Bruce Cole

Freeze your summer melt!

Summer is in full swing now, and while this season can bring beach vacations and beautifully hot weather, it can also bring a scary reality with another summer-induced phenomena…summer melt. Almost every institution can expect some transition of their numbers from the enrolled students of spring’s end to the actual matriculants of the academic year,…

on July 6, 2015

MYTH #2. “If I only had a good CRM.”

This post is going to continue deconstructing Student Search myths. Last week started with the myth of buying more names, and now, we’re turning our myth-busting efforts to the promise of CRM in Enrollment Management. The appeal of these three letters can be so captivating. Most of you know of someone who has been disappointed…

on September 14, 2014

Student Search Myths

Student Search season is about to begin (again). Admissions and enrollment offices have closed the binders on their summer retreats and annual planning sessions and codified the year’s goals for the division. I’m going to guess that no one’s goals include “reducing the quantity of names purchased.” I’m also betting no one’s sheet of divisional…

on September 3, 2014

Student Search Campaigns are Being Renamed

I’d like your help in championing a grassroots effort to start a word of mouth campaign to change the name of what we currently call Student Search in enrollment management. Progressive, forward thinking leaders are leaving behind the inefficiencies of traditional Student Searching and calling their student recruitment campaigns Student Find campaigns. Recently, I’ve rallied…

on April 4, 2014

Are You Using Gravity in Your Enrollment Management Strategy?

Gravity is a great thing. Sir Isaac Newton discovered what keeps us grounded. Later, Albert Einstein revealed gravity’s power and his descriptions continue to be used in modern physics. For all the life-necessary aspects of gravity, and the exciting physics explorations it provides, it is not a recommended strategy for your enrollment management. However, all…

on March 3, 2014

Why Response Rates Don’t Matter

Response rates produced by Student Search campaigns are, in many ways, meaningless. What? Keep reading before you decide that I’ve totally lost it. Here’s where I’m coming from: It is better to receive a response rate your admissions staff can handle than to get a response rate that overwhelms your team’s time and resources. You…

on July 1, 2013

Fresh from Concourse B (and the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference)

This blog comes to you fresh from Concourse B at Chicago’s Midway airport after having spent the last three days at the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference.  It was a great conference, and if you didn’t get to attend, I can recommend it as one of the best for enrollment planning. However, I suspect many enrollment…

on July 15, 2012

It’s May 2nd. Now what? 7 Tips for a Better Enrollment Year

May 1st is the day many enrollment officers dread. In fact, many of the attendees at the recent SACAC/PCACAC conference were unable to talk or see beyond that date. But the date has come and gone, and now enrollment professionals across the country are looking at a number on their report and wondering…what next? Whether…

on May 2, 2012

Parent Communications – a few observations, a compromise, and a suggestion

Many enrollment leaders want to communicate more with parents. And that’s good. Parents are critical to the decision process for school selection and shouldn’t be forgotten. But what enrollment leaders may not realize is that they already are communicating with parents…it’s just not as intentionally as it could be. I recently sat with a VP…

on April 18, 2012

Don’t Be a Touch-Me-Not

I’m often made fun of when I refer to communications as “touches.” “We’ll touch them once with a letter mailer, and follow it with a an email touch, and then….” If it’s the first time I’ve used this language in front of a client, I can often see a querulous look from my audience. Why…

on March 29, 2012
H·A ThirtyOne
Grown organically, one client at a time, simply by being ourselves and being good at what we do. We specialize in enrollment and admissions solutions with real results. Every time.
Recent Posts

Buffalo, May 14, 2022

To the victims, survivors, and communi…

May 24 | Colin Larkin

How Do You Remote?

Flashback to earlier in the pandemic,…

Mar 25 | Karyn Adams
Recent Posts

SACAC

April 21-24, 2012 | Arlington, VA

H·A ThirtyOne will be in the District!

More Upcoming Events