This morning I was watching one of the morning news shows that wasn't on commercial break (it was early, so I don't remember which one), and I heard something like "faculty tweet about 50 times a day." I was running late so I missed the segment, but I did mke sure to look it up when I got to the office today. I think this is just so cool, and a great story to have out there.

This is the article I found about it in the Washington Post (article).The school is GWU and they have been called "The Most Active College for Twitter Use," according to this study. They limited their study to administrators officially affiliated with the university. According to their methodology,

"To narrow the scope of our investigation, only accounts officially affiliated with university administrations were included. This excludes unofficial students groups, fans of sports teams, and the personal accounts of professors, students, and university employees. Limiting our study to official accounts enabled us to examine the Twitter usage of university organizations, rather than the usage of student bodies and the surrounding community."

According to the study, the 17 official GW accounts tweet on AVERAGE 58 times a day. That is insane! I have been trying to get the SS staff to get involved with twitter, and it has not been an easy task. But I guess like everything else, one you get going it is easy to get addicted! I love the idea of twitter and how it can keep you connected, and I love that this story is in the news. To me, it shows a great level of involvement and community, and that i always a great message to send about your school. The research is actually really interesting, and you should check out the full report at http://universitiesandcolleges.org/top-100-colleges-twitter/.

And please, follow Elizabeth on Twitter! I want to boost her "twitter self-esteem" and get a good following! http://www.twitter.com/elizscar

Do you have a good example of someone who is an obsessed twitter fiend at your school? Send me an email at meredith@simpsonscarborough.com. I would love to inteview someone about their twitter skills and how it has worked for them. Thanks!

--Meredith Simpson

At AGB's national conference on trusteeship last month I was introduced to The Education Trust's "College Results Online" tool.  On the site you are able to compare basic statistics and in-depth graduation and persistence rates for you and your peer institutions.  This is a GREAT tool and I have started using the data in a number of different ways, all of which can help you build a data-driven marketing and messaging platform for your institution. Check it out!

-Teresa Valerio Parrot

Join SimpsonScarborough CEO, Elizabeth Scarborough, for the Bring Your Brand Strategy to Life web series offered through Academic Impressions and explore the essentials of a dynamic brand strategy, including:

·         Using market research to guide differentiation

·         Finding your brand promise and making it practical

·         Bringing your brand to life

·         Assessing the effectiveness of an existing brand campaign

Pressure on institutions of higher education to bolster enrollment and advance their reputation continues to increase, and colleges and universities must differentiate themselves in the minds of prospective students. Far more than implementing a new logo or a tagline, effective brand building takes a holistic view of your institution and capitalizes on its strengths and unique qualities. Equally important is the way that you get your campus and your external stakeholders involved in the brand.

This four-part webcast series will offer you the information you need to begin identifying a plan of action for your institution's brand campaign. Designed to provide a broad overview of branding best practices, this web series is well suited for institutions embarking on a new branding initiative or looking to critically examine their existing brand.

Find out more and register for this web series.

This is going to sound very odd at first but bear with me. A goat-milk carton may actually be a good example of how to listen to your students. Ok, here's the deal: I saw this video on "Church of the Customer Blog" about Flying Goat Milk, and I just had to share it with you.  In the video, Jackie and Ben use a goat-milk carton (wait, don't click away yet) to illustrate why it's important to listen to your students. I told you this was odd, but here's what they say: "One thing you have to know about goat's milk is that the milk solids go to the bottom, and every time you drink it you've got to shake it up." But when Jackie shook the carton milk flew out all over her kitchen because the carton didn't have one of those fancy screw tops. When Jackie went back to supermarket, on one of her return visits, she noticed that carton now had a screw top, along with the words "Customer Requested" on the carton.

Jackie says, by adding these two words, "they are basically saying, hey we heard you." She also stressed the importance of not only providing ways for customers (or students) to contact your institution but to actively give them the tools to do so. The end result: we learn what students like and don't like--isn't that an important aspect of effective marketing?  As they said in the video, "Listening is a risk-free strategy overall...nothing can harm you by actively listening to what people are saying and feeding that back..."

-Jeff Papa

SimpsonScarborough discussed with Andrew Flagel, Dean of Admissions and Associate Vice President for Enrollment Development for George Mason University, the pricing study SimpsonScarborough recently conducted for his institution.

