A Separate Piece
By Andrea Jarrell
Creating campus communications programs that give parents their own experiences
Parents have become increasingly important as a campus constituency, a change driven by both financial and generational factors. Their increased involvement--from recruitment to commencement--demands an organized communiations effort that strikes a balance between information and involvement, and many campuses have responded by adding programming and dedicated staff. This article outlines essential stratgeies for communicating with parents, including creating separate experiences for them.
"We graduated," a parent declared last spring in an e-mail to Marjorie Savage. That was a first, says Savage, parent program director at the University of Minnesota. Although she is troubled when parents describe their child's college experience in terms of "we," she and her campus colleagues have managed to turn parents' increased involvement in their children's lives into an institutional advantage.
Twenty years ago, the idea of parent relations at colleges and universities was almost nonexistent. But parents have become increasingly important as a campus constituency during the last decade—a change driven by both financial and generational factors.
Parents' increased levels of involvement have been well documented: According to a 2003 study by GDA Integrated Services, during the recruitment stage of the college application process, 65 percent of prospective students' parents will read all publications of the institutions in which their child is interested and 50 percent will go to these campuses' Web sites. In a separate 2004 study, Stamats Communications found that parents plan to visit their children on campus five or six times during freshman year. And in UMN's most recent parent survey in spring 2004, two-thirds of UMN parents said they talk to their college student children two or more times a week.
Despite this evidence of parents' increased involvement—from recruitment to commencement and beyond—best practices in communicating with parents are nascent compared with those in other areas such as admissions, development, and alumni and media relations. Many institutions have responded by adding programming and staff dedicated to communicating with this constituency. In 1998, Susan Brown, director of Northeastern University's parent program, created Administrators Promoting Parental Involvement, which began as a way to allow practitioners in this field to share information and network. Today, APPI holds an annual conference each spring and, through its National Clearinghouse for Parent Programs and Services, it provides sample plans and materials from institutions.
The overall goal of parent communications, says Robert Sevier, senior vice president of Stamats, "is to strike a balance between information and involvement. Consider where that balance is with major points in the continuum of parent relations in mind: the college selection process, freshman year transition, problems and major questions during a student's academic career, career and graduate school preparation, and the transition from student to alumnus."
Organizational structures and services for parent communications differ from campus to campus, but innovators agree on the essential strategies for advancing parents from "prospects" to "graduates": partner and centralize, assess levels of engagement, and create separate experiences.
CONTINUED: Team building
