A message from the President: Recruitment and retention training

Dear Shippensburg University Community Faculty and Staff:

Since my arrival as interim president, I have greatly appreciated how many of our faculty and staff have expressed a desire to assist in the recruitment and retention of students. The Offices of Enrollment and Student Success welcome your assistance and have been discussing ways in which we, as a campus community, can begin to fully understand how students and their families make important college selection decisions. The COVID environment has not only influenced how we communicate with students and their families, but their emotional motivators to interact with us and other universities.

To help us leverage that understanding and best present the value proposition that Shippensburg University has to offer, I am inviting you to a special, interactive, in-person training workshop on Thursday, December 16, 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. in the Tuscarora Room, presented by Longmire and Company. The day will involve working with admissions, coaches, faculty, support personnel, and others who have direct or indirect impact on recruiting. The primary goal of the day’s workshop is to ensure that we are fully informed, better equipped, and highly successful in recruiting students in the context of our individual work and the on-going recruitment plan developed by the campus community.

Topics to be covered include

• The “Why Behind the Buy,” findings from Longmire and Company’s recent national market studies on COVID and how effectively/ineffectively we are meeting pre-enrollment needs,
• Effective communication with students and parents,
• Applying creative entrepreneurship to your work,
• How to position students to facilitate self-motivation,
• How to immerse students in their passion,
• High level service delivery across all brand touch points,
• Examples of superior customer service, and
• Why Shippensburg University?

I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to engage and look inward as we assess current practices and help design future strategies that position Shippensburg University to be the higher education institution of choice in this region and beyond. Enrollments are paramount to our future, and we all serve a crucial role in the recruitment and retention of students.

To assist in planning, please RSVP, via this link https://www.ship.edu/interactive-training/ by Friday, December 10. If you have questions or need additional information, please contact JoEllen Lindner, Sr. Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management at jrlindner@ship.edu.

Sincerely,

Charles