Office of College Advancement

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams

It is our pleasure to announce Greg King as the new chair and La-Verna Fountain as the new vice chair of the HACC Foundation Board.

Greg and La-Verna both love HACC and will help lead the HACC Foundation Board to success. Please join us in congratulating Greg and La-Verna on their new roles.

A key first step in reaching audiences is understanding them – their motivators, barriers and influencers.

This was the goal of the collegewide HACC Voices workgroups. Colleagues from every campus and Virtual Learning and nearly every division participated on our collegewide workgroups to:

• Conduct a literature review of some of the College’s target audiences
• Recruit current students to participate in focus groups and surveys
• Develop and implement a strategy to conduct first-hand research of our target audiences
• Develop audience profile sheets to inform our persona campaign and current and future student marketing

To our workgroup members, thank you!

Through literature review, focus groups, surveys and interviews, the workgroups crafted HACC Voices Audience Profile Sheets for some of the College’s target audiences.

• Active military and veteran students
• African-American students
• Dual enrolled and College in the High School students
• Hispanic students
• High school students
• Home-schooled high school students
• Nontraditional students
• Parents of homeschooled high school students

The Office of College Advancement has been using these sheets in our program marketing and persona recruitment campaigns. So how can you use them?

If your target audience is represented in one of these fact sheets, please take some time to review the fact sheet before you communicate with your target audience. It will help you to better understand them and reach a common ground. For example:

• If you are talking to a high school student about attending HACC, you may want to focus on some of the features of HACC that provide a full college experience, such as clubs and organization.
• However, if you are talking to a nontraditional future student, you may want to focus on the fact that many of our students are age 25 or over and the supports available to help them succeed at HACC.

The final sheets have been posted in the “Understanding YOUR Audience” section in the OCA channel on myHACC. Stay tuned for information about training later this calendar year!

As the College encourages registration among current and future students for the summer and fall 2020 semesters, the Office of College Advancement (OCA) is excited to continue its efforts with marketing by target audience and meeting future students where they are in their educational journey (see OCA August 2019 newsletter.)

Using our three personas, we launched this new approach in fall 2019, and it has exceeded our expectations. We are reaching and connecting with more future students based on their demographics and needs, while beating national advertising averages in the educational industry.

For example, the campaigns use different types of digital advertising to reach our three target audiences and guide them to a landing page that includes information relevant to them. (Please visit our 2018-19 marketing assessment for definitions for the terms below). During the registration phase of the winter/spring 2020 future student campaign, our assessment showed:

• Our responsive display ads received 53,069 clicks. The average click-through rate for the education industry is .53%. HACC’s click-through rate was nearly double at .94%.
• Our remarketing ads received 5,511 clicks and a click-through rate of .75%. The average click-through rate for the education industry is .53%.
• Future students reacted more to the 15-second YouTube ads than the 30-second ads.
• The Facebook results exceeded past results. We received 7,867 clicks, which is a click-through rate of 1.16%. The average click-through rate for the education industry is .73%.
• There were 17,201 swipes on our Snapchat ads, which only targeted the traditional-age audience. This was the first time we tried advertising with Snapchat.
• During the winter/spring 2019 registration campaign, our single landing page, hacc.edu/GetStarted, received 2,033 unique visitors between November and December 2018. During the winter/spring 2020 registration campaign, the targeted landing pages listed below received 38,102 unique visitors between November and December 2019.

o Nontraditional student (Tanishia)

o Traditional student (Mel)

o Workforce student (Jacob)

Additionally, when we compared the impressions on our digital advertising for winter/spring registration between 2019 and 2020, there was an increase of 550% in impressions. We went from 2,233,179 impressions to 14,544,766 impressions.

Finally, as we continue to market to future students, we are also establishing YouTube playlists for each persona, including:

• HACC Stories and Tips: Finding YOUR Place at HACC
• HACC Stories and Tips: Finding an Education that Works as Hard as You Do
• HACC Stories and Tips: Finding Everything You’re Looking For

Each playlist will include the 30-second commercials, helpful first-hand tips from students, student stories and more.

Effective May 1, 2020, HACC is utilizing Business Card Star for business card orders. The switch to this vendor saves the College thousands of dollars and streamlines our accounting processes.

Please refer to this webpage for instructions on how to first log in to the new portal and place orders for HACC business cards: https://portal.businesscardstar.com/pages/portal/help/hacc/

When you want to place orders for business cards, please visit: https://portal.businesscardstar.com/portal.html

If you have any questions, please email IMCProjects@hacc.edu.