Are parents an after-thought for your communications team?
College websites — often run by the marketing department of an institution — serve many functions, but they typically focus their communications on prospective & current students, and alumni. Parents provide a unique challenge to the communicators in higher education, as they aren’t the primary target audience, but their opinion is very important to the target audience — especially when you take into account that they are the college's best ambassadors.
Offering parents a space where content is specifically curated for their needs assures your messaging reaches them successfully. Plus, they'll be better informed to have better conversations with their students. Providing the information they need alongside the data they want can drastically decrease burdens on understaffed & underfunded departments, turning calls into clicks.
By giving parents their own landing place, you:
can highlight events and messages that a student might not find as important. An impressive guest speaker or a memo from the President about tuition might end up in the student’s trash, but parents may have more interest - and get their student more engaged.
reuse content that your marketing group has already created, to better illustrate the value of your brand. If parents are contributing financially to the school (tuition), knowing their student is in good hands - and what's going on - is vital information.
offer them the information in an easy-to-read format. By tailoring content to parent interests and offering an email digest, parents no longer have to search through websites that have been created for other constituencies.
Over 75% of parents surveyed (n=9000+, 15+ colleges) by CampusESP are open to receiving continuing communications from institutions directly, with email and personalized portals being the preferred methods of delivery. Further, the majority of these parents are interested in staying involved with the institution after their student's graduation — which opens the door for college ambassador programs, recruiting and pre-admissions activities, and giving campaigns.
CampusESP offers schools an easy-to-use solution for curating content to parent communities. Request a demo today.