Gaps are Everywhere
When you work in enrollment, the London public transit reminder to “Mind the Gap” is a mantra that serves you well. Whenever you’re stretched too thin, pouring over data, balancing budgets, or unearthing missed opportunities; this call can re-center and inspire you.
Gaps can be people we’re overlooking, or steps in the journey where we leave them hanging, unsure how to proceed or just unconvinced. New policies and tactics might have unintended consequences, creating barriers for your team or the students you serve. You try to stay vigilant for new gaps, but the daily demands of the work make them easy to miss.
The widest gaps are usually labeled ‘fires’, garnering attention, time, and resources for solutions. Gaps in technology always seem to outpace teams and resources, creating a sense of urgency to keep up with the latest CRM, website widget, or digital campaign. Gaps across campus and org charts produce disjointed goals and tactics whose results often breed confusion.
Left unattended, these gaps lead to loss – of resources, personnel, and the very student communities we are passionate about serving.
The Service Blueprint: A New Approach for Enrollment Management
You want to make the best use of the people, resources, and tools at your disposal to deliver a great experience for prospective and current students. A service blueprint is a well-established method in human-centered design to visualize a customer journey and all of the activities required to support it.
Posted on a wall or virtual whiteboard it becomes a tool for conversation and planning, helping your team see the gaps and decide where to focus for improvement. Once you have the process mapped it can also be a great tool for training new team members.
In a service blueprint you typically map out a customer journey in one row, with all the visible and behind-the-scenes human actions and technologies required to deliver the experience shown in rows below it.
To demonstrate how a service blueprint can be used for enrollment, we have created an example for the graduate student enrollment journey. Gaps abound in the graduate enrollment experience at many schools, due to lack of coordination across graduate admissions and individual academic departments. While schools see graduate and other non-traditional programs as a growth opportunity, a disjointed enrollment experience leads to missed targets.
In this example you will see:
- what support processes are likely to be most critical
- when behind-the-scenes actions must be completed, and
- where enrollment teams are best positioned to facilitate the engagements that propel a prospective graduate student toward your institution.
A Resource to Help You Get Started
We’re making our Graduate Enrollment Service Blueprint and starter questions available as a free download. Remember – a good service blueprint is based on research with your actual audiences and reflects your current or proposed processes. We hope this will spark some new thinking for your team.
Enrollment Strategy at NewCity
NewCity’s Enrollment Strategy team are experts in minding the gap. We center your students, parents, and staff at the heart of our initiatives and work to not only identify the gaps but to help you remove barriers to success. We leverage the power of your digital tools; CRM, communication plans, and website, to shape an experience that attracts prospective students and reinvests the efforts of your talented enrollment teams.
NewCity offers a variety of scalable solutions to address the unique challenges enrollment leaders are facing today. We’ve been partnering with our college and university clients to help them to mind the gap, innovate practices, and most importantly – create digital transformations that help you in the work of attracting and retaining the students you serve.
Schedule a call with us to discuss how NewCity can help you to mind the gaps within your enrollment efforts.
Download our Graduate Student Enrollment Service Blueprint
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