The Zinch Report

Zinch is approaching its birthday (we’re 1 year old) next month. Without letting the cat out of the bag, I will say we have some long anticipated releases that will coincide with arguably the best month of the year. We’re hoops fans over here :)

So what do we have to show? 300,000+ users, almost 500 colleges, yeah, yeah yeah… You want results, right? Well, we do too. We’ve heard from many students and colleges about successes they’ve had using Zinch. A couple days ago I pinged Brad Ward, Electronic Communication Coordinator (their web dude) at Butler University. Butler has seen some great results. Let me share…

Can you tell me a little about your background?

I attended the University of Illinois at Springfield and graduated in 2005. I was a student blogger at students.uis.edu/bward03s. My sophomore year I started a website called twosouth.com. I was an RA and started the site as a community builder. My wing was all freshman and sophomores. I put up a forum, stuff about the campus, what to bring, and stuff like that. As it went on, I started seeing a bunch of prospective students visiting the site. We averaged about 29,000 page views a month. The university started embracing the site and even putting it in brochures. People took notice. The marketing department hired me on as a photographer- taking pictures for brochures. They had the nice classroom shots but didn't have a good representation for real campus life. I worked in this capacity for 1 ½ years. Around October 2005 I started looking for new opportunities and found one in the marketing department- they ended up creating a job for me as a marketing and recruitment specialist, so I did that right after graduation. I got my feet wet in online recruitment there, creating content for sites like MySpace and our iTunes U page. It was great experience, and I was already very knowledgeable about the campus since I had my undergraduate degree from there.

When did you begin at Butler University?

I had worked at UIS for 15 months and was ready to take my experience to another University. I started looking around and found a job at Butler; it too was a brand new position. They knew what they needed; in the interview they told me they needed someone “who could be on the internet all day.” The position is Electronic Communication Coordinator, and I oversee the email campaigns and website content, as well as social media and our online presence. I enjoy being involved in the marketing aspect of Higher Education. I see the need. Higher Ed is a little behind the curve of social media and using the Internet to recruit. Both of the jobs I've been in (at these universities) were newly created positions. They both said "we see the need, but don't know what to call it."

Why is there need for these new positions in Higher Education?

For Butler University, they had gone through some consulting for their admission website (go.butler.edu). Up until last Friday the Butler University homepage had not been updated since 2001. It was straight web 1.0. As these consultants came in they suggested a microsite with more media stuff and Butler realized they didn't have someone to manage this. As I'm at conferences- I attended the Stamats Conference recently- I saw many schools starting to think about things like this. This year they did this "what did you learn" thing at the end of the conference. 20-30% of the schools were saying, "we need to hire somebody to manage our online/web outreach." With Facebook and MySpace and YouTube things have really changed with students. You need keep up.

How long have you been using Zinch?

We started July 20th (not long after we first launched for colleges). I found out about it on a blog- a Higher Ed blog. Back then it was, "has anybody heard of this?"

What was the initial response?

It was positive. I sent it to everybody around our offices and one of my co-workers sent an email saying, "this is the future of recruiting." We had a very good first impression of the layout. We really liked the “white space is refreshing” wording. The site is so easy to use- click a few times and find what you're looking for. Very user-friendly. The whole concept behind it is solid.

What results have you seen?

Very positive. One stat that really stood out is that 1 out of 10 kids on Zinch have already been in our database and have just ignored us. We've name-bought them from somewhere (name buying is typically from ACT or SAT). So we send them an email or two. We send a “last chance” email if they don’t respond and many even ignore that. But when we find them on Zinch we're meeting them on their turf, and they're more responsive. We can be more laid back, not so stiff, which is nice.

Recently I messaged '08-'09 grads. I have been able to look through kids’ profiles and really get personal. Because of that I had 78% of those kids give us a shout-out or agree to receive communication from us.

For the 2010 class, 42% of the kids we've found are of minority ethnicity. A lot of schools are reaching out to these students in particular. A lot of schools have scholarships and other incentives to recruit these students. For this coming fall, we have about 90 kids who have sent us a shout-out and 76% of those have been accepted. Of those, 78% are out of state- which is great. We want a diverse student body so Zinch is a great alternative to billboards or radio outside of Indy, which can be costly. It seems the quality of the kids have been high, which is impressive. Another big stat is that we have a 35% open rate on our messages, compared to an 11-13% on email open rates. So we are reaching 3X the percentages through Zinch communication.

Also, regarding first generation students- I’m a first generation student and I’ve thought often of how we might reach out to theses kids. Zinch has a great representation of this group of students.

Give us some context for college admission; why is Zinch compelling?

As far as Zinch, one thing we like is the export feature. We have allocated significant resources of time and money into our student tracking database. We follow the communication process through this software. Zinch has integrated very well with our existing infrastructure. Anther interesting feature through Zinch-- when you do name-buys you usually only get 30-40% of the students’ emails. But with Zinch, they’re using an email to sign up- so nearly all of the kids through Zinch have emails. And now that there is somebody dedicated to this communication we’re actively online. With the "name-buys" we're not able to communicate with these students via email as much as we'd like.

In college admissions a lot of people are talking about how to reach students on their turf. Research shows that email is ‘dead’, and students prefer text or online messaging. Obviously we can't jump on Facebook because of privacy issues and the fact that it would be painstakingly boring to click through profiles and find some real content. Zinch has put this all in one place for us to use- which is very beneficial. The site is geared toward the audience we’re seeking with a clear purpose- higher education.

Anything else you’d add?

In general, college admissions offices are very behind...

Why do you think you're seeing success with Zinch?

The kids visiting your sight are obviously driven to find a college. In Illinois, for example, every kid is required to take the ACT. So when buying names, the kids whose contact information we’re gathering may not even have interest. But with Zinch, these kids have interest. These kids seem to appreciate our communication. They seem very interested and want to know about the school. Our communication is therefore more relevant and efficient.

How do you see technology and social media impacting college admission?

I think more and more colleges and universities are realizing that they need to start looking at these options for recruitment. 2 years ago everyone was saying "print is dead" and 2 years later we're still using brochures. For us, we want to have touch points with kids- as many as possible. Zinch, Youtube, blogs, forums. When I got here one of the first things I did was search Facebook for a Butler University class of 2011 group. There were 200 kids in this group at the beginning of the summer. By the end of the summer, a few weeks before move-in it was 750; our incoming class was 950. What we saw going on in that group was everybody asking questions. The concern was that there was a lack of good information, because other students (none of whom had attended Butler University) were providing the answers. One person asked "do they have wireless in the dorms" and someone replied "no". In fact, we do have wireless. The point is there was no real admissions presence. This made us think more about being purposeful and being more involved online. Kids rely more on the internet for information. I think this is where we're going.