How to Approach your VWC Community Strategy
How to Approach Your VWC Community Strategy
Communities are the best way to organize your prospective students and their families and create an easy separation of content. Ideally, your communities should mirror what you would typically cover on a campus tour or visit and answer the questions you hear most frequently. When thinking about the prospective student experience, it is important to think “where will a prospective student start their exploration?”, “what is the most relevant information I should share?”, and “how will they navigate the site throughout the discovery and application period?”
It is also important to think about who will own your communities and what responsibilities they have. A community should not be made if there is not at least one student ambassador/admissions officer community leader in each community. This would also be a good time to consider pulling in campus partners who are actively engaged in the admissions process for a subset of your students. Community leaders should be regularly available and will act as the first line of defense when fielding questions for the admissions team.
While you are creating communities, it is a good time to think strategically about whether they should be public, private, or invitation only. How you are using your overall Wisr site and who is using it (high school juniors, high school seniors, high school counselors, prospective student family members) could determine who should have access to what information. Keep in mind that public groups are available for anyone to see and join, private groups require an invitation or approval to join but will still appear in the list of available communities to all members, and invitation only communities will be visible only to members of the group set by the admin or community leader.
With these questions in mind, here are Wisr’s suggestions for building communities in your Virtual Welcome Center. Ultimately, you need to decide which communities best meet your institution’s needs, but here are commonly used among Wisr’s existing Virtual Welcome Centers.
Welcome
The Welcome community should be your public one-stop-shop for information regarding the structure of the site, schedules, and where/when to find certain information. This is where you should host any welcome/final remarks videos/webinars as well as instructional posts that let your students and parents know what to expect in your other communities.
Do not expect much discussion to take place in your welcome community as this is mostly an information hub. We recommend having a weekly discussion post with information and updates for the week as well as a Topic related to which team members are regularly available and links to their profiles so your members can engage in 1:1 chat when necessary. It might also be a good place to track technical difficulties and other issues common to all users of your Wisr network.
Campus or Virtual Visits
Campus visits are typically an integral part of a student’s decision where to apply. While our current situation may not allow for tours and visits, we all hope one day these opportunities will return. Creating a community that provides updated information on campus visits and registration information in your site makes Wisr a one-stop shop for information and a place to easily answer questions that will likely apply to several people. In the meantime, this is the best place to host activities and information that would typically occur during a campus visit. You can also host virtual information sessions, campus tours, and other activities to replace and later enhance your campus visit program. A campus visit community has the ability to limit phone calls with questions about upcoming sessions.
Transfer Students
Students who are considering transferring to your institution have unique needs and questions that are not necessarily relevant to all applicants. Providing a space where they can not only understand the transfer experience from a student life perspective, but also get more information on how your institution considers transfer applications, how deadlines and requirements may differ from the application process, and how their credits and classes will transfer will all be key to their decision-making. If possible, we recommend appointing a student or staff community leader who came to your institution as a transfer student to provide the most authentic voice about their experience.
International Students
International applicants will likely never have an opportunity to visit your campus before choosing to apply or possibly enroll. So, your Wisr network will be an invaluable tool for them to learn about your institution and will provide more information than just the school website. International applicants likely will have questions about additional materials required for application, including language proficiency exams, and may have questions about visas and financial aid available to international students. As their needs will be slightly different than domestic applicants, creating a community for them will allow them to address their questions with people who are trained to answer them and connect with current international students who can explain the process and talk about their personal experience.
Parent and Family Members
Parents and family members have the most influence over a prospective student’s decision where to apply (and eventually attend) college. Giving them a place to engage and have their questions answered will provide information and comfort about your institution. For the parent and family community, we recommend having more senior-level staff involved and potentially inviting parents of current students to interact with parents and answer questions.
Ask An Admissions Counselor
This community is straight forward and the name alone should inform your members what to expect in this discussion board. Topics in this community should focus on various popular areas of discussion or frequently asked questions. For example, topics can cover upcoming deadlines, financial aid, commitment/depositing, etc. Make sure to note in each topic which admissions counselors are available to answer questions and the hours they will be available throughout the day.
