Gaining Acceptance

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Recruiting & Retention Technology

Gaining Acceptance

9/1/2007

By Matt Villano

GOING MOBILE

COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS are on the move now more than ever. Mobile phones, Blackberrys, PDAs—you name the technology, students are using it. With this in mind, a number of higher education institutions have targeted the mobile environment as an area to extend recruitment, admissions, enrollment, and retention efforts.

Soon, with the help of TeamUp Mobile, they can truly go mobile. The company, which was founded earlier this year, offers a service through which higher education customers can keep in touch with current and prospective students via short message service (SMS) communications to mobile devices. While none of the company’s customers were live by press time, more than 40 schools had already signed up.

According to company President Matt Booth, schools will utilize these messages to communicate with students before they apply, and throughout the admissions process. Once students have enrolled, TeamUp Mobile messages will also keep them informed of events on campus. After graduation, they’ll receive messages as alumni, too.

“It’s all about marketing,” Booth says of the service, which he developed with his father. “Wherever schools want to drive student interest, we’ll send messages to that effect.”

At least for now, institutions can roll out the TeamUp Mobile model in one of two approaches: In the first, schools purchase a block of 30 SMS messages per student, for $1 to $3 apiece. In the second approach, schools offer students a monthly subscription service, through which they pay roughly $4.99 per month.

Booth says the latter approach enables schools to generate revenue from messaging, since actual costs to provide the service are a good deal less than what students would pay. In the $4.99 model, he says, $2.15 goes to the cellular carrier, and $.50 goes to TeamUp as a processing fee. The remaining $2.34 per user is pure profit for the school.

“Automating these processes eliminates the potential for human error and favoritism,” says Gates. “Students like that.” In the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, school officials have used a similar web-based system from RightNow Technologies since 2006. Their challenge: to improve the way Minnesota institutions interface with prospective students, before they’ve even applied. The system is part of the Minnesota Online website, and Kyle Snay, online knowledge and learning administrator for MnSCU, says application advisers use it to answer questions students have before they apply. From a web interface, students enter questions via e-mail, or in a chat window. From there, the staffer responds to the query in a number of ways: