Plan-it Marketing

Background: Plan-it worked with Boston University on an initiative to drive enrollment among top-tier students after acceptance and to help predict future behavior. Our work led to strategic changes at the University, which resulted in a dramatic increase in applications and early enrollees this year, and it was recently featured in a Boston Globe article.

Objective: Identify the triggers to drive top-tier admitted students to select BU as their college of choice.

Method: This "Enrollee Conversion" study began with an expansive Qualitative Exploratory, to thoroughly understand the application and enrollment decision, including key drivers in the decision. This exploratory included parents, high school guidance counselors, high school juniors and seniors, and college freshmen. In this way, both influencers in the decision, those about to make the college decision, and those who recently made the college decision were included, to obtain perspectives from all relevant constituencies.

Based on learning from this phase, a Quantitative Decision Simulation was conducted. This phase included seniors in high school who were accepted to BU, both those who decided to enroll at BU and those who chose to enroll elsewhere. As part of the conjoint, participants were exposed to a range of scenarios with very specific and diverse college/university descriptors (e.g., a range of international study abroad programs, average student to faculty ratio of 13 to 1, #1 ranked occupational therapy program in the country, etc.) and asked to rate their likelihood to enroll in that college or university given the scenario or set of attributes presented. The conjoint analysis was then employed to understand the optimal combination of messages and the weight that should be given to each message within the combination, to prompt a positive outcome: convincing an accepted student to convert to an enrollee.

A simulator model was then created, to predict the percentage of accepted students that will convert to enrollees, given a specific combination of messages about BU. This allowed BU to "try out" different messaging scenarios and gauge how many accepted students will enroll at BU.

Results: This work was used to make dramatic changes in messaging across all areas of the admissions process at BU, from on-campus and off-campus admissions information sessions to printed admissions “sales” materials, to campus tours. As a result, BU has seen a significant surge in applicants and early enrollment this year and expects a surge in final top-tier student enrollment by the May 1 deadline.