Tag: strategy and development

  • Online Learning Infrastructure: Assessing the Current State

    Online Learning Infrastructure: Assessing the Current State

    How Insight and Evaluation Can Lead to Execution

    Let’s set the stage. You’re a sharp, focused higher education leader staring down the realities of expanding your online and hybrid learning programs. You’ve got big goals: running your online operations in-house, owning the process, and driving growth on your terms. 

    This is where Online Growth Enablement comes in. This isn’t a fancy buzzword. It’s the real work behind sustainable change. It’s the boots-on-the-ground understanding of exactly where you are today so you can figure out how to move forward tomorrow. 

    At Archer, we do this every day — rolling up our sleeves and digging deep to map out the real picture of an institution’s online learning infrastructure. Because, let’s be honest. The only way to grow is to start with the truth about your current state and your place within the landscape of the communities you serve with your programs.

    Why Your Current State Matters 

    Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum — especially not in online learning. Enabling the growth of your online learning infrastructure takes coordination, collaboration, and a whole lot of buy-in from every corner of your university. Marketing, tech, enrollment, financial aid, the registrar, faculty, leadership — if they’re not on the same page as you, you can’t successfully move forward. Period.  

    Driving real growth starts with taking an unflinching look at where you stand today. Questions you should be asking about your online operations include: 

    This isn’t about a vague, feel-good assessment from 50,000 feet up. It’s about getting into the weeds. Because, until you understand the inner workings of your current infrastructure, you’re not going to build anything sustainable. You’ll just be putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling foundation. And that’s not going to cut it in the long run.

    The Power of Deep Insights

    Let’s take a look at a real-world example of why a close examination of your current online learning infrastructure matters. One of our partner universities was taking 14 days to review and process the transcripts of students applying to their online programs. This might work fine for a traditional on-campus program with two or three big start dates a year, but for an online program, the game changes. To stay competitive, you need five or six start dates annually. And that 14-day turnaround? For our partner, it meant missing out on dozens of potential enrollments.  

    Fixing this issue wasn’t about throwing money at the problem. It was about setting a clear benchmark and making it happen. We worked with the institution to rethink its processes, reassign its teams’ responsibilities, and streamline every single step of its transcript review.  

    The effectiveness of every touchpoint you have with a potential student and every handoff between your admissions, financial aid, and academic advising teams affects your ability to deliver an overall positive student experience. Deep operational insights aren’t just nice to have; they’re the key to uncovering bottlenecks so you can clear the way for real, measurable growth. 

    How We Help: The Growth Enablement Assessment

    At Archer, we don’t do guesswork. We help our partners make sense of the current state of their online learning infrastructure through our Growth Enablement Assessment — a no-stone-left-unturned look at every department and operational variable. From enrollment workflows to marketing execution, we get into the details that others overlook to help you figure out where you are and make a plan for where you want to be.

    Our approach is anchored in our Good, Better, Best methodology:  

    This isn’t just an audit. It’s a road map. By pinpointing exactly where you stand and where you need to go, we equip you with the insights and strategies to move your online learning operations from functional to thriving. 

    Why It’s All Worth It

    Yes, this takes time. Yes, it’s hard work. But the payoff is undeniable.  

    Fully understanding the current state of your online learning infrastructure isn’t just a box to check — it’s the foundation for every initiative that follows. It gives you the clarity to enhance not only your online learning programs but also the overall health and effectiveness of your institution.  

    When you commit to this process, you’re building something bigger than just operational efficiency. You’re creating alignment across departments, fostering innovation, and embedding collaboration and continuous improvement into your institution’s culture. When every team is in sync, bottlenecks disappear, every touchpoint matters, and your processes deliver on the promise of a strong student experience.  

    It’s not just worth it. It’s transformative.  If you’re ready to take the first step toward long-term success and scalability, contact Archer Education. Let’s build the online learning infrastructure your institution deserves, together.

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    John Goodwin

    John Goodwin is Archer Education’s EVP of Online Growth Enablement. Archer revolutionizes the student experience by supporting partners through change, helping institutions achieve sustainable growth while fostering self-sufficiency.

