Welcome, everybody! I'm really excited for you all to join us on our on our discussion today understanding the heart of successful campus visits. Why some virtual tours just don't cut it? Featuring Georgia Southern and without further ado, I want to introduce my partners from Georgia Southern. And so I'm going to kick it around the room quickly. My name is Zach Chastain and I'm the director of university partnerships here at Student Bridge. And I'll go ahead and kick it over to Dr. Clines.
Sure, thank you, Zach. My name is Amy client, and I'm the director of Undergraduate Admissions here at Georgia Southern University. Within our office, we are responsible for admissions, recruitment operations, communications events, as well as new student and Family Programs.
Fantastic. Kylie
Hi, there. I'm Kylie Hall. I'm the Assistant Director of Admissions communications. So I work with all the areas Amy just mentioned, to get outgoing communications to our new students.
Fantastic. And last but not least, Mike.
Hey, everyone. My name is Mike Smith. I'm the Assistant Director of Admissions for events and visitation. And that is exactly what it sounds like. I oversee all of our events, visitation programs, that includes our campus tours, virtual tours, on and off campus events. I also supervise our southern ambassadors, who are our student tour guides, as well as our Welcome Center. So our frontline staff who answer the phones and greet guests and work on the happy hardwood, as we call it.
Fantastic. Well, again, thank you all for being here, we really appreciate it. And I'm actually gonna kick this back over to Amy to give us kind of a background on Georgia Southern University as a whole.
Sure. So Georgia Southern University is a member of the University System of Georgia. So we're a public institution, we have roughly 27,000 total-- students at Georgia Southern with about 23,000 of those being undergraduates. We also have four different campuses, you can see listed, they're all within about an hour's drive of each other. Also with our online campus as well. And we offer just approximately 140 different degree programs among all of our campuses.
Fantastic. Really, really good stuff. Even though I'm a Georgia State graduate, I'll give Georgia Southern credit, it's an amazing institution with amazing results, we can't wait to hear about those things today as well. So I'm going to go ahead and kick this, this this kind of presentation off and talk about the power of an in person visit. You know, we all sit here we talked about how valuable the in person visit is, you know. We have people like Mike that are some of the most important people on our campus driving this because we know that we're going to yield students based on getting into campus. And so as we talk about the power of an in person visit, the power is connecting with your current students. The power is that real time personalization. It's when we walk onto campus, when someone says I just have that feeling, it's more than just your campus and the color of the grass and the buildings. It's a culture that you get to feel when you walk onto a college campus. And so like I said, less about looking at buildings, and less about being shown around campus and more about connecting with those current students. Connecting with the different faculty members, and really understanding the power of a college campus, which is the people in that authentic and genuine relationship.
Now, we all know that our industry has pivoted very hard and entered into this virtual world. Now the pendulum swung really quickly last April, very quickly. And I'll be honest, I was really proud of this industry, we did a pretty good job. But we've learned a lot in the last year. And we've had to pivot to these virtual experiences. And so with these virtual experiences-- You have to inject your people into the process earlier. A lot of the traditional ways that we've recruited college fairs, high school visits were taken away from us. And so we've had to replace those top of the funnel leads in a different way. And the way that schools like Georgia Southern have done that is to inject their people early in the process online. Give students a reason to engage and interact with you. We live in this world where we hide behind our computer, and a lot of you have heard that cheesy Brad Paisley song, I'm a lot cooler online. It's because we get to be who we want to be. And so we don't have to identify ourselves and we're all online. It's the same reason why you only probably had this scenario in your life or someone sent you an email and you're like, they would never say that to me in person, right? Because they get that they get that keyboard warrior feeling when they're behind that screen. It's so it's so important to give you give your students a reason to engage and interact with your people. Drive connections, which drives conversions. And I want to say that, again, drive connections to drive conversion. The biggest mistake universities can make virtually is trying to drive conversions to drive a connection. It's never going to happen because we live in a world and as soon as I go up to Mike and go, what's your name, email and phone number? In his mind, he's immediately going, "hold on a second. What are you going to do with that information? And is it going to benefit me?" And if it doesn't benefit, Mike, why would he give that information to you? And so creating those barriers online is an issue that a lot of universities make by doing that. And then the last thing is, it's not limited to only one portion of the funnel. It has to be different levels of your digital funnel to drive conversions in different areas. Because engagement, we as consumers act, when our engagement levels are at the highest. And so that to me is one of the biggest things that we want to talk about as we pivot into this virtual world. Now, as we get into the discussion portion of this, I do want to-- we're gonna have this, this, this discussion to be about just gonna open minded, and just kind of hear from Georgia Southern about what they've done. And so we'll start with with Amy, on top level stuff. So traditionally, what enrollment strategy if you have you had to rely on in the past?
