Leverage your Greatest Asset… Your Students

I remember when I was applying for college and schools would send alums or current students to my high school to talk about their college experiences.  I remember how mezmerizing their stories of the infamous college life were and in the end it enticed me to apply to some schools that weren’t even on my radar.

We all know how influential it can be for a prospective student to listen to  current students or alums.  While admissions recruiters do a great job conveying the facts of a school, the current students and alumni can talk about the actual experience, what the social life is like, academics, opportunities for internships and jobs, etc.

So then the question is, how can we exponentially increase the effectiveness of our current students when it comes to recruiting international students?

Let’s face it, we can’t send our current students or alums to all the regions of the world where we would like to recruit, but we can do it virtually.

Look at all the different technologies we can employ that would allow the message of our current students to reach undecideds.  We could create videos with prospective students (if you are interested in this see a previous blog on creating inexpensive video for the web), we can have our students blog their experience, we can have digital conferences with high schools, we can podcast our students and so much more.

Because I preach the need to focus one’s social media initiatives, I am going to highlight podcasting in this post.  I think podcasting offers one of the best opportunities to convey the experiences of your current students.  The reason for this is that podcasts do not typically require as much bandwidth as videos.  This allows prospective students who live in developing nations to have an easier time accessing the rich media. 

Podcasts in my mind are also a step above blogs for two reasons.  First, let’s face it, no one wants to read and second, if you are really set on having a student blog you can easily transcribe all of your podcasts which turn out be quite good blog entries (for an example check out the goSwoop transcriptions of our podcasts).

Podcasting is also much easier than you might think.  If you have a PC and a microphone (either internal or external) you have all the tools you need.  You can easily use Windows Movie Maker (located in your accessories folder) to record and edit audio or use Audacity, a free audio recording and editing tool on the web.

Once you have recorded your podcasts with students you can host your podcasts for free on the web.  I use mypodcast.com but there are various other sites including podbean.com.  With your free account you will be able to take the podcasts that you have recorded with your current students and post them on the web.

Now all you have to do is publicize your podcasts.  To promote the podcasts we did with the USIEF Chennai office, they placed a link to the podcasts in their e-mail signatures.  At goSwoop, we promote all of our podcasts through a weekley newsletter.  

There are many options for publicizing your podcasts so get creative and share your current students’ experiences of studying at your school to every prospective student around the world!