COLLEGE OPEN DAYS - DOES SIZE MATTER?

A familiar feature of open days is the person standing at the door with a clicker to count people as they arrive.

If numbers are up, the head of marketing can bowl into the Principal’s office and gleefully report the good news. If they’re down, the approach might be to don the proverbial tin hat, keep your head down and hope the boss’s attention is being taken up by a bigger crisis elsewhere.

Like so many metrics, open day attendance is often a distraction from the big picture.

Falling attendance numbers are, superficially, a bad sign, but sometimes they are an indication that the college’s marketing communications have improved.

Stay with me.

Let’s split open day visitors, albeit arbitrarily, into two groups.

Group 1. The keen

These are people who are considering going to college but would like to have some face-to-face contact to reassure themselves they’re about to make the right move. Maybe a parent wants to meet the lecturer who is likely to be teaching their offspring to make sure this person knows their specialism.?

Perhaps a potential student is a bit nervous about college and wants some reassurance that they will fit in and feel safe.?

For this group of people, the open day is there to provide something which the website can’t - the ability to get a feel for the place and the people first-hand.

Group 2. The confused.

This group includes the students and parents who have been on the website but got stuck. Perhaps they struggled to navigate the site and therefore felt the need to attend an open day to find out whether the college can offer what they need. It may be that they found the course they were looking for but were unclear about one specific aspect, such as the number of teaching hours, the support for English and Maths or the equipment they might need to purchase.?

They might have struggled with an overly long-winded online application process or failed to get through on the phone. Perhaps they downloaded a PDF prospectus on a smartphone, realised it was almost impossible to digest on the small screen and gave up.

If you’ve been effective at improving your website, the application process and your customer service, open day attendance from this second group may have fallen substantially - even while the application rate increases.

This was the experience in one client college. Improvements to the website and the introduction of a new simplified marketing approach had swiftly doubled the daily application rate, settling down to a sustained 45 per cent increase. ?Open day numbers, though, remained modest if not slightly down on the previous year.

The college’s good data allowed colleagues to see that the application numbers were in fact increasing, which prevented excessive concern about the open day “performance” and focused minds on what counted - the outcome.

This is not to say that falling open day numbers are of no concern. If the application rate is also falling, then it’s likely that reduced attendance really does signal a problem.

If on the other hand the college is following a clear marketing strategy and the application rate is increasing then those smaller and therefore more manageable and customer-friendly open days could be a strength rather than a weakness.

Of course, this is not to say that colleges shouldn’t feel happy about good open day numbers.

Context, though, is everything.

Let’s put it this way. If open day numbers are up, ask the question. Is this because your visitors are keen or simply confused?

Steve Hook