Budget season is in the air. Will next year bring seasons like the mild winter we've experienced in Pennsylvania, or will it bring a hurricane-laden season of turmoil?
My wife and I complain every winter about weather forecasters' ability to predict snow storms. This year, though, as I thought about it, I can't say that they have been any better than some colleges and universities have been in planning for their enrollment.
How often are you more than 5% off your numbers? Do you fall short every year? You're not alone. Some institutions set unreasonably high institutional enrollment goals every year - even when they haven't hit their numbers in years.
A recently "separated" enrollment leader 
complained to me that his President continually asked him to set goals that were simply unachievable to provide more "wiggle room" in the university's budget.
I challenged him by asking if it was really the President's fault, or was it actually his? That led me to the piece below about the 5 questions enrollment leaders should be asking before finalizing their goals.
1. Do I actually believe this is a goal our admissions team can achieve?
If you know that the goals you set each year (or maybe the goals that were set for you) are well beyond was can actually be achieved, so does your team. I'm not talking about a stretch goal that is just too far out of reach; that's a goal that at least is designed to have a team work just a little harder to reach a goal.
In this case, I'm talking about a goal set by a person or group without direct knowledge and understanding, or without taking into consideration every specific step and tactic the team would need to take to achieve the goal. When this approach is used every year, the goal becomes meaningless to the admissions team. It leads to complacency and a lack of urgency when numbers begin to go awry.
2. Am I providing the leadership, ideas and tactics to help the team actually achieve the goal?
If your numbers have been flat, down, or require a sizable growth for the coming year, what will you be doing differently? How much of the growth can be gained by increasing the inquiry pool? How much can be gained by increasing your conversion rate? Are there target groups that you will focus more time and energy toward?
Based on my location, I've worked with a good number of clients based in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Several of my clients have locations in very different markets, or encompass a larger span of regional markets for their recruitment efforts. In order for them to effectively engage prospects in those respective markets, they must be able to regionalize their content.
If your institutions recruits across different markets, do your marketing and admissions staff employ different communications styles and different tactics for prospects in each of those areas within your territory? For example, the marketing language, images and tone for a prospect in the general Philadelphia market is very different than what may be used in Lancaster (home of the large Amish and Mennonite communities in rural Pennsylvania).
Almost everyone I speak with understands those differences, but few actually use that understanding to their advantage by coaching and teaching it to their teams.
3. Are staff prepared and ready to meet the goal?
Now this question connects very closely to the second question. Once you identify those specifics actions your team needs to take to meet your numbers, how will you follow through with them to help them ensure they are using every tool necessary to successfully use those tactics?
How will you coach each person? What conversations do you need to have in staff meetings, as well as 1:1's to help staff stay focused, continually improve and remain optimistic in the efforts throughout the year?
Many years ago, I made a significant shift in my program's marketing strategy. It was new and the staff didn't trust that it would work. They kept asking me what we would do if the strategy failed. They wanted to know how we would make up all of the lost inquiries.
Those were very valid questions, but I also needed to remind them that while the expense and the risk involved was high, the return of last year's efforts results in only 18% of all of our inquiries. The staff themselves were responsible for a much larger component of the prospective student pool.
It was at a very poignant staff meeting when I used those questions and concerns to launch the next major initiative - one that was meant to also dramatically change our lead generation efforts. While the expected growth was significant, the required changes of the staff were minimal (for most of the staff).
We began an initiative to deepen the relationships we had with our feeder schools and organizations. The organizations we wanted to target were already with us, were already referring students to us, but we shifted the way we connected with and engaged those organizations.
The focus on these efforts had to become the focus of the team; they had to forget about the marketing changes. Each of our staff meetings included time to report on the marketing efforts, but we spent much more time as a group sharing specifically what tactics each person had been using, and assessed together why some of those efforts may have worked better than others.
Each person had to create their own specific list of tactics they would use to increase the referrals from their partner organizations through the relationship strategy.