Sure. So um, you know, the easy answer is what you would think of as traditional enrollment strategies. A lot of in person opportunities for students and families to come to any of our campuses, to engage with what we have to see, or envision what it's like to be a student, or the supporter of a student on any of our campuses. Typically, you know, in spring, that's the time where we're trying to get folks interested for the next cycle, you know, our rising seniors. We're working with our admitted students, to get them excited about coming in. We have had scholarship events in the past, but aren't you know, in person on campus. Large open house events, our accepted students day was planned to be in person in 2020. We also usually have in persons orientation, we call them soar. And then you know, your rounds, you know, having different opportunities for folks to come and engage in person with our counselors, our processing team, our orientation team, things like that. Really, if I think about it, and we've had this conversation, the only consistent virtual option that we really had was our student bridge campus experience, on our website, and it was there, but I don't know that we were leveraging it really. It was just something extra, right, that we could have for those individuals, particularly further away, that may not be able to travel, great resource. But you know, thinking back on it now and how, how much we relied on it. But quite frankly, once we had to do this pivot, that was really the only thing that was already existing, that like, thank goodness, we have something because we had to really start creating a whole new batch of things when we couldn't do our traditional strategies.
Okay, really good. It's what it sounds like I'm hearing to is that a lot of the things that you were traditionally doing enrollment, injected your people into it? So one of the transitions digitally that we're talking about is how do we inject those people into and so from your side, like, Mike, I think that we all think, you know, like you said, Amy, the virtual visit, right. But we never think about how is that going to impact the actual virtual visitor, right, like, for Mike. So Mike, from your standpoint, what strategies that you have, traditionally, before, before this whole, this whole digital impact was made?
Well, I think we knew we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, I think our strategy going into a virtual was to try to recreate what our in person events look like the best we could. So we had our in person events calendar. And what we tried to do was recreate as much as possible from that. So we knew what the programming was that we had coming up, and we were going to be offering. So how can we transition that? What could we do and find that gave the student a similar experience and pretty much the as much of the same information as they would have gotten in person. And that was kind of the angle that we took--
Okay, fantastic. All right. Um, and then going over to Kylie next, what was it like having to pivot to that virtual environment? I think your title being in communications and being involved with there's a lot of times when we talk about pivoting to virtual as pivoting to engagement, right? And so how was it? What was it like to pivot to a virtual environment, when it seemed like it happened almost overnight?
I think we realized pretty quickly that there were a lot of things that we didn't have and that we weren't necessarily ready for. So things as simple as who's going to answer our phones. If we're all working from home? How are we going to handle that? We didn't have a chat feature on our website, so we could do live chatting with students through the website. And we didn't even have a YouTube channel in March of last year. So we didn't, we had other social media channels, but we didn't have a great way to get out fresh video content to students, that our counselors and our current students had created. So we very quickly realized the gaps where we were going to need some additional support. And that's where we just worked really, really quickly, had some late nights trying to get some of those things together. So really our first big initiative was okay, we need a place for all this information to live, so we can have kind of one landing page, one central location, where we can give all these virtual resources to students. So, you know, a big focus of that was the Student Bridge, virtual campus experience that we had already created, because we had that it was something we were already pushing students too. So that was sort of the Hallmark. And then we kind of built around that once we started adding live events and counselor appointments and that sort of thing we were able to add those things in. But it was a big undertaking. And definitely there were some sleepless nights trying to figure out what are we going to do. But we were able to turn it around pretty quickly.
