​Community colleges increasingly are turning to electronic mapping to reach targeted audiences for a variety of purposes, including enrollment, fundraising, fee-related initiatives and marketing.

With mapping systems, colleges can leverage information they routinely collect when students register, and correlate that data at the neighborhood level to reveal patterns they can use to manage enrollment and conduct funding campaigns—among other initiatives.

Electronic maps are a graphical representation of underlying data, and they enable colleges to achieve their objectives by reaching a select audience, such as a particular ethnic group or level of household income.

A tool for tough times

The trend toward using mapping comes as colleges face higher expenses and dwindling resources. Rather than aiming their messaging at the wrong groups and overspending on those efforts, colleges are using mapping systems to ensure that mailings and other communications get to the people they want to reach.

“I think the bottom line here is the bottom line,” says Bob Gochicoa, president of the CareerFocus Consortium in Michigan, which provides mapping and other marketing services to colleges.

“Traditional funding models for community colleges are broken,” he says. “State and federal support have remained stagnant. Colleges that are dependent on local taxes have taken a huge hit with declining property values.”

Colleges need to develop a new type of intelligence that will allow them to compete successfully for resources coming from their local communities, Gochicoa says.

The CareerFocus Consortium offers enrollment mapping as a service to any community college. For more
information, visit its website.

“This is the purpose of the mapping we are doing," he says. "Not only do you have to craft the kind of message that your target audience will respond to, you also need to get it into the hands of the right person. For community colleges, this is actually multiple messages to multiple demographics.”

Tracking enrollment patterns

Washtenaw Community College (WCC) in Michigan has used mapping tools provided by the consortium to distribute CareerFocus magazine, the primary tool for providing information to community college districts, says Larry Whitworth, who retired as WCC president in August after serving as its CEO for 13 years.

“During my time as president, I have worked with [the consortium] to examine our enrollment maps to determine where our students are coming from in comparison with voting results by precincts,” Whitworth says.

Many colleges use mapping to reduce the cost of marketing by only mailing the magazine to U.S. postal carrier routes that are “student-enrollment productive,” Whitworth says.

“In other words, there are neighborhoods or carrier routes within each district that produced no students,” he says. “That can be true for a wide variety of reasons, [but] sending the magazine to these neighborhoods will generally produce little if any” return on investment.

Reaching voters

At WCC, the idea of reducing mailings because the carrier route would be unproductive wasn’t a consideration, Whitworth says.

“The reason for not using the cost-savings analysis of the mapping was because better than 50 percent of the college budget was derived from local property tax,” he says. “My goal was to understand the electorate so as to make the CareerFocus magazine a more effective tool in both student recruitment and success of our millage campaigns.”

Marketing for community colleges is an area that needs demographic-data analysis in order to more effectively deliver tools that produce the best outcome at the lowest cost, Whitworth says.

“Schools can now track enrollment in each of the postal carrier routes in their district to determine the effectiveness of enrollment growth and the effectiveness of the college message on voting patterns,” Whitworth says. “This kind of analysis provides the foundation for increasing or decreasing marketing budgets during these very difficult financial times.”

Through electronic mapping, WCC achieved the goals of increased enrollment and the passage of a millage vote.

“Two years ago at the national presidential election, our strategy of working with the various carrier routes to perfect our message produced a two-to-one positive vote in support of one mill of property tax equal to $12 million per year for the next 10 years,” Whitworth says.

In addition, the college has been able to track enrollment growth by carrier route and measure revenues versus expenses in each.

Determining the best ROI

Carroll Community College (CCC) in Maryland is also taking advantage of the enrollment mapping capabilities offered by the CareerFocus Consortium. The electronic mapping service includes full-color maps featuring raw enrollment data and enrollment rate labels for each carrier route, produced for both credit and continuing education.

“This allowed the college to target its direct mail to the postal carrier routes that historically have provided the college with both credit and continuing education enrollments,” says Craig Clagett, vice president for planning, marketing and assessment at CCC.

The college uses a 2-percent enrollment rate as the cutoff—mailing to those carrier routes where historically that percentage of households have generated enrollments.

“This allows for more cost efficiency in direct mail,” Clagett says.

By identifying high-response carrier routes and then mailing to those most responsive, the college can be far more effective in its campaigns.

“Electronic mapping facilitates easy assimilation of the geography of your enrollment,” Clagett says. “This is useful in deciding what events, in what locations of your service area, to attend.”

Outreach and recruiting resources—specifically staff time—are limited, Clagett says.

“You want to invest where you will get the greatest return,” he says.

The emphasis on cost efficiency has to be balanced with the college’s mission of serving all residents of its service area, he says, so for basic marketing CCC does mail countywide.

“Marketing budgets are finite, so our additional marketing efforts are sometimes informed by the [return on investment] information provided by enrollment mapping,” Clagett says.

Educating policymakers, too

Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina has also reaped benefits from electronic mapping.

Carrier routes focus marketing

“With 400,000 households in our growing county, we can't possibly mail our publication to every home,” says Laurie Clowers, associate vice president of communications. “We use enrollment mapping to determine which households to mail to, in order to have the greatest impact.”

The college examines the map data and mails to the postal carrier routes where it tends to get the most students.

“The data also includes demographics such as home values, household income, etc., but because our student body is so diverse, we don't rely on that data for mailing,” Clowers says.

Wake Tech has received positive feedback on the mailings, and Clowers thinks it's helping raise awareness of the college’s programs.

Since launching CareerFocus in 2007, the college has seen enrollment grow by double digits each year.

“In addition to informing students and potential students, we hope that CareerFocus will help inform policymakers to minimize cuts in public funding as much as possible,” Clowers says. “We are also laying the groundwork for additional funding for future growth. We will need a bond referendum to start building on the land we purchased for a new campus.”

Other potential uses

At least one other organization, Patchwork Nation, a reporting project of the Jefferson Institute that explores trends in the U.S. by examining different kinds of communities, is considering offering mapping services to colleges.

“The big use for colleges, and specifically community colleges, would be to see [which colleges] are drawing students and then start comparing the way different kinds of places use the schools,” says Dante Chinni, project director of Patchwork Nation.

“In other words, how do the community colleges in the [wealthy suburbs] differ from the service worker centers,” Chinni says. “You could get a read on the different populations that attend each. In theory, you could begin to understand and maybe craft class offerings based on what different places—or different kinds of counties—need. It may help colleges see things they may be missing or have overlooked.”