How 5 institutions use parent data to predict student enrollment
CampusESP’s Parent Promoter Score™ helps institutions be more strategic with parent data. It’s a score between 0-100 that ranks parents based on engagement actions, including email opens, content clicks, portal logins, account registrations, and more.
Parent Promoter Score™ elevates the most engaged parents, so you can focus on the students most likely to move through the funnel – or the ones that need a little more support. The score is often used for enrollment modeling, considering parents in the top quartile of engagement are 3x more likely to have a student enroll.
Most enrollment leaders agree that parents are influential. Parent Promoter Score™ helps them put that influence into action.
5 ways enrollment leaders are using Parent Promoter Score
1. University of the Pacific goes all-in on engaged families that haven’t converted … yet
If a parent frequently engages with your content, they are considering sending their student to your institution. You can think of a high Parent Promoter Score as a high intent to convert to the next stage of the funnel.
However, when a parent has a high score, but their student hasn’t yet applied, deposited or enrolled, these are the families to double down on. CampusESP allows you to continually nudge these families with automated campaigns.
“The most valuable part of CampusESP (which you can’t get from Slate), is Parent Promoter Score. We use it to send reminders to highly engaged families whose students haven’t deposited yet.
... And our deposits are 11% ahead of last year. Pretty good, considering this year’s FAFSA issues!”
2. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee focuses on families “on the fence”
While the most engaged families are low hanging fruit, some find it even more impactful to focus on families that haven’t made a decision yet. By devoting more counselor resources to these families or tweaking the messages you send them, you have an opportunity to sway their decision.
CampusESP makes it easy to personalize content based on Parent Promoter Score. You can tailor your communication towards winning over less engaged parents, while affirming enrollment decisions for more engaged parents.
“I’m a big believer in the power of Parent Promoter Score. This data shows us which students are likely to enroll. It also helps us understand which families are ‘on the fence’ – and where my team can make an impact to grow our incoming class.”
3. Juniata helps admissions counselors prioritize outreach.
With an endless list of students and limited cycles, admissions counselors should be strategic about which students they spend time on. Parent Promoter Score helps counselors focus their efforts.
Parent Promoter Score signals which families need more counseling, which families could use an extra nudge to visit, apply, or deposit – and which parent is the bigger supporter (AKA, the better one to call). With CRM integration, it’s easy to get the data out of CampusESP and into the hands of counselors.
“Parent Promoter Score helps us identify interest in Juniata. We’ve had multiple instances of “stealth” interest – where students have never engaged with us, but we see a high Parent Promoter Score, our admissions counselors give the parent a a call, and they have a great conversation to move the process forward.”
4. Beloit College pulls Parent Promoter Score into enrollment modeling.
Our research shows that students with engaged parents are more likely to apply and more likely to yield. To measure these results for your own institution, CampusESP provides reports that demonstrate how higher Parent Promoter Scores are associated with higher funnel conversion rates.
Some institutions go deeper and build custom predictive models for their unique population. These models offer a target score for each funnel stage, which serves as an indicator of whether they’re on track to meet their target numbers for each enrollment stage.
“Parent Promoter Score is a core part of our yield model – along with campus visits, FAFSA submissions, and a student propensity score. At the top of our funnel, we consider a high Parent Promoter Score a trigger to move a student from prospect to inquiry. At the bottom of our funnel, a high score is correlated with deposits.
Parent Promoter Score also guides our outreach strategy – If a parent has a high score, we know they’re interested, so we send them print mailings and may offer a financially supported campus visit.”
5. BVU combines the parent score and student score for an enrollment “super score”.
Combining student and parent interest offers a more holistic view of the student’s enrollment plans. Sometimes the student and parent scores are aligned, but when the scores are conflicting – there’s opportunity for engagement.
When a student scores high but a parent scores low, it may indicate financial, geographic, or other factors keeping a parent from sending their student to your institution. CampusESP helps you message them about why your institution is a good fit. When a student scores low but a parent scores high, CampusESP helps put this family on your radar.
“We give our admissions counselors a combined score that includes student propensity and Parent Promoter Score. Sometimes parent engagement is a better predictor than student engagement.
As you can imagine, when a student has a high deposit probability and a parent has a high Promoter Score, our yield rate is 100%. But – even when a student has the lowest deposit probability and a parent has a high Promoter Score (51+), our yield rate is still 100%. ”
How to get started
To get the most out of Parent Promoter Score, we recommend exporting the data from CampusESP back into your CRM – where most of your enrollment team works on a daily basis. CampusESP supports integration with Slate, Salesforce, TargetX, Ellucian Recruit, and other major CRMs.
If CRM integration is not an option for you, CampusESP offers automated, recurring exports, which makes it easy to email parent engagement data to any relevant stakeholders on campus.
With only a three-week implementation, CampusESP can jumpstart your parent communication and provide meaningful parent data in no time.