Good. Yeah, I think we've all experienced those sleepless nights where we pop up at three in the morning, and an idea pops up that we've had that we've been thinking about for the whole entire time. And so I want to kick it back over to Mike. And so you brought up earlier that you oversee your ambassadors, how did you pivot your ambassadors to a virtual world as well and use those students as power as well? During conversations?
Yeah, so so the timing for us was somewhat unique, I guess not maybe not unique, but it was right at right a spring break. So they were already off campus. So Spring Break comes and they were gone, and they never came back. And so there never was a transition period to where we got to sit down with them and say, okay, you're going to be going home next week. And this is what we're going to have to do. So we never really got to have a conversation with them. The first analysis was, okay, we're going to extend spring break, and then it was they're not coming back. It's going to be home for the rest of the semester. So that was a challenge. We had to incorporate virtual meetings, virtual trainings, everything that we had spent time being trained to do that year, had been thrown out the window. So we had to pivot and transition. We did have a few weeks, we had the luxury of having a lot of students that did stay around, a lot of our students had apartments and leases in the area. So we were able to capitalize on those students that did stay around and did not go home, and use them to help us film things. So the ones that were here were the ones that we pulled in to say, Hey, if you're free, we know we've got we got to fill some content, we had lots of volunteers that were just eager to try to do whatever they could to make that effort to have some content available. So we got some really, really good virtual campus tours filled, we able to work with marketing and get those things done. And then from there, we used them a lot. So we would ask them content wise, hey, we're filming these things, can you give us some testimonials, and they would just literally just pull out their cell phones, and they would send me those. And we just like Kylie said, we just created a little bank, a bank of those, and had those in a folder, and we kept those there. Once we went back and needed them, we would pick out the ones and just use them as needed.
It goes back to that we talked about earlier, the authenticity and the genuineness of a campus visit and bringing that to the virtual sides-- so really really good stuff there. Amy last question on this on this topic for you is, from the leadership perspective of knowing that I'm responsible for this number, numbers aren't going to change, how did you from the leadership perspective, I guess it's going to put it organize and prioritize what can be done now, versus what can be done later on the virtual world?
Sure. So fortunately, the support that I received from our vice president's office, we report through the Vice President of enrollment management, is enormous. And so we were having sometimes multiple meetings a day, just talking through the needs and and what you know, what we how we were going to be able to continue serving our students, but while also keeping our staff, you know, safe and comfortable and productive. Right. And so it was one of those things kind of referring back to what Mike said, of kind of sitting down with the counter, like what would we be normally doing this time of year in a in person environment. And those are the things we need to focus on quickly, because we had already we'd already started taking reservations for accepted student day. And so-- that's so critical, you know that that kind of event, you know, to host on your-- that yield piece that we just knew we had to figure out a way to make that happened. And so we kind of worked from that perspective of calendar wise, what would we be doing? And then what are the resources we need to invest right now. Unfortunately, in the university system, you know, our budget year comes to a closed at the end of June. And so we were at that time already looking at budgets and Okay, how much money do we have, you know, across the university? Not just individually in our department, so timing wise for money, it was actually okay because we knew what we had to play with, and so if we needed to make some investments [INAUDIBLE] make huge investments. But, you know, we knew that we were going to have to pivot where our resources went too, financial resources, if we needed to add some some elements for the virtual component.
Gotcha. Makes sense. And as we transition to the next slide, I think this is kind of right up Kylie's role, too. How did you put content together for your virtual experiences? You know, being that you're leading the communications team, and there's all these different priorities? Like, what was your strategy there? And how did you get this content put together? I think Mike hit on it a little bit. But can you elaborate on that a little bit as well?
