e-Campus Advertising - Is it Working?

There's no doubt that many things can be partially responsible for our sudden increase in online enrollments again this spring. When we went through our major growth spurt from 2000 to 2004 we had five straight years of more than a 55% increase in online enrollments with an annualized growth rate of 93% per year over the five years. Then things leveled off pretty well. This semester we have seen a 13% increase in online enrollments. That is the largest semester increase since spring 2004. Why did this happen? Economy? Sure, probably several economic factors are at play here. General student demand for online? Sure. Advertising? Yes, I think so.

There is no way to know for sure, but our award-winning promotional campaign for Lake Superior Connect might very well have had an impact on our enrollments. I've worked closely with Gary Kruchowski, Director of Public Information and Governmental Affairs at Lake Superior College to promote our e-Campus offerings and services. I'm of the opinion that these efforts have been successful with an impact on increased enrollments.

There are several occasions each year where we post banners, such as Grandma's Marathon, the American Birkebeiner, and similar public events. Yesterday we received our new banners based on the same comic strip-like approach we have used for the past few months.The banners are very striking. The artist on all these items has been Dave Kirwan of Duluth.


I've previously posted our video ad E-Learning is G-Learning which is one of the 3 30-second ads created for television and web display. The video below is the other two 30-sec ads combined together into a single 60-sec ad.


We have also used the idea in print ads, as shown below.It's impossible to say how much of an impact any of these things have had on the increasing online enrollments, but I feel safe in saying that they have played a significant role - somewhere, somehow, someway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving
Read more

Distance Education and Reauthorization

Image
The Committee on Education and Labor in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "College Opportunity and Affordability Act" (H.R. 4137 ) on November 15, 2007. This means we are nearing the end of the long road leading to reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA). The House committee bill now joins the bill passed by the U.S. Senate (S.1642) in July 2007. House link: H.R. 4137 , go to part H, section 496-A Senate link: S. 1642 , go to part G, section 491 (formerly 496) At some point the language differences between the House and Senate will need to be hammered out. However, with regard to accreditation concerns for distance education, the House committee bill is identical to the Senate bill. The current language would allow college and university accrediting agencies to address the quality of a school’s distance education offerings without the need to create separate standards, procedures or policies related to distance education (for a while this looked to be the dire
Read more