How to market your center

19 July 2021

ACADEMIC SUCCESS EXCHANGE

We’ve talked about marketing student success centers before, but we also know this is a frequently-requested topic that can have a big impact on center operations, so we opened the floor to this discussion again, so that new attendees had a chance to share their strategies and learn from others. This time, we were joined by one of our great clients, Andrew Pelletier of Housatonic Community College, who graciously shared some of the marketing strategies he employs in his Academic Support Center:

  • Andrew emphasized that much of his center’s strategies aim to drive traffic to the Accudemia homepage as much as possible. He and his staff do things like place a link in their LMS shell for all courses to accomplish this.
  • He encourages center employees to include a link to Accudemia in their email signatures.
  • They place and distribute handouts all across campus.
  • An ASC staff member recorded an instructional video that guides students through the process of accessing and using Accudemia. This video is embedded both on the ASC website and on the Accudemia homepage. Their goal, Andrew says, is to point out to students how easy it is to use Accudemia and how much control students have over their experience.
  • They also market the center by email in several ways, targeting specific courses, specific faculty members, and other cohorts. They also sometimes message all students in bulk. This can be done easily through Accudemia’s messaging features.

After Andrew brought up this last method, our support team showed attendees how to use the messaging features in Accudemia. Of course, while we hope you, the reader, are using Accudemia to track your center’s usage, Andrew’s suggestions can be modified for any center looking to drive traffic to their physical or online location. 

What we loved most about Andrew’s methods is his desire to show students how easy it can be to access the center’s services. We’ve seen time and time again how many students are intimidated by the idea of getting help and sometimes assume that services will be difficult to access, or may not be friendly to them. The more you can show students that your center is warm, friendly, and easy to use, the more likely they’ll be to visit.

Here are some other ideas that were  presented during this productive session (some of which we also went over in our previous session on this topic):

  • Asking instructors or department heads to insert a note about the center into their syllabi (similar to including in the LMS course shell).
  • Recording a video intro for faculty to play during class.
  • Taking advantage of high-traffic areas with a scrolling screen about your center (if a screen is available) or posting flyers.
  • Leveraging the “Welcome Back” or Orientation activities at your institution. This can include things like making sure your center is included in a campus scavenger hunt, asking to make a presentation to students, or asking deans or faculty to spread the word about your center.

We hope this gives you some ideas about how to market your center as we approach the fall term! Fall is a great time to promote your offerings and take advantage of students’ enthusiasm before they get too far into the term. If you have any questions about how to leverage Accudemia, be sure to get in touch with us!

Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Academic Success segment recap for 7/13/2021 for the weekly Accudemia sessions. We hope that these questions help you to ponder how you can ensure every student feels welcome in your center. Join us next Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. EST for our Weekly Accudemia Session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!