So I think the first thing we did was kind of sit down and say, Okay, what are the components that are really critical for students to have access to right now? So what departments are they going to want to talk to this summer? What questions are they going to have? And we kind of put that together, and from there, we just started reaching out to as many people as possible. We, I think, went through all our contacts at the university to say, all right, we need someone here on campus before we're totally shut down. So we had we had a timeline, they said, all right, this date, you can't come back. And so we just basically started emailing everyone and saying, alright, if you can get here on this day, we can get this filmed. And also curing the value proposition for these other departments. So with financial aid, saying, "okay, this is something that you guys are welcome to use as well. It's going to cut down on the questions you're getting from students like this is really something that's going to benefit you in the long run", and sharing that I think, got a lot of buy in. And then with the students and Mike, maybe it will just speak to this a little bit more, but they were going through, possibly a bigger transition than we were at the time. And so just sort of giving them an opportunity to be able to give back to the university, even if it wasn't in the way they were typically accustomed to. If they were available, they were pretty receptive to, you know, helping us however they can. So at that point, it was just a matter of okay, record, however, you're able, if it's on your iPhone, that's totally fine. If it's on your computer, we don't care. Just get us content that we're able to use.
Yeah.
Then we, I mean, we had folders, we still do, of content that we were able to sift through. So there was a lot of sitting down watching videos deciding, is this worth our time to use? Or should we try to get something else. And that was something you know, there were certain things we weren't necessarily able to use, and we had to do. There were several things we had to film a few times to get something usable. But I mean, it really was all hands on deck to get usable content. And now that people are used to it, it's a lot easier this year. Now, people are used to us reaching out and asking for updated things. So they're still really willing to get it. They know that it's been really helpful for students.
Yeah, it's a it's an amazing thing, how much you realize you love your university when you have to move back in with your mom and dad and all that freedoms taken away? And so yeah, doing what y'all did makes a lot of sense. And so Mike, anything you want to add to that, during that journey?
Yeah, Kylie, pretty much it a lot of it, but I will say that, you know, just as Dr. Clines said earlier, we didn't, we didn't have any virtual content. So what we had was on our virtual visit experience, and so I will say that one of the first phone calls we made was Student Bridge. You know, that was that was very important. And Dr. Clines mentioned this earlier. We were in March, so most-- a lot of our on campus events were already wrapped up that are one big thing that we had coming up was that accepted students day, and we knew that we had to react pretty quickly to that. We knew that was gonna be our big yield event, if we didn't execute something, we were going to lose those students. And so that's where one of our first phone calls was the Student Bridge, and we sat down and came up with a plan, we did try to utilize some of the content that was already out there. That Student Bridge had film for us previously, that we have on the virtual visit experience. So we did try to reuse some of that content. But it was, like I said, getting content however, we could get it. We had more than enough. If we didn't need it, we didn't use it. But we figured that the more content we could get to pull from the better, the more that we get had to pull from. And so that made it go pretty well. As far as the students go, like I said that they we did have some folks that were seniors that just kind of had that moment of,"You know what, I'm never gonna be able to give this tour again. I'm never going to have that opportunity. So yeah, I want to give back in any way I can. What can I do to make this work and to make my impact since I'm not going to be on campus or be able to interact anymore. What can I do to help?" and that was great.
Yeah, I think you brought up a really interesting point, Mike, too, is that the type of content at the different areas of the funnel is different too. And so that student admit day content you mentioned it has to be even more authentic and more genuine than a lot of the top level content. So the pivot they all made there was really impressive. And I think, a testament of how hard y'all had to work in that short timeframe to get everybody filmed and completed and edited and all that stuff. Excuse me, to taking it where we need to get them to go. And so moving on to the next of these pieces, what virtual solutions did you consider? I'm sure there was a ton of them that you did consider out there. So Amy, from your standpoint, like, what ultimately were you looking for? And what other virtual solutions did you consider when it came to? Oh, my gosh, we're transitioning in this in this environment?
