A Separate Piece
Taking their temperature
There are some parallels between parent relations and media relations. Although the media are key institution audiences, what drives the campus-media relationship is the influence the media have on their target audiences (the public). Similarly, parents have a powerful influence over an institution's true target audience—students. Good parent relations actually begins with students, many experts say.
"The biggest challenge we see for institutions right now," Brock says, "is that while it has become increasingly important to communicate with parents during the recruitment stage, it can be easy to overreach." Citing the work of Neil Howe and William Strauss in their book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, Brock says Generation Y students typically have very strong relationships with their parents. But in working with clients, he has found distinct differences in how audience segments respond to recruitment communications targeted to parents.
Cautioning that these are broad generalizations, Brock says that "urban prospects are, in general, more traveled, more affluent, and as a group, higher performing. As such, they tend to be more economically dependent on parents but less sensitive to cost." They also visit more campuses and tend to make their own final college decisions within a comparatively large "consideration set," relying on parents for approval of final choice. "Rural prospects are more likely to be less affluent," he says. They are more apt to apply to fewer campuses within the region and to have fewer campuses in the consideration set, and they are less likely to rely on parental approval of their final choice. "In this group, however, when parents are very involved, they are more likely to be the principal decision maker," Brock adds. It's easy to create caricatures of entire audiences, he says, and it can be a mistake to institute broad-based strategies without knowing how various student and parent audiences might respond.
When developing recruitment materials, for example, campus communicators should keep in mind that most students say they drive their college-search process, yet parents indicate that they are more involved than students admit. "It's really a mutual veto," said John Maguire, president of Maguire and Associates, in a fall 1998 interview with the Lawlor Review. "The models we build show conclusively that the parents are closer to being correct in the level of influence that they exert on their sons and daughters. … Very rarely will a student end up at an institution that isn't the choice of both."
So how should communications professionals develop messages that resonate with both parents and prospective students? Experts say they should rely on a combination of consistent qualitative and quantitative research. "Surveys, by nature, ask for quantifiable answers to very specific questions and are not good at gauging depth of feeling, range of feelings, or the human reactions to various influencing factors," such as parent influence on college choice, Brock says. "Once you get a focus group talking openly about such influences, the discussions are incredibly informative." A single focus group will not yield actionable information about motivational influences, but if a campus conducts them periodically, Brock says, they are the best way to understand how students respond to such influences.
Post-recruitment, it's even more important to survey parents and students. Dehne advises institutions to start by asking students what they think their parents want and need to know and what their parents regularly ask them about. He recommends conducting focus groups with five groups of students: first-years, seniors, athletes, student leaders, and students of color. Each group has a slightly different take on parental involvement, subtleties that might not be evident in a single group, he says.
Lipman Hearne President Rob Moore advises surveying current and recent parents about existing parent communications programs to discover what they find useful, what may be intrusive or misdirected, and what they would like, and then basing program improvements on research results. This is precisely the tack UMN took to develop its program, which began in 1993 with a parent newsletter. Two years later, UMN's first reader survey pointed to a need for giving parents more direct interactions with the campus. The university responded by creating programs that give parents reasons to come to campus, notably a Parents Weekend, and by creating a single point of contact. Although Savage says she's added services and events based on parents' requests, she balances that by considering what she reasonably can deliver. "Be patient and explain carefully when parents ask for things you can't deliver," she says. Setting goals that are aligned with the institution's mission will help parent program managers navigate a very cluttered path.
CONTINUED: Catch and release
