Best of CASE District VI Award
 

Institution: University of Missouri - Kansas City

Title of entry: Quick to Market 60-Day enrollment push

About this entry: With enrollments stubbornly staying flat in the last couple years, our Chancellor issued a 60-day challenge to come up with ideas that would significantly move the needle on enrollment for Fall 2023. He would invest in the best set of ideas. With that in mind, our marketing team, partnering with enrollment management, gained approval for a plan to market to new geographic areas, market specific degree programs and employ more "commercial" marketing techniques -- deadline driven non-tuition incentives that would lower a family's bottom line. As a cash-strapped urban research university, UMKC had previously been confined to marketing in the greater Kansas City area. But true to his word, the Chancellor embraced an experiment to market in three new geographies: the Dallas-Oklahoma-Arkansas, areas St. Louis area and Springfield/Joplin areas. That broadened our funnel to millions more students in near geography to our campus. We created smart, targeted messages for those areas in a digital only campaign, defined incentives that provided a deadline to be eligible for "cash back" to pay for books and apartments and dropped the application fee. We analyzed degree programs for current popularity of current students from those new geographies and developed a set of STEM program ads. And in about 45 days we launched a new, mostly digital recruitment campaign. Three months after launch, we have seen a 10 percent increase in applications and admits and have generated more than 5,900 qualified leads from our new areas alone for Fall 23.