Sure. So we were just talking about this the other day, I believe before COVID forced us into this environment, I don't even know how we've functioned as a multi campus University in terms of, I guess, we just drove to every meeting. And in this context, I started at Georgia Southern in February of before the shutdown in March. So I, you know, I kind of missed a little bit of that history there. So, but one of them was just finding-- we needed a platform we needed, you know, to, like Kylie said, you know, find a place that we could put everything. We needed, you know, to think quick reach out to our corporate partners, as I would call them, our educational partners to say, What do you have that might fit this need, you know, we need to do as close to as in a live event as we can in a virtual space for 1000s of people, you know or, you know, we need to reach them better, you know, through social media or whatnot. So, you know, we kind of worked our list and reached out to the different folks that we work with, you know, usually. We also, you know, we have a really good system here in Georgia, where we know a lot of our colleagues at other institutions reaching out I know, Mike, and I think immediately probably the [INAUDIBLE] that he's on, probably started blowing up about, you know, what do we do now? I know the admission directors in the state of Georgia started meeting regularly, like every week to talk through what things would look like on our campuses. So really, you know, it was just kind of, you know, going down that list going down that calendar, what do we need? What do we think, you know, are the resources we need to get this to happen? And then working working are our resources and our colleagues, so--
Fantastic. That's such a good stuff. And Kylie, you said something a minute ago, that I think is a really important piece to hit on, you refer to your virtual experiences, right? From your standpoint, as a user at a university, what do you see the difference between a virtual experience and a virtual tour?
I think for a virtual experience, it's really giving incoming students a sense of what the students are like at our university. Getting just sort of a glimpse, not necessarily into their like everyday life, but more, getting a sense of who they are? How they function at the university? How they feel like they fit in at the university? Just sort of giving more of an overall picture, but a feel for what the students are like at our university, sort of getting a connection to students.
Gotcha.
And I know, you know, when we talk about the difference between a tour and experience, I think, Mike, this is a perfect question for you. Because I don't believe you build in person tours, I think you build in person experiences when you have students come to your campus. And so what-- when you say when I say in person experiences, what goes into that to you? Because a tour could just be me walking around campus and seeing a bunch of buildings. But what do you do specifically? And how do you train your ambassadors to be more experienced focus, whether it be virtual or in person?
Well, here at Georgia Southern, we have a lot of traditions. And so that is a big part of that, is we definitely want to hit on all of those traditions. We want to when people come to Georgia Southern, we want to know what it is that Georgia Southern is, and so I think we try to, during our tour, we try to highlight and make our tour stops, our tour locations, part of those traditional experiences that they can they can, they wouldn't see anywhere else, right. So that's academic buildings, that's places on campus that has stories. And so historical stories, like for example, like our lakes are a big stor-- are our big highlight, where our president built a lake named after himself, and then he went home and his wife got mad at him. So he came back and he built a second lake that's twice as large named after his wife. So that's one of those two kind of Georgia Southern traditional stories that we tell on a tour. So we try to make it a little bit of storytelling, talking about the history of Southern, talking about the traditions, talking about what's dinner life is like. We try to incorporate as much of campus partners as we can, you know, we are somewhat limited in what we can provide them on a daily basis, but we work with them to provide a, you know, if his meeting with someone from a different college or a different department, we will work with them to make those things happen. So that they get that full experience while they're here.
Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. All right, I'm going to that next discussion topic, Kylie, tell me a little about your current virtual experiences that you're using, all the way from the top of the funnel all the way to the very end when it comes to yield into enrolled students.
Sure, so we, from the beginning, we've kind of used our Student Bridge, virtual experience more for top of the funnel, referencing specific videos, sort of hyper linking and emails to provide additional context to whatever topic we're talking about. Using on social media, and then just sort of utilizing as an additional resource for students, so providing it as an option for a resource. So last year, when we did have to pivot to fully virtual, we realized, okay, this is a great experience, but it is not geared towards admitted students and yielding students, and giving them the next steps they need to become a student at Georgia Southern. It's great for overall, getting a feel for the university, but not necessarily those next steps. And so that's why we reached out to Student Bridge to see what are our options? Can we create one specifically for admitted students? So we can really focus on the next steps and getting them enrolled. So that was a big, that was kind of the big turning point for us, and developing that new Admitted Student Experience is what we call it, um, to kind of replace those accepted student events that we were talking about. Then Mike can talk a little bit about we obviously not being on campus, we had to find other options for our campus tours. And that's really Mike's wheelhouse.
