Help Us Help Russ the Mailman

July 25, 2008 • 8:48 am • POSTED BY Jim Walls

Now that summer’s winding down, our nation’s mail carriers better invest in some good quality weightlifting belts. ‘Cause universities are gearing up for the fall recruitment season, and the 4,000+ college campuses across the US are about to unload more mail than ever. Search pieces. Viewbooks. Applications. Financial aid brochures. Window stickers. Pottery Barn catalogs (I kid). The reality is that your average seventeen-year-old will likely arrive home from her first day of school this September with her mailbox flowing over. And it doesn’t take a marketing study to guess where those millions of tons of paper will end up in a few months time. There are two things I remember from that period in my gangly adolescent life: opening my acceptance letter to Lehigh, and the night I dragged several garbage bags full of glossy mailers out to the curb.

So in the age of the Internet, Facebook, texting, and Twitter, why are so many schools still stuck in the old way of doing things?

Quite simply: the old way works. Almost too well. Studies have shown that each mailing up a kid gets from a university increases their likelihood of applying, up until around the tenth mailing (when the returns begin to tail off). Other studies outline the benefits of reaching out to kids earlier, prompting some schools to start sending brochures as early as freshman year.

With a few universities as clients, we’re guilty as well. We like to think our materials are a little more effective than our competitors’, and we make every effort to follow sustainable printing practices. But there’s still too much paper. Too much ink. Too much energy being wasted printing and shipping. But we think it’s time for a paradigm shift. There’s got to be a better way. And if we can figure out that way, think about the implications beyond those on our landfills: Universities can take all that money spent on marketing mailings and pump it right back into things like scholarships and research. They can spend less competing with one another and reinvest in what universities do best: educating. 

Fortunately, at least one of our clients wants to help pave the way, and they’re willing to run a limited test this year to give interested students a chance to opt-out of mailings early in the recruitment cycle. But they rightfully don’t want to wind up with a class that’s 80 percent full, so we need to come up with ways to effectively deliver the same information to potential students without sacrificing acceptances.

The quick-and-dirty option is to just e-mail out some PDFs. But I’m not sure I’m buying it. The high-school age kids in my family don’t really check their e-mail—it’s how their parents communicate (a perception that kinda blows my mind). We can put all the info up on a Web site and let them have at it, but that seems so passive. Who wants to spend all afternoon on a university marketing Web site? Then there’s the aforementioned Facebook, Myspace, etc., etc., blah blah blah. But as I type this, every other agency that works with a university is thinking the exact same thing, so I’ll leave that one for the Axe Body Spray media buyers. And though marketing managers are falling over each other trying to figure out how to market via text message, that’s dirty pool. I don’t want that stuff on my phone, and I imagine the kid currently lighting firecrackers in the park across the street from my house doesn’t want that either.

So what are we gonna do? Well, a few of us here are working on some ideas, but we bet there are some others out there with some pretty intelligent thoughts that haven’t crossed our collective 160over90 mind. So let’s try and solve this together. What can universities do to deliver their messages, without all the waste?

Please make any suggestions you may have in the comments below, and we’ll do our best to make it a conversation. If we can deliver an effective system that still fills up classrooms, we won’t keep it a secret. We’ll share it with other schools. And the effect could very well be massive. 

Do it for the kids. Do it for the trees and squirrels and birds. Do it for my mailman Russ.