Community-Powered Continuing Education
CASE STUDY: Longwood University College of Graduate and Professional Studies
A story-based approach to increasing enrollment and diversity in continuing education.
The Challenge
Kicking student recruitment into high gear to ensure unified and effective messaging for nine programs across Longwood University’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies (CGPS) offerings. Transforming continuing education marketing support systems, strategy and KPI tracking for each program, including a branding and marketing deep dive into each graduate program. Diversifying the application pool for graduate studies programs.
The Growth
The Longwood University College of Graduate and Professional Studies increased enrollment by increasing partnerships with faculty through collaborative marketing efforts and implementing key data-tracking systems. In 2022, six programs maintained or increased enrollment as compared to 2019, during a time when the industry was seeing drops in enrollment.
The Approach
Working closely with CGPS faculty, we brought them on board to begin thinking about marketing as an essential part of their jobs. We collaborated with each program on a continuing education marketing support plan to identify objectives, hone branding, complete a situation analysis, and determine strategy and implementation.
We created a seasonal “marketing blitz” for Professional Studies, a data-tracking process to analyze effectiveness of various efforts, and a data dashboard for tracking key metrics for all graduate programs.
The Team
Letterpress believes in engaging input and buy-in from the community surrounding any effort. For Longwood this included:
The Stories
Storytelling is key in building relationships and success. With the CGPS team, we worked to:
- Spotlight graduate students and alumni by sharing their progress and accomplishments.
- Highlight faculty members’ research and contributions to their fields.
- Elaborate on program differentiators by featuring diverse student, faculty and alumni storytellers.
Letterpress is a mission-driven company. We only work with organizations that we believe have a positive impact in their communities.
Longwood enrolled its most diverse group of students to date! One of the program directors shared that “Your marketing efforts are paying off in a BIG way — all the work on increasing our diversity is working!”
The college can now offer more marketing services to promote individual graduate programs, including email marketing, social media campaigns, graphic design, videography and strategy. With systems to track data in place, the program can easily assess what’s working well and what’s not, then pivot to be more effective.
The Good
The Learnings
Hone in on your key differentiators or “uniques."
What makes your organization different from your direct competitors? Why should someone choose you over the competition?
Data is key.
Find out where your leads are coming from and start tracking them. The more you know, the more you can adjust based on what’s working well and what’s not.
One word that comes to mind when I think about the Letterpress approach is ‘holistic.’ Our team is learning to work together, plan, think differently and see things from different perspectives with the Letterpress team.
— Dr. Jeannine R. Perry, Longwood University College of Graduate & Professional Studies Dean
