Parent involvement in college is at an all-time high. Most schools are now looking for ways to focus that involvement on student enrollment outcomes, student success metrics, and parent giving goals. Not sure where to start? Here are 8 insights to guide your strategy.

Each quarter we highlight several institutions that approach parent engagement in thoughtful and creative ways. In Q1 we’re featuring partners that have generated revenue, collaborated with campus partners, boosted student persistence, and more!

With a strong prospective parent engagement plan, USU experienced 8% higher yield rates for students with a parent using CampusESP.

Nassim Nozartash, AD of New Student and Family Services at UNC Charlotte guest blogs on UNC Charlotte’s experience launching CampusESP in 3 weeks.

The University of Delaware and the Catholic University of America piloted our new Donor Management tools on Giving Tuesday. The institutions saw higher engagement, more donor participation, and more dollars raised than years past..

In spring 2020, Texas A&M hosted 14,000 families–virtually–across unique orientation tracks designed for first-year, transfer and Spanish-speaking families. And they set it all up in two weeks.

Early results from our Student Enrollment solution are overwhelmingly positive, especially at the top of the funnel. In the 2019-20 enrollment cycle, we saw that parents of inquiries opened over 2x more emails than their students, and their students were nearly 3x more likely to apply.

Over the past several months, CampusESP partners have crushed the crisis communication game. We’re seeing parent activity ten times higher than normal as colleges and universities send out COVID-19 updates!

We’ve gathered top best practices when it comes to managing your crisis communication strategy, and we are happy to share our tips with you!

CampusESP is happy to present Arizona State University with the Q2 ESP MVP Award.

ASU had one of the largest launches to date, with over 97,000 families during their initial implementation in July 2020. They have continued to grow and now have over 101,000 families in their portal!

We surveyed over 3,800 parents of college-bound students and asked how COVID-19 has impacted their student’s enrollment plans for Fall 2020. Here’s what we learned.

Our 2020 Q1 ESP MVP award goes to Penn State University, in recognition of their outstanding crisis communication and portal expansion to 20 commonwealth campuses.

Here’s their story.

Catholic University is being recognized as our 2019 Q4 ESP MVP winner for outstanding use of their Parents Council community.

In just 4 months, they have brought in over $100,000 (a 7x ROI on their CampusESP investment).

We recently launched a new set of features designed to help you reach families of prospective students. With support from five innovative pilot partners, the early results - such as an 80% email open rate - are in. This blog will give you the what, the why, and the “wow” from our pilot... and introduce you to our new enrollment management solution.

Each year we survey parents across all our CampusESP partner schools. The process is managed by our Customer Success Team and is free for all our customers.

This year the survey was completed by 7,991 parents from 50 participating colleges and universities. So what did the survey find? Let’s get to it…

GUEST POST by Brian Watkins, Director of Parent and Family Affairs at the University of Maryland and former President of the Association of Higher Education Parent/Family Program Professionals (AHEPPP).

With an aging database on life-support, and a desire to engage families with a more robust email platform than MailChimp, our office needed a tool that could better meet our needs.

After partnering with CampusESP, we’ve increased our overall campaign reach by 8x. 

We know that helping parents help their student get off on the right foot is critical. That’s why we’ve pulled a list of our most popular content, classified by type, to share with families of first-year students. We analyzed over 261,000 clicks to help you best support your first-year families.

In December we sent our annual customer satisfaction survey to more than 200,000 parents. These are our key takeaways.

Student debt is at an all-time high: $1.5 trillion. Parents represent the fastest-growing demographic absorbing student debt, up 71% in just 5 years.

We partnered with the good folks at Ovum to release a compelling infographic that connects the increase in student debt to the increase in parent involvement. Ovum is the market-leader in data, research, and trends in higher education.

What kind of information do parents actually care about? And when's the best time to share it? Based on real content performance data from more than 300,000 parents using CampusESP, we have the answers. 

We've analyzed thousands of clicks on student success news, deadlines and advice to map out your content calendar for the next year.

GUEST POST by Katie Matthews (Parent Program Specialist at Baylor University)

The Baylor Parents Network started using the CampusESP parent portal in June of 2018. From prospective parents to parents of current students, read about their experience.