Yeah, so like I said earlier, we tried to take our events calendar, and in person events calendar and turn that into a virtual events calendar, as well. So everything that we were trying to offer, in person we wanted to try to offer virtually as much as possible. And so virtual tours were part of that. So that was one of the first things that we got filmed and ready to go was a pre recorded virtual tour. On each campus, those are a lot of the pre-recorded, then we had students that recorded those. But when we do those, we host those, we hosted those during this during the pandemic. We hosted those twice a week. Now we're hosting them once a week, but we have a live and that' when we use pre recorded, but we have somebody live that's actually there and is hosting that tour. So they still have that live interaction with a live person. And we were doing that even when we were remote, they would just host it from their from their house. That's one way that those Student Ambassadors got engaged as they were signing up to host those virtual tours, instead of doing those those in person tours, so those seem to go really well. And those are still pretty popular now as even for folks that, you know, just can't visit campus, they may live across the country and can't do an in person visit. So those are still pretty successful. We tried to recreate our eagle previews, which are our open house events. So we tried to take the programming from that and whatever we had, do the best we could provide that programming in a virtual environment. So there's a live welcome. Then we go into the breakout sessions with our different campus partners, which is something they enjoy. So that was one of the biggest things for our campus partners was, they love those events, they like being able to be in front of our students. And that was the one thing that they just really missed out on. And so we definitely wanted to find a way that we could provide that opportunity for them to get in front of the students, not only for our students, but for them because that was something that, you know, they just enjoy being a part of, and being able to interact with the students and being in front of them and know that they are playing a factor in those students decision to come to Georgia Southern. So we incorporated our virtual tours into that. We even took some of our off campus events like our virtual-- our counselor luncheons. We do a circuit around Georgia, and around our border states have different counselor luncheons, and we turn those into a virtual format as well. And so instead of having renting out a restaurant and having counselors come in and having to meet us for lunch, we invited him to bring lunch to work that day. And we set up a zoom meeting and had an information session via zoom and had really really good results. So much. So what we're going to try to continue some of those in the fall as well. So what we learned from that too was is we learned that moving forward, we're gonna need a combination of these things. Some of these things where we're so great and just had really good turnouts. And really, so we're gonna we're gonna keep some of these things. So we're going to do a combination of in person and virtual moving forward since they were so successful.
Fantastic, and I think everything that you're kind of both humankind describes leading to how do we inject our people as much in this process as possible. And so that's what I take away there. Now going over to Amy, summing up, like what results? Have you seen? How's the last year been for you all?
Well, enrollment wise, we had a record freshman class, and in which, quite frankly, many schools in the university system also saw that we, if it's not known, we went test optional or, or pretty much did not require a test at all, for admission. So not to say that our virtual efforts didn't help that, obviously. But it certainly opened the door to more students who perhaps couldn't have enrolled previously. But in terms of in engagement, you know, we-- like Mike said, there were some events that we were just amazed at how many people logged in and participated in. We also, you know, saw some that weren't as successful. And so things that like, okay, that just doesn't translate, right, that in person piece is just there's not, or at least the way that we chose to implement it virtually was just perhaps not the best route. But I mean, enrollment wise, everyone's very happy. And certainly looking at next year, we're on the trajectory to meet our record number, again, for this upcoming year remaining test optional this past year as well. But I know I think Kylie and Mike could probably speak a little bit more in terms of some attendance rates and things like that, or click through rates with some of our virtual programs, if we want to get specific into those.
Yeah-- So Kylie? What specifically results have you seen from the virtual sign outside of just, you know, obviously, enrollment looks great, which is the number one thing right, we're all we can all smile and be happy when enrollment looks good. But from your standpoint of breaking those things down, and also looking forward in the future? You know, what, what results have you seen? From your side? On the communication side? Kylie?
