How SRU recruits future students, promotes potential educational programs
Slippery Rock University’s marketing and communications office uses an “evidence-based research-informed strategy” when creating its messaging for potential future students.
Ken Bach, senior director of University Marketing and Communication, said the university intermittently surveys its students and their families about their view of the school, its campus and its culture. This helps the university create its strategy, which is updated annually.
The efforts to listen to the students and families who already attend or are otherwise associated with the university, Bach said, informs how the marketing and communications team approaches the next potential iteration of SRU students.
It seems attending SRU has become a tradition for some families, said Mike May, vice president for Enrollment Management.
“Oftentimes, it's welcome back to campus for the first time,” May said, “because there are many alums bringing their college-bound student.”
Bach and May work together on recruitment messaging, which Bach said is built around three main criteria: the university’s programs, its cost and the value of a degree. He said these messages are conveyed through an informational identity intertwined with a visual identity that, together, help the communications office create the brand of SRU.
Bach explained that it is integral to the university that its signature color of green — dark green, light green and legacy green — appear in the school’s marketing materials, alongside university students and alumni.
“The visual identity is intertwined with the narrative and that is two pillars that are holding up the brand,” Bach said.
According to Bach, Slippery Rock University being part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education doesn’t affect the school’s individual identity or its messaging. He said “there's very little sort of trickle down, but there is alignment,” when it comes to its identity as a state school, but the marketing office has a lot of autonomy when it comes to building a brand.
“(We had) to really make sure Slippery Rock was telling the right stories … that has informed the advertising we do. It’s the decisions of who we are as a university,” Bach said.
According to May, two-thirds of the students at SRU come from within a two-and-a-half hour radius of the main campus in Slippery Rock.
While it may seem rational to assume most of those students attend the university because it may be right in their proverbial backyard, Bach said it’s often actually more difficult to recruit nearby people to attend a local college.
This is because research shows that students graduating high school and heading into college typically want to be “just far enough away” from their homes to feel like they are independent for the first time, Bach said.
Still, SRU embraces efforts to defy that trend.
The university has three major markets: Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Pennsylvania and outside of the state.
May explained that his office aims to get Slippery Rock University in front of as many eyes as possible. However, the message that comes with the university name changes based on market research mainly conducted in Bach’s office. He said recent data demonstrates that appealing to prospective students’ emotions has proved to be effective.
“We’re really trying to move from informative to emotive communication,” May said. “It’s not changing who we are, it's communicating who we are and what we can do for you.”
May also said SRU has changed a lot since the rollover of the century. He said the university’s former claim to fame as a school for physical education and exercise science now shares the spotlight with new, growing programs. Nursing and technology-related programming has grown, leading the marketing and admissions offices to pivot to share information on those options, too.
“Fifteen years ago you would not hear anything about nursing,” May said.
But today, he said the staff spends time “trying to stress the types of academic programs” the university has and why SRU is the place to go for those programs.
And as the university recruits more students, efforts to track where the students come from will continue to shape how the marketing department tells the story of SRU to potential future students.
“One of the things we’ve come into over the last year is we’re making sure we are cataloging our county, as well as high schools where students come from,” he said.
