The first SMS message was sent in 1992, and your target audiences have grown up texting their friends and family. Because your college aims to serve these digital natives, adding a messaging communication channel will help you reach this audience every day. 

Compliance — Your First Step

Before we jump into the benefits of using messaging, your university will need to take the essential first step of getting permission from your students and leads. Even if you’ve been in contact through email or phone calls, you’ll still need to obtain their express written consent before you send the first text.

You can stay in compliance with the anti-telemarketing laws in your country, like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the United States or European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with opt-in opportunities and language in your digital spaces like social media and websites, as well as in printed material like applications, flyers, business cards, and mailings. Make consent a standard part of materials designed for students and a part of your website. Once you have permission from your audience, you’re ready to start using messaging that benefits everyone — from your staff to your students.

Send marketing information with messaging to change leads into students

In 160 characters or less, you can drive prospective students toward enrollment with a simple conversational message. Most of your leads are already checking their phone more than 96 times a day, and you can reap the benefits by sending SMS texts that include a clear call to action right to their screen. Your enrollment team can send these short, relevant messages about new changes on campus that include links to the application or an interesting fact with a link to your college newsletter. Asking questions is a great way to get them interested while also unveiling what your school has to offer.

Your message can be as simple as:

Hi Jamal! Did you know XYZCollege
has an open house this Sunday? 
Reply OPEN for more info. 
Sean XYZ College

Messaging can free up university staff and increase productivity

Messaging is an efficient communication channel that can save productive hours for your university team. A quick message is easy for your staff to send compared to making numerous unanswered phone calls or emails. Your counselor’s caseload can become more manageable when they can use messaging to engage in conversations, saving valuable time they can use to guide and ultimately enroll more students. And since messages are read and responded to faster than other communication channels alone, your university staff will be able to serve more students in less time.

Messaging + your existing student database = engagement

With SMS-Magic, your staff won’t have to spend all day at their computers or on their phones to send engaging messages. Once you’ve stored vital student information in your CRM database, your team can create segmented groups that will receive specific marketing or SMS messaging campaigns. Send relevant and personalized messages to these student groups based on their enrollment or housing status, major, interests, or campus location to snag their attention and trigger engagement.

Messaging automations can work for you and your students

Messaging automation can also save your staff valuable productivity hours by responding without staff intervention at any time of day. With SMS-Magic, you can create messaging flows triggered by keywords, numbers, or phrases. This process can allow your team to collect data, assist students, and send applicable information using messages they’ve previously written. If a student requests information about your school while a counselor is in a meeting, a triggered conversational text can respond instantaneously, starting and continuing that vital conversation.

Sending confirmations and reminders to keep students on track

Even though students may schedule a meeting or plan to come to an event or orientation, sending reminder messages and confirmations can help increase their attendance. These reminders can be automated and scheduled to send multiple days before, one day before and the day of. Your school can also use this reminder strategy to send messages about important due dates for enrollment and financial aid applications, school and course registration, parking passes, and housing.

Using conversational messaging in higher education is a great way to stay in touch with prospective students and current students – even students who might be taking a semester off. Sending hundreds or thousands of messages and keeping track of them, however, takes a little help. SMS-Magic has the tools that will make your messaging campaigns easy to create, easy to implement, and easy to track. You can’t easily send thousands of messages using your mobile phone, but you can easily send thousands of messages through SMS-Magic.

Let SMS-Magic help you communicate your educational offerings and services to your students each day. Ready to get started? Contact our SMS-Magic team for a demo or a free trial today!

Since the majority of your alumni use text messaging every day, it’s a natural way to begin and continue a conversation with them about your institution, your plans for the future, and what matters most to them.

When using text messaging to have donor conversations, here are three key strategies to increase your success, and have fun along the way.

Colleges and Text Messaging: Learn About Alumni as Individuals

Asking a recent graduate, with thousands of dollars of student loan debt, for a large contribution isn’t going to work. It’s surely not going to help you impress them with how much you care about their world.

The same can be said for asking a patron of the arts to fund your new basketball stadium, or asking a sports fan to contribute to the purchase of that new library.