These lists were the focus of our 1:1 meetings as well as our staff meetings for the majority of the year. About nine months in, we reduced the time spent and began focusing on the upcoming year because our numbers were so high at that point we could have quit altogether and still outpaced the previous years numbers by more than 6%, and our annual goal by more than 4%. I think we finished with 12-13% growth that year. That grew an additional 15% the subsequent year. We were all a very proud group.
4. Do I have sufficient benchmarks to measure and adjust throughout the year?
As you prepare to begin a new year, you expect everyone to see the annual goal, and use it to stay focused for the entire year. You need much shorter metrics and/or benchmarks to help your team understand how well they are (or are not) progressing.
I used monthly and quarterly metrics, and had the team complete bi-weekly progress reports (I made a copy of this available for download). These shorter term efforts help the team focus and visualize what they need to accomplish on an almost weekly basis. If a particular location needed 100 new students for the year, we knew it needed 220 applications. The enrollment advisor knew she needed around 400 inquiries, of which she was responsible for 190. We broke those numbers down, and not just on an averaged monthly basis. She knew that she needed 21 applications in June, 36 applications in July and 40 in August.
To be even clearer about this approach, if, by August 8 or 9, she didn't have 14 applications, I knew we had only a few days for a rapid jump, or we would end the month with only 25-30 applications for her location. I also knew that being short 10 applications meant being short 4 students, and being short 4 students in August meant we now needed 6 more students between October and May.
I didn't spend my time going over number after number with her. I spent my time going over prospect after prospect with her. She needed to understand who those prospects were; what their reasons for enrolling were so that she could engage them and help them make a decision - even if it meant deciding not to enroll with us.
This approach helped her clearly focus time on actual prospects and applicants. If she were too focused on numbers, she may take shortcuts, or inadvertently begin pressuring students to apply. Instead, by focusing on how she was engaging the prospects helped her build more trust with them, and kept us both focused on the results of those efforts.
So my role was to help her think through what was needed to get there.
5. How will I hold staff accountable for their success or failure?
I helped a client develop a coaching and accountability program for her staff. Her primary issue that she inherited was a complacent staff. Yes numbers had dwindled, but when we dug deeper into her data, we found there were specific areas within the recruitment cycle that had significant holes.
Our work together, then, needed to shift to those holes, and those holes, which we could demonstrate to the staff, became the purpose and reason for change. It also helped her focus on very specific areas for improvement with the staff.
Having that focus played a major role in her staff meetings, as well as the 1:1 conversations with the team. in each staff meeting, she carved out time to discuss those focal points for the year, and in the 1:1 meetings, she drilled own further with the staff.
When we think of accountability, we too often think of holding someone's feet to the fire, and think of how we will reprimand someone for not completing a task, or achieving a goal.
I like to go deeper than the surface with accountability. I think of it in terms of coaching; helping a team member look at his strengths and weaknesses, and together finding an approach he can use to maximize his strengths to improve on our focal points.
Then I ask him, on a weekly basis, what actions he specifically needs to perform/complete to work on those focal points. At the end of the week, he has to detail to me how successful he was or was not with those actions. The accountability component is really his at that point. Yes, if he continually fails complete those tasks, his performance will continue to be sub par, and I will need to step in. But the purpose is to allow him the opportunity to create the success on his own.
As I conclude this post, I thought I would share that this particular post was written over a month's time. While I pause and re-start many of my posts, this one specifically took a little longer. As a practitioner, it took me several years to continue and develop as a leader before I could launch an approach with as much focus on coaching. When I worked with my team, I had to have several not-so-easy conversations with the team. They were conversations that were very uncomfortable for me.
Now as a consultant, one thing that continually strikes me, are the times when I see other leaders that need to have the same frank conversations with their team members, but haven't the confidence and/or support to do so. In fact, there have been a few times that I have been asked specifically to have those conversations for a client. It's typically easier for the outside person to come and deliver the bad news.
Of course, I accept that role, but I had to develop a strategy that helps the client follow through so that leader and follower adopt a strategy the can continue to use to hold each other accountable. Without it, I become the returning consultant bringing more bad news (and some times it gets delivered to both the follower AND leader).