Specific College/School Communities or Academic Experience
If your institution requires students to apply to a specific school or college to gain admission, we recommend having communities where information can be found about those schools and colleges. Create a community for each school/college and encourage members of that discipline to create content to inform students about the academic experience and resources available in their school/college. If you do not have distinct schools and colleges, consider a community that is dedicated to the academic experience at your institution.
Content in this community can be anything from student “My Story” posts to recorded samples classes with professors to a tour of their state-of-the-art facilities. Each community should also have at least one student and one faculty/staff member related to that subject regularly available to answer questions and act as a point of contact for the community.
Athletics
Athletics may play a significant cultural role for all students on campus and/or be the main focus for student athletes. If athletics plays a large cultural role on your campus, this community can be a space to highlight football Saturdays and March Madness and the cultural joys that come with attending a school with a strong sports culture. For schools where athletics does not play such a central role to campus culture, this community can provide a space for prospective student athletes to talk to current athletes and coaches about time commitments, how to balance academics and athletics, and understanding how athletes are supported on your campus.
Interest Fields
As students explore colleges, they may know what they are interested in doing with their careers, but not exactly what they want to study while in college. Creating interest communities can help prospective students envision how their academic experience can tie to their long-term goals. Interest fields can also extend beyond the classroom to cover passion areas. We suggest creating interest fields that are most common to your student population. For instance, Students interested in Arts and Humanities, Business, STEM, the Social Sciences, Healthcare, Education, etc.
Student Life
Imaging what your life would be like as a student at your institution is probably the most important factor students are considering when choosing where to apply. Living on campus, student organizations and Greek Life, athletics and intramural sports, and campus resources all factor in. Providing a clear picture of campus life and what students can expect by living and studying on your campus will help students understand whether your institution is a good fit.
Health and Wellness
How your institution thinks about the health and wellness of your students will be essential to address and is a growing area of concern for student and families. Providing information about physical and mental health services, stress management, and how students manage their health concerns is particularly important for some populations of students. You may want to remind students and their families that they should not be posting information about their personal medical conditions as this community is a public forum. However, providing contact information and links to professionals in the offices that most closely manage medical issues on your campus should help point families in the right direction.
Affinity Groups
When deciding where to go to college it is critical for prospective students to feel like they will find other students similar to them. Creating communities to reflect the diversity of your institution will show students and their families that people like them do exist. We definitely recommend having a strategy for prospective students to find what they are looking for without necessarily providing every affinity their own community – that would be a lot for your team to manage! Our recommendation is to try to group some affinities under larger umbrellas, for instance Religious Life (as opposed to Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, etc.), Multicultural Students (as opposed to Asian, Black, Latinx, etc.), and then consider groups that otherwise would not fit into a larger context, for example First Generation Students, Veterans, and LGBTQIA+ and Allies. Discussion threads within communities can help drill down to specific identities within the communities. These groups could either be set to public or private depending on sensitivity.
Culture and Traditions
An essential part of considering whether or not to attend your institution is learning about campus traditions, culture, and lingo (I bet you have a long list of acronyms every student needs to know). Designate a public community in your Wisr site for prospective students to learn when and why students jump into the fountain, run naked through campus, or play so much euchre. This community will help them get a real sense of what makes your institution unique. We recommend allowing your student ambassadors rule this roost and share all the things they know and have learned about being a member of your campus community. Start threads for myths and legends, campus facts and figures, acronyms, and favorite traditions. The content of this community could also be great fodder for social activities and trivia games in your social programming.
AMA/Ask Me Anything
Ask Me Anything discussions are a great way to lean on your student ambassadors and admissions staff to offer your prospective students and their families the most genuine and authentic perspectives about student life and the student experience on campus. You can even host live AMA events in this community so students who miss the live event know where they can read the script or watch a recorded video. Use Topics and events to organize which AMAs are live and what topics they cover.
Ambassador Hub
Since your Student Ambassadors will be using Wisr on a regular basis, we recommend creating a community for Ambassadors to communicate with each other and staff and act as a home base for their training, materials, and sharing tips and deadlines. This will keep all relevant information about upcoming meetings and trainings in one place and as well as serve a community for your team to interact. We recommend that this exist as an invitation only community for your student ambassadors and staff.