Top 3 Questions Students are Asking About Graduation
Students are notorious for asking the same graduation questions over and over again. We work with students from 42 universities across the United States and we’d like to bet that we know three of the five questions they’re asking Commencement offices most often. What if you could eliminate these repetitive questions by understanding the root cause?
Question 1:
Do I need tickets/
Can I get more tickets?
This is on the mind of both students and their parents. But didn’t you already tell them? It’s on the website, social media, and in their email inbox. Here’s the thing, students don’t read all of their emails. A survey done by Bowling Green State University found that 40% of students admitted to not always reading emails from their academic advisers.
Why Don’t Students Read Email?
We explore this question in more depth in a separate blog you can find here. To summarize, it’s not their preferred channel of communication. They get a lot of emails and reading through all of them doesn’t seem worth it. Even the important emails (i.e. graduation information) are subject to their email bias. Emails are generally content heavy and if the information doesn’t seem immediately pressing, they’ll forget about it. Besides putting URGENT in all of your outbound emails, what can you do to ensure they’ll read and remember what you tell them?
Have you tried interacting with them on their preferred mode of communication? 73% of students say that they want schools to text them… however, only 28% report being offered the option to text with their college or university. Everyone’s busy, and they want the information they need to be at their fingertips when they need it–information such as the second most popular graduation question.
Question 2: When/Where is my graduation ceremony?
We have a phrase at Peoplocity that we love using, “The right message to the right person at the right time.” This is what we call Proactive Communication. Understanding, anticipating, and personalizing interactions are the key components in this communication strategy. Even if you’ve already said the location of the graduation multiple times, if it’s not in their hands when they’re headed to the ceremony, their first instinct will be to call and ask. Besides reducing the number of graduation questions, Proactive Communication shows that you care and helps build loyalty. A full dive into Proactive Communication can be found here. Now, what could be the final most asked question?
Question 3:
Can I decorate my cap?
How many times have you answered that one?
Let’s recap. Students don’t read emails. Why not?? The info generally isn’t relevant to them at the moment they received it. How can you make sure they’re equipped with the right info? By interacting with them on their preferred channel of communication and using the right message at the right time framework.
Peoplocity’s messaging platform makes it easy to use that framework. Check out how the platform works and request a demo today!
About Peoplocity
Peoplocity’s two-way, personalized messaging platform is making it easy for universities to communicate with students and their parents throughout the entire graduation process. We’d love to talk with you to see if we can help you improve communications with your customers.
Tags: College Graduation, Student Experience
Categorized in: Blog, University
