Chris Bohl, Markayla McInnis, Alyssa Perry & Sam Huffman | GNP contributors
East Carolina University is on the hunt for new students, and it is paying an out-of-state consulting firm $352,435 to help it find them.
Carnegie is the firm’s name, and it specializes in branding a university or college as a person by deducing its personality types. With that it makes a marketing plan that matches the school’s personality to prospective students’ personalities. Carnegie figures those out too.
“The Carnegie work is intended to help us … refine our messaging and materials in ways that will help ECU stand out from our competitors and make stronger connections with prospective students,” says Jeannine Hutson, the university’s chief communications officer.
The Greenville News Project looked into ECU’s enrollment, Carnegie’s work and how ECU will implement it. GNP interviewed ECU and Carnegie officials, and it obtained Carnegie reports from ECU through public record requests.
GNP found that:
>> Fewer first-time students are enrolling at ECU than 10 years ago.
>> ECU has five personality traits that can be group into three categories, as Carnegie reports it.
>> Admissions is now revamping its student recruitment materials to lean into ECU’s personalities.
Current students told GNP that they did not pick ECU because of its personalities. They enrolled for practical reasons.
Declining enrollment
The process of becoming an ECU Pirate is like a funnel. A lot of students apply, ECU accepts a portion, and a portion of them enroll as full-time Pirates by paying to register for classes.
Numbers that ECU report show that from Fall 2010 to Fall 2022, the pool of students applying for admission has gotten bigger by nearly 42%. At the same time ECU’s acceptance rate grew by 88%. But fewer accepted students followed through to enroll. Their numbers fell by nearly 11% from 4,201 first-time first-year students in 2010 to 3,725 in 2022.
That makes ECU’s situation less dire than the national average. Across the U.S. undergraduate enrollment has fallen 14.6%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The Common App and North Carolina’s Free Application Week are behind ECU’s applications increase, says Stephanie Whaley, the director of the university’s Undergraduate Admissions office.
“It is much easier for students to apply to multiple colleges without having to fill out multiple applications,” she says. “This has led to application increases at most colleges in our state and around the nation.”
Students choose to apply. ECU chooses how many to accept for admission. The enroll, though, is a choice for the student to make, often with parents involved. At this narrowest point of the funnel, it comes down to persuasive marketing.
Whaley says Admissions “focuses heavily on yield” as a key performance indicator. It is calculated as the percentage of accepted students who enroll. ECU’s yield for Fall 2010 was 40.1%, and it has fallen ever since. By Fall 2022 it was nearly 19% of 19,758 admitted students.
How to boost the yield is the job ECU outsourced to Carnegie. It “was chosen through the standard university RFP (Request for Proposal) process,” says Clint Bailey, ECU’s director of marketing strategy.
“Of the submitted proposals, Carnegie’s most closely matched our requirements and expectations,” he says. “They are a well-regarded firm in higher education with extensive experience and well recommended.”
Bailey says ECU wanted an outside consultant instead doing the work in-house. The risk of that could be results biased in favor of ECU.
Carnegie, he says, brings an outsider’s view.
Branding ECU’s personality
Carnegie, based out of Westford, Massachusetts, deduced ECU’s personality through a process known as psychometrics. It is steeped in psychology and aims to uncover people’s attitudes, beliefs, emotions and more about a product, which in this case is ECU.
To do that for ECU, Carnegie emailed its psychometric survey to upward of 220,000 alumni, students, teachers, administrators and support staff. The survey also went to an unknown number of community figures and parents of current students.
It was an opt-in survey, and 311 of all those people opted to take it. Another 102 people who attended Carnegie’s on-campus workshops also took the survey.
Carnegie’s sample may seem oddly small, but it meets the standards for survey work of its type. There is a cost to precision, though. Repeat the survey, and the results will fall somewhere within plus or minus 6 percentage points of the first.
There is a cost to interpretation too. The survey represents only the people who took it. The results do not apply to all the people in each of the groups to whom the survey was sent. That is to be expected, says Jared Brickman, Carnegie’s senior vice president of research.
“We wouldn’t recommend interpreting [these] data in a vacuum,” he says. The surveys are “just one piece of a much larger puzzle, including a significant amount of … data from content analysis of [ECU] and competitors’ websites, ‘discovery’ interviews with top institutional leadership” and more.
Psychometric surveys have their own kind of limits. They can offer insight, but they cannot fully encompass someone's personality. “Humans are too complicated to distill everything down to a personality archetype,” Brickman says. “We are trying to gather information in several formats to get to a logical strategy to use, rather than trying to say, ‘ECU is exactly X amount of each archetype’.”
