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Ready to Refresh Your Campus Visit? Here’s Your Game Plan. 

The campus visit is a pivotal moment in the college search process. It’s an opportunity for prospective students and their families to experience your institution firsthand—and, more importantly, to form the emotional connections that often seal their enrollment decisions. But the traditional campus visit model is under pressure. Students are changing how and when they visit, and colleges must adapt.

In a recent conversation on our Higher Ed Marketing Lab podcast, two leading campus visit experts, W. Kent Barnds of Augustana College and Echo Delta’s own Jeff Kallay, shared their insights into how colleges and universities can reimagine the campus visit. Their advice offers a roadmap for creating visits that resonate with today’s prospective students and their families. Here’s what they had to say.

The Changing Landscape of Campus Visits

Increasingly, students are delaying campus visits until they’ve narrowed their options and have more information. Unlike in the past, when juniors might visit to explore and seniors returned multiple times to confirm their choice, today’s students are often treating visits as a final step in their decision-making process. This marks a significant shift from the past.

Key factors driving this change are likely the rising costs of travel, students’ reliance on social media for research, and lackluster visit programs that don’t offer the value students and families really want. To stay relevant, institutions need to reevaluate how they design and market campus visits to better align with the expectations of today’s prospective students.

Common Pitfalls and Challenges

Many campus visits fall short because they prioritize institutional convenience over student-centered experiences. This is especially common when input from stakeholders like faculty or board members heavily influences the design of the visit. Instead, campus visits should be designed with the needs of prospective student and their supporters as their top priority. 

Another common pitfall is a lack of authenticity, which leaves many campus visits struggling to match the perceived genuineness of social media. To bridge this gap, colleges should focus on creating an experience that goes beyond what a student can see online. A good place to start is ensuring that tour guides share genuine, unscripted stories and providing prospective students with opportunities to observe real moments of campus life as they unfold. 

Crafting a Compelling Campus Visit

To meet the moment, Kent and Jeff offer actionable advice for reimagining campus visits. Here are four areas they recommend everyone in charge of a campus visit explore.

Focus on Curation and Limiting Choice Paralysis

Reducing choice paralysis is crucial to creating meaningful campus visits. Instead of overwhelming families with countless options, colleges should curate visit itineraries that highlight what they do best and align with prospective students’ interests. For example, Kent Barnds shared that Augustana College is piloting a program to suggest recommended visit plans that maximize students’ time on campus. They’ve also experimented with providing visiting students with a list of thoughtful questions to ask faculty, with the goal of making it easier for nervous prospective students to engage in richer, more meaningful conversations. 

That said, no matter how well-curated, a campus visit can only convey so much information at once. Rather than trying to cram more into the visit, Jeff Kallay encourages many of his clients to focus on getting more out of the post-visit experience. One low cost way to pull this off is creating a simple online photo album that follows the flow of the campus tour. By including seasonal photos–like the quad decorated for commencement or covered in snow–as well as images of spaces that might not be accessible during the visit, families can review what they saw after their visit or explore areas they didn’t see in more detail. 

Make Emotional Connections that Help Yield

Ultimately, the decision to enroll at an institution is an emotional one. According to Jeff, there are five emotional connectors that correlate with yield and deserve a place in your visit experience. They are:

  1. Location and its conveniences (e.g., proximity to Target, Starbucks, or Chipotle);
  2. Demystifying “day one” (e.g., showing where classes, dining, and housing are located);
  3. Interactions with supportive faculty or staff;
  4. Conversations with current students;
  5. Connections with other prospective students.

Use Digital Tools to Improve the Visit Experience

Digital tools can enhance the campus visit experience and integrate it seamlessly with other touchpoints. For example, colleges can enhance the car ride to campus with audio guides that provide highlight landmarks and share stories about the local area.  

Another area of opportunity? Streamlining the check-in process. Many families register online but are frustrated when they’re asked to re-enter their details upon arrival. Colleges can avoid this redundancy by leveraging CRM data to personalize the check-in process. In turn, this helps visitors feel recognized and valued from the moment they arrive. Additionally, digital tools like mobile-responsive itineraries or follow-up emails with curated resources can extend the impact of the visit.

Add Fun and Memorable Moments

Inserting moments of fun and celebration in your visits can be a key differentiator. For example, at Augustana College, students who commit to enrolling ring a gong in the reception area. Meanwhile, at Elizabethtown College, every prospective student leaves with a piece of carrot cake. These simple but effective traditions foster a sense of buoyancy and excitement that can help students feel a sense of belonging and see themselves thriving on campus.

Practical Steps for Enrollment Leaders

If you’re ready to rethink your campus visit program, where should you start? Kent and Jeff offered these actionable steps:

  1. Audit the Experience: Walk through your registration process and attend a visit as a mystery shopper. Identify pain points and areas for improvement.
  2. Focus on the Student: Shift the visit’s purpose from showcasing your institution to meeting the needs of prospective students and their families.
  3. Incorporate Feedback Loops: After visits, ask families what they didn’t learn about your institution and adjust accordingly.
  4. Start Small: Use existing tools you already own, like your CRM and photo-sharing tools, to smooth out the visit experience and quickly start providing greater value. 
  5. Focus on What Your College Does Best: Every institution has unique strengths. One college might excel in sophisticated digital experiences while another may shine in hands-on experiences. Rather than copying another college’s playbook, lean into your institution’s distinctive capabilities and build on them to create a compelling visit experience that aligns with your strengths.

Wrapping Up

Students’ relationship with the campus visit is evolving, and colleges will be well-served to evolve with it.  As Kent Barnds and Jeff Kallay remind us, it’s time to stop thinking about visits as just another admissions task and start treating them as the emotional cornerstone of the college decision process. Start small, stay student-centered, and create experiences that truly resonate. And, if you find yourself looking for an outside expert to help you make the most of your visit experience, we can help. Just reach out.

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Jarrett is our VP of Strategy and the torchbearer for all things digital. Since joining us in 2014, he’s made it his mission to help clients seize the power of smarter marketing strategies—and reap the rewards.

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