Changing the Comfort Zone

 

GETTING PERSONAL IN CYBERSPACE

St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware is redefining the role of the American boarding school. The grand Gothic buildings and rolling lawns of the 2200-acre campus have signaled the promise of opportunity since its founding in 1929. But it’s the spirit and energy of the students and faculty that chimes a descant to the future: This school is “counter cultural,” engaged, responsible and ambitious.

Louisa Zendt, Director of Admission and Financial Aid, talks of St. Andrew’s with warmth and enthusiasm. She told us, “The magic of St. Andrew’s lies in three factors: we have an incredibly diverse group of kids, the students and teachers all reside on campus, and the school philosophy is somewhat counter-cultural.

“Our students are bright, motivated, and fun. No matter their differences in background, they quickly find they have great interests and energy in common and they want to be fully engaged in the life of the community.

“At independent schools ‘community’ is one of the most important intangibles, but at St. Andrew’s, being small and all-residential, community is really compelling. The relationships between students and faculty are inspiring and life-changing. The teachers are enmeshed in the daily lives of the kids 24/7; one third are on duty every weekend, so they are actively involved sharing their family lives and personal interests with the students. Faculty and students develop great friendships; the kids feel this unique sense of community right away.

“The school ‘ethos’ is counter-cultural. That is, we do what we think is best for students at this age. We don’t make decisions in order to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ in a competitive admissions environment. This applies across the board, whether it is a decision about fundamental course offerings, maintaining family style meals and dress code, or whether to wire up the bedrooms creating pillow-to-pillow Internet access (we didn’t).

“Keeping with the School’s founding mission, to be ‘accessible to all, regardless of means,’ the School’s financial aid program fully meets each student’s demonstrated need. Admission is need-blind, and all those who are offered admission are granted the aid for which they qualify. We are fortunate that there is no barbell in our socioeconomic stratification chart.”

It’s no surprise that Zendt is creative and personal in her recruiting methods. She uses PORTAL to implement her strategies, and it has changed the way the Admission Office works.

“At St. Andrew’s, we build recruiting on relationships,” she explained.

“PORTAL is a tremendous tool for data tracking, the best I’ve used, and I speak from the experience of having worked with three different admission databases. Having a data tracking system that matches our goals and our personality is incredible. I can easily manipulate and sort my data for all our recruiting purposes.

“This is our first year with PORTAL. Our office assistant has extended herself and really understands the potential of PORTAL, while I am just learning. Recently, I’ve jumped in learning to manipulate and sort the data myself in order to create reports and layouts to support our program in new ways. PORTAL is so user friendly, so much fun. I love creating ‘info sheets’ of prospective student information for a parent caller to use in making an admission call, or for the lacrosse coach to use to contact interested players. I can gather so much information so easily.”

Zendt described feeling cautious about sending blast emails to prospective students and their families using iR’s BROADCASTER. “At St. Andrew’s, we pride ourselves on being really personal and authentic. I wasn’t comfortable with ‘e-marketing’ in general. We want applicants to meet our faculty and students and get to know us. I hand sign letters and write lots of hand written notes. The idea of using a tool to send multiple ‘personal’ notes at the touch of a key was unsettling. I was not interested in sending notes that were not from me.

“inRESONANCE has given me a whole new outlook. With PORTAL, it is so easy to create email blasts that are customer oriented. I first used BROADCASTER this winter to send out a friendly reminder about application deadlines. I was very anxious about the possibility that one person might get the reminder notice who shouldn’t--a person who had already notified us that they would not be applying until the following year, for example.

“Then a member of my staff showed me how easily I could review the list of recipients of the proposed email blast from my laptop and omit anyone who should not be included. In the same way, I could stop and add a note to any one of the designated email blast. Just as I look over each letter that I sign that goes out, I could do the same with this email blast. In fact, the blast email was made personal by adding a simple note and I found myself caught off guard by the many compliments I received from recipients, thanking me for the ‘kind email’ that I had sent, that had actually been sent by someone else in the office. We had tremendous feedback, and we had full control. No one asked me, ‘Why did we get this email?’

“‘Visit-Back Days’ are just around the corner, and it has been great using the data tracking to individualize preparations for this important event. I used PORTAL to manage the process of creating individualized programs for each re-visiting accepted student. The process was dramatically different for me, as every bit of information I needed was already in PORTAL. I did not have to go into the individual files at all. I could work from my living room, or anywhere on campus, to make lists of classes to visit, coaches to involve--it was all so easy. Because we are able to rename some of the fields in the database to suit our school, we can pull exactly the information we want.”

Has Admissions found it difficult to make the transition to PORTAL?

“Not at all. We have been able to make many changes ourselves without calling any of the techies for help. In fact, over this whole first year of using PORTAL, there might have been one or two questions for which we felt we should call inRESONANCE, yet our office assistant usually figured it out herself before calling. Everyone at iR is so personal, when we did need to call, we found the support people so easily accessible. For the most part, iR told us, ‘Yes, you found it,’ or ‘No, here’s the reason it’s structured that way.’ You can tell PORTAL has been thoughtfully designed.”

To learn more about the active life of a St. Andrean, visit the School’s web site.