Going Back Again and Again

When yielding a class, how often do you return to something to do it again?

Sometimes it’s necessary to pull a new report with updated data.

In other cases, it’s an unnecessary step that adds to a significant amount of wasted time.

Time that could be better used communicating with prospective students.

Let’s take just one example – prioritizing applicants.  This is something that most CRMs can automate, but many have not utilized that feature.  Instead, we (myself included) would rely on counselors to review their applicants and identify to prioritize outreach.

We convinced ourselves that it would minimize errors.  That’s not true, but I won’t get into that today.

So, we ask our counselors to review their applicants to prioritize their outreach.  How long would that process take?  Let’s assume about ten minutes to go through their applicants and bring their best guess as to who should receive a particular outreach.

How often would they do this?  Let’s assume twice a day.  In the morning, they’d work on some mass outreach effort, a group email, or a text.  In the afternoon, they’d work on a more personal outreach, perhaps leading to dreaded phone calls to students.

Ten minutes a day, twice a day, for 50 weeks a year amounts to 83 hours.

A team with six counselors just found a .25 FTE from the few minutes a counselor reviews their list of applicants to identify an outreach list.

The thing is, the process of going back repeatedly makes the time add up quickly.

Admissions leaders can improve their outcomes by focusing like a laser on the repetitive tasks in their office and finding ways to automate them.