Engaging alumni via text messaging gives you the power to quickly learn more and more about your alumni, so that you can tune your requests to match their financial situation and areas of interest.

You already know their graduation year, which helps you better segment your alumni based on their projected financial giving ability. Use text messaging to survey your alumni to learn more about their passions and interests. For example:

When your alumni respond, you’ll know exactly which type of funding opportunity will interest them.

Engage Alumni via Text Messaging to Build a Relationship

Now that you know what interests them at a high level, you can tune your requests. You can continue to ask them questions to learn even more about them, giving you the key insights to build a relationship.

Just remember, you won’t build a relationship by only asking them for donations. It’s just as important to give back to them with programs or opportunities that match their interests. You want to be a partner for life, not that pesky organization that always asks for money.

Use text messaging to invite alumni to networking events, special programs at your campus, or continuing education opportunities. Texting makes it so easy to keep your alumni in the loop concerning key news and updates, fun announcements, and more. For example, colleges and text messaging can invite your alumni to a special networking function, then remind them of the date and time.

If you want to get donations from your alumni, always continue to give. That’s the foundation of long-term relationships.

Ask Alumni to Help You Fundraise, and Make it Fun!

Alumni can help you with more than money. When you make it fun for them to help, it’s even better.

Every activity can become fun and engaging when you turn it into a game. Text messaging helps you create that fun environment for fundraising. You can incite alumni to get involved in your fundraising goal, based on different actions that contribute to your success.

For example, you can award prizes for alumni who capture different levels of investment, create campaigns within their local networks, contribute new fundraising ideas, and more.

Engaging alumni via text messaging makes it easy to gamify fundraising. You can announce the program, send promotional texts to keep the game top of mind, feature winners and their ideas, offer special prizes, and share each alumnus’s personal status with them.

The Bottom Line

Text messaging gives you the chance to have important conversations with your alumni, for fundraising and continuing to build long-term relationships.

You’ll communicate the way they like, learn about what matters to them, as you show you care about them as individuals, and build relationships that fuel ongoing fundraising success.

Let’s face it. Your students are all digital natives. They spend more time on their smartphones than they do anywhere else. When you communicate with them the way they naturally like to converse, everybody wins.

That’s why text messaging for Higher Ed is such a powerful communications channel for universities and other educational organizations. Your students will read your messages. They will respond. In fact, text messages get 6X the responses vs. email and 10X vs. phone calls. How’s that for connection power?

Colleges and Text Messaging

You can use conversational text messaging for virtually any communication you want to share with your student population. And they will love you for it.

Following are just a few examples:

1. Campus announcements.

Whether you want to send out information about classes, campus schedules, and updates or simply let your students know about something that just came up, text messaging is the fastest and most effective way to reach them.

You can send out a simple outbound informational message to your entire student population.

You can send a message to a select group of students, from everyone in a specific class to those in a school to those with a certain GPA.

2. Events and special opportunities.

Some campus events require registration or some kind of response from students. You can easily use text messaging for Higher Ed to manage those events, as well.

For example, let’s say you want to promote and sell tickets to your Fine Arts production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. You can promote the event, guide your students to their discounted ticket sales and remind them of the upcoming event, all with a single multi-touch messaging campaign. Here’s how.

First, you send a message telling them about Hamlet.

Next, you can send a message a week later offering them a student discount.

When your student buys the tickets, you can automatically trigger a confirmation message. You can also offer a keyword response for them to ask questions or get help.

Then, you can send reminder messages ahead of the actual play date, as often as you’d like.

3. Emergency announcements.

Text messaging is a fast way to get emergency information to students. For example, weather advisories, road closings, building closings, class cancellations, and more.

The Bottom Line

Your students are digital-first. They communicate through digital means, like messaging. Colleges and text messaging are meant to go together.

If you want to get their attention, you need to communicate the way they want. That’s just what text messaging for Higher Ed lets you do.

More importantly, conversational text messaging gives you the flexibility to communicate virtually any type of information, quickly and effectively, to any segment of your student population.

So what are you waiting for?