Yeah, absolutely. So we were really, really happy last year, when we launched our Admitted Student Experience with Student Bridge. We really had an excellent response to that. So over the last year, we've had over 12,000, students utilize that accepted student platform, which certainly reached far more students than we ever would have been able to at an in person event. So we were definitely happy that we were able to reach all those students. We actually tracked the name capture. So through that platform, out of the students who utilize the name capture on the calls to action, we had about a 90% yield rate of those students, which was really impressive. So just being able to see that information. And know that, you know, that did have some sort of impact on the students actually choosing to attend was really great. And we are utilizing, we've redone our Admitted Student Experience this year. And we've seen a little bit of a lower, slightly lower interactions. But since we are also offering in person options as well. And offering far more virtual experiences. So our orientation is virtual, we have some virtual modules that students have to complete prior to orientation. So there's a lot more virtual things being thrown at students. So we do think that could have something to do with it. But we're still seeing really excellent numbers of students utilizing the platform. And then the ones who, you know, stay on the platform, we've seen really, really great, great times of students staying for extended periods of time and really utilizing the content on the platform, which I think has probably been the most encouraging for us that, you know, the students who are on the platform, who are staying on for a long time, they're really getting out of it. Our hard work is not in vain.
It's always good to try to date on the back end to see exactly, you know, not just what the results are, but also how we can make changes going forward. As we look forward into next year's cycle, Amy, what concerns Do you have moving into next enrollment cycle? Because we've learned a lot in the last year about how students operated at the very beginning, how that virtual worlds impact and how they're operating now. And so what concerns are you talking about going hey, these things may not be the same going forward. We may not have you know, one of the things that I think of too is that we live in the south and we may have been more open than some of the schools in the northeast. So that could have been an advantage for us. And so what other concerns Do you have moving into the next enrollment cycle?
Sure, so couple things, you know, that kind of keep me on my toes, and concern, you know, part of it is having offered all of these virtual options. And we've slowly started adding back in person components, which, as you said, in the south, we were able to do that, whereas other schools weren't. But moving forward, the expectation certainly is to keep some of these virtual options. But there's no, you know, we're not adding staff, you know, we're not, you know, we don't have a big overtime pay bucket that we can have with folks coming in. So, you know, so that's a concern is, is identifying which things to keep, because there's a great access component too. For not only students that, you know, maybe further away, but it's just, you know, it's a barrier cost wise travel, you know, what, whatever that might look like for the student to actually get to one of our campuses, to check us out. So making sure that we are able to balance that, and know what that looks like, so that we don't, you know, have burnout, because when we do get back to being more fully in person, offering what we were traditionally would do, you know, the, it's just going to be more with the same if you will, which I know in higher ed, we're used to doing quite often, but you know, the zoom fatigue, I'm, you know, I'm ready to be back in person and not have to look at myself in the bottom part of the screen every day. And so I think two is just coming off of this like, thing a lot of people are, they're grateful, and and it's great to have this resource virtually. But there is there seems to be this desire, I know, for me, certainly, we've seen it with some of the in person things we have been able to offer to get in front of people and to have your feet on the ground on that campus or around people that represent the institution. So again, just kind of balancing that.
Yeah, I think that, you know, we talked about the pendulum has swung over and over here, I think it's going to come back and land towards the middle. And we're going to adopt a lot of the things that we that we did a really good job of virtually now. But also there's going to be some traditional levels, we go back to you because simply they just work. And that's what it's about. But they work because we're injecting your people into it in a more strategic way. And so we'll talk a little more about that. Mike, from your standpoint, concerns wide. So you know, what concerns do you have? And that you handle visits? And maybe, you know, how is that going to impact you going forward? And what concerns do you have, from your standpoint?
