
AB: I must admit I rather fell into graduate admissions as my graduate assistantship was working with the Graduate School. When I first took a position at Loyola, I was in Student Services and then chose to move into Graduate Admissions at the University. I like this role because of the flexibility of the position, and my experience and knowledge from my graduate assistantship helped make this the right fit for me. A big part of why I like graduate admissions is the opportunity to work with the graduate faculty. I like working with them and enjoy how each school needs a bit different attention, focus, and marketing as they are serving a specific student segment. This is different than with undergraduate admissions.
JS: What is your biggest challenge this year?
AB: We are proud that we are coming off of a year of record enrollment. This achievement has potential to be our biggest challenge this year as we work to keep up the momentum in applications and matriculants after a significant increase. Along with this momentum in activity is the need to keep people on the team motivated and engaged after such a good year. It is critical to keep a constant watch this year on what we do in light of this situation.
JS: What is working well for you and your team?
AB: I am fortunate that many things work well with my team. I’ll share about two of those. First, we work well in partnership with individual schools and departments. This has been an initiative that we’ve worked at over time, and it runs very well now. Outcomes of such partnerships are our successes in social media and with student and alumni profiles. Without our partnerships working well, the content for the social media would not be dynamic and we’d not have such consistent availability of folks to profile.
Second, we bring together all channels of marketing well or, should I say, we have a well-functioning integrated plan. While we have an overarching execution plan (including dates, timelines, responsibilities), we also have integrated plans specialized to each school. These plans indicated segments for marketing and the mix of channels for those segments always integrating social media as well. My team serves seven schools, which means some programs may require separate plans if they are new or have a specific focus.To support these plans, I can rely on my staff to individually do their jobs well.
JS: What is the next trend you see coming or are tracking?
AB: As our numbers grow, we are paying more attention to both diversity and international recruitment. To broaden our recruitment efforts, both of these areas are critical, and we need to fine-tune our strategies and tactics overall as well as in particular programs to best continue our success.
Additionally, we have our social media up and running, and it is doing well. Now, we must look at “what’s next?” How do we keep people active, involved, and engaged in social media both internally and those we want to attract to the graduate schools?
JS: How does the word “segmentation” apply to your department or strategy?
AB: Segmentation is at the heart of what we do. To put this in context, “Gen Yers” or the “Millennials” who are now a part of our funnel have a whole different and additional set of expectations from their undergraduate recruitment and admissions experience. Many of them got lots of special attention. This fact has placed a layer of responsibility on graduate admissions to follow the same path to recruit those targeted students. To be able to best segment and target it takes data to know them, and it takes a deeper dive to get this data. One example is from our Admitted Student Survey, where we found a correlation between income and customer service regardless of age. This finding helped us focus on our customer service offerings to increase yield.
In fact, let me say that when we became a general graduate admissions office, we’d have been lost, and more than that, unsuccessful, if we had not segmented our target audiences.
JS: Can you give us a preview of a few key points you’ll be sharing in your session at the Stamats Integrated Marketing Graduate School Marketing Conference in July?
AB: International student recruitment can be a challenge for any institution. I’ll be sharing a bit about our journey in this arena with a few key points. I’ll talk about how we chose our course of action based on data, the commitment we made to the course of action as seeing results in this area takes time, and then discuss what it takes to make international students feel welcome through the recruitment and admissions process.
