3 biggest takeaways from the 4th Annual CampusESP Summit
The Columbus Center in Baltimore, MD, was buzzing with energy and excitement from the CampusESP community November 7! Because of COVID, this was the first time since 2019 that The CampusESP Summit was able to take place in person. Those three years make a difference. In 2019, we had 18 Summit attendees and 50 total customers. This year? 148 Summit attendees and 264 total customers!
With growth in the CampusESP community also comes growth in family engagement ideas and success stories. We offered multiple tracks, featuring presenters from 12 institutions such as Texas A&M, George Mason University, and Morehouse College. Each shared stories on how they’ve navigated challenges and improved their campus outcomes by using CampusESP.
Keynotes featured industry leaders Raquel Bermejo, AVP for Market Research and Planning for Enrollment Management at Ruffalo Noel Levitz and Subir Sahu, Senior VP of Student Success at Drexel University. Both shared some great insights to think about when it comes to the future of family engagement – insights that were so great that we want to summarize them here.
Read on for our three key takeaways from The Summit keynotes.
TAKEAWAY #1: Families want more
Raquel Bermejo gave us a sneak peek into RNL & CampusESP’s newest survey of current families of college students and their engagement expectations – the largest study of its kind to date – which analyzed data from 21,860 responses across 35 institutions.
One of the biggest findings from the study was that parents want to hear from colleges more than ever. In fact, 85% of current families are open to hearing from the institution at least once a week. Oddly enough, when asked the same question, 85% of prospective families also reported a preference for weekly communication. This desire for constant communication has grown steadily year over year, with 72% of families looking for weekly communication last year and 65% of families in 2020.
Not only do families want more communication from their students’ school, but they also want to get more involved in their students’ college experience.
Bermejo shared that 40% of surveyed families would like to be more involved in their student’s experience at the institution. “Some of the themes they told us were joining a parent board, volunteering for events and activities, and meeting prospective parents at local high schools,” said Bermejo.
With families raising their hands to participate in campus events and even recruiting initiatives, right now is a better time than ever to leverage parent involvement to bolster your enrollment and retention strategy.
TAKEAWAY #2: Families influence student success
Subir Sahu and Dave Becker (CampusESP's Co-Founder and CEO) took the stage for a lunchtime fireside chat, where they talked about the influence of family engagement on student success. Today, institutions have to do more than just engage students – if it wasn’t already clear from our first takeaway, engaging parents and families matters more now than ever to student success.
“I wholeheartedly believe that if an institution is serious about creating a culture of student success, you have to figure out a way to engage families. The days of just working with the students are long gone,” said Sahu.
Sahu and Becker discussed the shortcomings that come with using Facebook as a channel to engage families of college students. Side note – If you want to learn more about Sahu’s perspective on Facebook and how Drexel was able to sunset their Facebook page for families, read our article, Facebook won’t help you reach your parent engagement goals.
“Where we found success at Drexel was realizing that we cannot deliver on the outcomes that we seek with Facebook as our primary vehicle for family engagement,” said Sahu. “We needed a better way to deliver information in a more streamlined, systematic approach for our family members.”
Sahu also emphasized the importance of giving first-generation families and families of color a better way to get information from their college (and Facebook is not it). By giving those families the info they need to answer their questions, they can feel more empowered to help support their students throughout their college journey.
“Many families of first-generation college students and families of color are learning this experience alongside their students,” said Sahu. “A lot of times, we just need a mechanism to deliver good information to those families so they feel prepared and knowledgeable to help support their students. To present it in a coherent format through CampusESP helps with those types of questions for certain, and we’ve seen that move in a positive way during our time at Drexel.”
TAKEAWAY #3: Families that have good experiences influence future enrollment
At The Summit, Dave Becker introduced the concept of the Parent Engagement Lifecycle. From looking at potential colleges, to enrolling, to graduating, parents play an important role in every stage across the lifecycle of a student. CampusESP is an integral part of that lifecycle.
“When we look at the Parent Engagement Lifecycle, we put CampusESP at the center because we really want to make it seamless for parents to interact with you,” said Becker. “We don’t want them going into different silos and websites – we want them to have it all in one place.”
The Parent Engagement Lifecycle lines up well with the trends in family involvement and family engagement that Bermejo showed us (see takeaway #1). Families of current students that have good experiences with the university want to get more involved and can influence future enrollment, be that through helping with your recruitment efforts or simply sharing positive word-of-mouth endorsements.
Simply put, it’s critical for institutions to engage parents from both an enrollment and student success perspective. “We’ve gone from parent engagement as a fad, to a nice-to-have, to a need-to-have. Schools need to be thinking about their parent engagement strategy,” said Becker.
Want to learn more about how we can help you grow your parent engagement strategy?