I'll tell you one major concern is we have a pretty young ambassador team, and many of them have not seen in person tours, the way they were a year ago, year and a half ago, because they weren't able to give those large groups that we've had to do. So we've been doing some smaller groups. And so there's gonna take a little bit of a training for them to kind of see what it looked like prior to the shutdown and the pivot. So that's gonna be a little bit of a challenge. Maintaining in person versus virtual events as well. So obviously, Dr. Clines mentioned earlier, we're not bringing in extra staff, we don't have opportunities to bring in more staff. And so knowing now that virtual is not going to go away, and we're going to have to provide opportunities for students to visit us both in person and virtually, I don't think that's ever going to go away, I think we're gonna need to provide those opportunities and just being able to provide enough staff and enough resources to commit to pulling off both types of successfully. So how do you allocate your resources so that you're not taking away from one to put towards the other, and then you can make both of them become both both in person and virtual, be equally as effective?
Cool. And then kind of as we wrap up today, the last question, I think it's really important to sum up for everybody is, and I want everyone each one of you to answer this one of the things is really important, from your standpoint is, what key takeaways do you have in virtual recruitment? And so we'll start with Kylie.
I think one of the biggest things is really that our reach is a lot further than sometimes we realize, especially in the virtual environment, I think we've been able to reach a lot more students than we have than ever before. And so just, you know, we have to be prepared to serve those students, whether that's, you know, if they decide to come to Georgia Southern at our orientation or at an open house, whether in person or virtually, so I think it's been really great that we've been able to provide that access to a lot more students.
And I mean, and the beautiful thing about that to Kylie is that cost wise it doesn't take that much more to reach out far when you're doing virtually whereas in person at any kind of boots on the ground is extremely expensive. And so I think that's one thing We learned that and then, you know, to Amy's point earlier, I think, you know, one thing that I've hearing a lot from my side is like bandwidth, like, we can't continue to be doing exactly what we done and go back to the traditional level, it's just not going to work. And so balancing those things out, and understanding where to put your priorities is gonna be really important. Mike, same question, from you, what key takeaways do you have?
Engagement is key. So for virtual events, or virtual recruitment, if they're not engaging, they're not going to be effective. So it took us a little while to try to figure that out and try to work through some of that we did some trial and error, to try to, you know, improve our engagement, and we're still working on some things there. But that's the key, you know, you can do virtual events all day long, you can put them out there for students, but if they're not engaging, and that's something that students are gonna be interested in, they're not going to be affected.
Yeah. And that's a really, really good point. Because even when you're talking about, you know, we always heard that phrase, in the world of content is king, well, it's no longer King anymore. It has to be it has to provide the right context. And it has to provide the right delivery mechanism and platform for them to even care about that content. So you can have the best event in the world. But if you don't have a top of solution, converting students into an emotionally engaged students, no one's coming to your event. And so therefore, you're not you're not getting the with those last results that you need. And then lastly, Amy, from your standpoint, from leadership perspective of Georgia, so there wasn't really have you taken away and some of the things that you and your team have had to discuss within leadership? You know, regarding looking forward?
Sure, I, you know, I, the biggest takeaway was, you know, we've we've talked for years, about more virtual content and online, and it wasn't really until we were forced into a situation where it was the only thing we could do, did we do it, and so we're pleased wit what we did, but then realizing that, you know, nowadays, especially our virtual presence, is going to be even more so that could be that very first interaction with the institution. And so where Kylie was saying, you know, first we just have people on their cell phones going around campus, like filming themselves, you know, making sure that we circle back to what we are going to keep and continue to make sure that it is representative of our institution. And not to say that it's authentic to have a student walking around their cell phone and telling their story and their experience on campus. But you know, now with the reach that, you know, that Kylie mentioned, you know, the engagement that Mike mentioned, making sure that that's all captured in the Georgia Southern brand, if you will, right. And moving forward and, and now being more proactive about that, because it's always going to be here now, it's not, you know, we had to do it. But now you know, now it's, we've got a time now, and really that behind site and expertise to move forward and making that a robust experience for students.
Fantastic. Already. Well, I really appreciate all of you thank you all for joining us again, I want to say again, thank you to Dr. Clines, Kylie and Mike for all for all your support, but your continued partnership with Student Bridge and we look forward to helping you hit your goals in the future.
