PS&L Blog

Last night I got beat up by several friends and unfortunately that is somewhat normal. I have been practicing the Japanese martial art of Aikido for almost twenty years so maybe I should be used to it, but I’m not. I wonder why sometimes some partners don’t listen to my feedback so they can throw me better without killing my arms or neck. And what does this have to do with recruiting students?

Aikido is about learning how to connect or harmonize with you partner so you can control them without hurting them. As the person doing the technique you should be able to feel the connection and change the way you move so that your partner wants to hold on. When an aikido technique is done correctly it is like magic. There appears to be no force. The person being thrown feels in control until – oops they aren’t and they are pinned to the ground. To me that is how good communication should work except for the oops and the ground part.

The question is, are your admissions counselors connecting and talking with prospects or are they talking at them? Are your publications communicating effectively or do they confuse or annoy the reader? The same goes for your web site. In the aikido world feedback comes pretty quick. When something hurts you tap out. Then you can explain to your partner what is going on so they can throw and pin you safely.

In the higher education communication world we need to rely on research and training to make sure our efforts are both on target and non-aggressive or off-putting. This sort of research is easier in the web world where we have analytics packages that can track every move. From those analytics we can make suppositions and then changes. We can question users about their experience and make changes and test again. For our counselors it is important that they are given training in how to ask hard questions in a soft way and how to tell stories that connect the prospect and the school.

In aikido you can tap out and then go back to your workout but in our highly competitive college and university marketing environment people don’t tap out. They just leave.

What this means is that you have to be sensitive to your prospects’ reactions to your messaging, the state of your campus, and the way your admissions team listens and responds to them. This entails studying the analytics and research on the one hand. With your other you need to make sure your admissions team is trained in one-on-one recruiting techniques. This way they can master the art of aikido admissions, keeping the recruiting process completely under control until its time for them to close the deal and throw and pin – I mean successfully enroll the student.