Q. Why did you decide to study George Mason University's price elasticity? 

A. Mason has enjoyed a steady surge in popularity, with extraordinary growth in our out-of-state markets.  As with most institutions we are under increasing financial pressure, but while we had a fair amount of insight on in-state students, we had conflicting data on price and cost related to our out-of-state students. Most of our overlap was with other D.C. area schools, where tuition was FAR higher than ours.  At the same time many, if not most, of our applicants indicated that they were also strongly considering far less expensive options closer to their homes, generally their state's flagship institutions.  As a result, more often than not we were the middle cost of the three top choices, both for the students we were enrolling and those we weren't.  To build our budget models we needed a better idea of how price (including discounted price) related to enrollment patterns.

Q.  Why did you choose SimpsonScarborough to conduct the study? 

A. Two reasons, cost and scope of project.  Many of the companies we reviewed wanted massive investments of funds, several in excess of anything we were likely gain in revenue from even optimistic projections.  Others wanted comprehensive long-term contracts, which was problematic since we had no experience with those companies on which to base a multi-year contract, and the degree to which we would be able to impact our financial aid formulas, given our historically low level of institutional discounting, wasn't large enough to require the kind of longitudinal experimentation they were used to exploring.  SimpsonScarborough offered a statistical approach that was very attractive for its flexibility in use for our planning process.

Q. Who were the major beneficiaries of the resulting data once the study was complete? 

A. The data were most helpful to our institutional planning team, but also very well received by our governing board who was wrestling with issues of price, discount, and access.

Q. How have you used the findings?

A. Based on the study, SimpsonScarborough developed a simulator which allowed us to see the effect of a range of institutional decisions on price and discounting.  While there is no way to know what might have happened otherwise, Mason chose the optimal model, which included a larger tuition increase with commensurate discount, and our yield patterns closely tracked the model that suggested increased yield in that scenario.  Of course, it remains to be seen how that pattern will hold in the new economic reality, and the subject certainly bears further study.  It is safe to say, however, that the model gave our planning committee and our board the data needed to approve the testing of a more aggressive tuition and discount model than our institution had taken at any time in its history. 

Andrew Flagel is the Dean of Admissions and Associate Vice President for Enrollment Development for George Mason University, where he also teaches in the Department of Communication.  He has presented hundreds of seminars on the college admissions process to students across the country, has been a featured speaker at the Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference as well as the Washington Journalism Conference, has been a featured guest on C-Span's Washington Journal, and his quotes have appeared in recent educational stories in Newsweek, US News and World Report, The Washington Post, and even Teen Vogue.

Dean Flagel serves on the Advisory Board for the National Young Leaders Conference and the Executive Council of the Virginia ACT Advisory Committee as the Virginia representative to the ACT national assembly.  He also served on the Seal of Approval Committee for the National Association for College Admissions Counseling and spent three years as their national membership chairman.  Along with speaking on the college admissions process, Dean Flagel regularly offers presentations on communication styles for "millenials" as well as motivational speeches. 

Be sure to check out Dean Flagel's blog  and his column on Monster Worldwide's admissions.com.

- Renee Kart

[T]he "spacebook" blog has been pretty successful in terms of reaching middle-school and elementary-school kids. Back in November, I posted a little on-the-fly analysis, based on Google Analytics, of how our well our mix of traditional and non-traditional (read: social media) PR campaign worked for this site in its early days. You can see the analysis, complete with charts and graphs, at http://highered.prblogs.org/2008/11/21/traffic-from-a-pr-campaign/ . So if you're interested in reading about that kind of measurement stuff, take a peek at that post (and the comments, of course).

CU comes out on top in several sustainability rankings

Our school has been getting some positive press in the environmental world. Sierra Magazine ranked us second "greenest" school in the nation, after Middlebury College. CU-Boulder was lauded for programs leading to jobs as campus sustainability coordinators, outdoor education coordinators and environmental journalists. The only other school in the nation to be listed as a top school for three job categories was the University of California, Berkeley. 
The Sustainable Endowments Institute rated CU as one of the top 15 campuses in the nation for sustainability. CU-Boulder has the most "A" grades (in seven of eight categories) of any other large university on the list. Due in part to exciting new programs like zero-waste football CU was recognized for our constant work towards being on the leading edge of sustainable practices. 

Check out what they're saying about us: 
Sustainability Endowments Institute 
Sierra Magazine 

Despite these accolades we still have some work to do. CU recently released our carbon inventory, showing the campus's total greenhouse gas emissions. Although the school compared favorably with similar schools we still have a long way to go. Read the report and find out more.