ECU marketing professor Russell Lemken says psychometric work like Carnegie’s focuses on understanding students, which can help the university replicate what makes them happy and want to enroll and stay.
Brickman also says it’s important to focus on the “why and how” instead of the “what.” This helps to better understand thought processes, like why a crucial decision was made. Thinking this way helps to think about the internal thought processes, hoping that others will react the same way if the right marketing is found.
Investigating alumni, who are a sign of success, and current students, who are a sign of partial success, are crucial aspects of psychometric surveys, says ECU marketing professor Russell Lemken. It all helps ECU get a better understanding of its target audience, which helps it better target its marketing, he says.
Brickman says that schools need to know this because “the big picture here is that how people respond to a survey can often predict other things, such as how they might react to certain words, images or other marketing collateral,” such as brochures.
Or, as Brickman puts it, “I often liken it to knowing where the dartboard is on the wall as opposed to throwing darts with a blindfold.”
Who is ECU?
It cost ECU $147,100 for the survey, workshops and analysis and more that went into the 106-page “Reputation Strategy Report” that Carnegie delivered to ECU over the summer. According to the report, ECU is "welcoming," "reslient," "fun," "innovative" and "accomplished." Those traits combine into three personality types:
>> ECU is a "proud advocate” that can show its “resilience and perseverance to overcome challenges.”
>> It is a “collaborative guide” that offers a welcoming environment on campus.
>> It is a “transformative innovator” that is a “forward-thinking and leading-edge place of learning.”
ECU also prides itself on having a student population that is resilient, determined, engaging and inventive leaders, the report says.
The goal is to embed ECU’s personality types into the university’s marketing strategies in ways that connect with prospective students. But none of the 30 current students interviewed by the Greenville News Project credited Admissions marketing material in their decision to choose ECU.
Most of them picked ECU because of the majors it offered. Eight said they did not research ECU before applying for admission. Ten said they did research their majors specifically but not the university in general.
That matches a Fall 2023 advising survey sent to first year and transfer students in the School of Communication. Eighty-eight responses were gathered, and the reasons for choosing ECU varied. Some picked it for being “close to home” or for the majors it offers. Some cited word of mouth recommendations and the campus vibe. For some, it “felt like home.”
Putting its personality to work
With Carnegie’s reputation study in hand, the work to implement it starts.
ECU Undergraduate Admissions has been reviewing Carnegie’s work and is using the strategy report to guide its student recruiting efforts. "This information allows us to improve how we communicate (and) what makes us unique,” says Whaley, the Admissions director.
One step in that process involved a $22,000 Carnegie review of the university’s recruiting materials or “collaterals,” as marketers call them. In its collateral analysis report, Carnegie scored 16 of 30 ECU marketing products as "average."
It found that ECU does well with a “clean, simple” design that shows its “grit and determination.” However, Carnegie said the appearance of some of the collaterals was “generic and dated.”
Whaley says her department is now working with ECU’s in-house marketing team to implement recommendations from Carnegie’s reputation and collateral reports, and a third report that lays out a psychometric way of targeting prospective students. It cost $78,000.
Material for the 2024 recruiting cycle had already been printed, Whaley says, so the updates will be made for the 2025 cycle.
Admissions has already updated its electronic communications to prospective students, such as emails, phone calls and text messages.
What a new personality-based sale pitch looks like, ECU does not yet know. Whaley says specific examples are not available now but should be by Spring 2024.
She also says ECU’s marketing team is looking into whether Admissions needs to retool its website and develop additional student recruiting campaigns to fit Carnegie’s recommendations.
Two other reports were not in hand as of early November, ECU’s public records clerk says. One is an enrollment communication development plan. The other is a financial aid optimization plan that aims to predict how much aid money each admitted student might bring in to the university.
In the meantime, Admissions is using its own recruitment plan to help identify prospective students—and enroll them. The plan involves multiple strategies, such as:
>> Communicating with high school sophomores through the SAT and ACT, among other venues.
>> Attending high school and community college fairs in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
>> Hosting daily campus tours, and Open House and Pirates Aboard events.
Admissions also uses a customer relationship management program called Salesforce to communicate with prospective students and track their movement through the application process. It can email them based on specific triggers, such as lack of action during the admissions process.
The software “also allows us to build more personalized and segmented communications to students,” Whaley says.
If ECU can increase retention and increase new student enrollment over the next two years, the university should see a modest increase in overall undergraduate enrollment,” she says.
Bohl, Huffman, McInnis and Perry reported this story for the fall 2023 class, In-Depth Reporting.
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