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  • Escape Velocity: The Power of Your Multi-Year Growth Roadmap

    Escape Velocity: The Power of Your Multi-Year Growth Roadmap

    Applying a Strategic Framework to Your Organizational Plan

    “It’s Groundhog Day … again,” said Phil Connors, a disgruntled weatherman.  

    In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Phil Connors knew what it was like to experience life as an endless series of tedious events that recur in the same way day after day. And many of us working in online education management — especially in a highly competitive environment — can begin to feel like Phil did. 

    Receive enrollment targets. Develop and launch annual marketing campaigns. Pursue prospective students. Track students’ applications to completion. Onboard students. Repeat. 

    But when do you have time to reflect and analyze? When do you pause long enough to identify areas in need of improvement? How do you plan for innovation, growth, or testing when all of your time is spent on the status quo? 

    In my recent article on building online student services, we discussed the importance of assessing your organizational design and effectiveness to identify improvement opportunities and facilitate high-quality growth. My latest article on the organizational development journey took the discussion a step further to describe the steps involved in developing a multiyear approach to stakeholder engagement around strategic initiatives.

    With this article, we address the concept of escape velocity. We’ll show you how a multiyear strategic growth road map can help your organization break free from its Groundhog Day cycle and launch it into tomorrow. 

    Why a Multiyear Strategic Road Map Matters

    In higher education, we’re accustomed to having a university-level strategic plan with broad themes and objectives. These plans are useful in that they allow academic and service units to identify areas of contribution or special projects.

    Less common, however, is a performance road map for the unit-level organization itself. Specific programs and functions may have goals, targets, or expected outcomes, but do they collectively add up to something more than the sum of parts? Are teams competing against one another for resources or prospects? Have the true bottlenecks in processes and infrastructure been identified so that teams can tackle them together, or are they each working on problems in a silo?

    A multiyear strategic road map aligns the work you and your colleagues are doing today with the work to be done next year — and the year after that — to reach new levels of achievement, performance, and value. This means moving beyond “keeping the lights on” to building a true organizational vision where day-to-day tasks and operations contribute to a larger mission. 

    The multiyear road map also works to keep everyone accountable, so that the organization can escape the gravitational pull of mere survival, instead moving up through the atmosphere into new spaces and opportunities. 

    Importantly, the road map is not developed by a small group of people and then handed down from organizational leadership. It requires a strategic conversation across the organization that identifies what winning looks like and how all parties will win together.   

    Introducing the Hoshin Kanri Strategic Framework

    A simple search for “strategic framework” in your browser or artificial intelligence tool will bring up 25 to 50 options, which can feel overwhelming. As you dig into the variety of frameworks, you realize that each has a specific purpose and most are not interchangeable. For example, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis can be used to understand your organization’s general position in the current environment, while the Ansoff matrix can help you dive into your individual products and their specific markets. 

    In our opinion, if you want to develop an organization-wide multiyear strategic road map, the Hoshin Kanri framework is a powerful tool.  

    The Hoshin Kanri framework originated in Japan after World War II and was historically used in the manufacturing and technology industries (think Toyota). However, the framework can apply to any industry including higher education. The words “hoshin” and “kanri” mean direction and administration, which in this context refers to identifying the most important strategic focus areas for the next three to five years, and then managing activities and delivering against annual objectives in those focus areas. 

    To fully engage with the framework, there are seven steps that move from vision development to planning and execution to bidirectional feedback management, which makes this framework different from those that only focus on one of those aspects. 

    At its core, the framework is an iterative blueprint for escape velocity — where everyone’s contributions align and where individuals are responsible for providing direct, productive, and sometimes even uncomfortable feedback about progress, barriers, and how the plans are working. This feedback loop is one of the most powerful parts of the model for organization-wide deep listening and trust-building. 

    In the next section, we will discuss each part of the framework.

    Breaking Down the Hoshin Kanri Model Components

    As we walk through the components of the Hoshin Kanri model, remember that models and frameworks are suggestions or guidelines on how to organize a strategy, not directives. Every organization is different, and you should feel free to make the model your own.

    Step 1: Establish (or Revisit and Refine) Your Organizational Vision

    A multiyear road map, by definition, requires a vision for where your organization could or should be three to five years from now. While it’s easy to understand what you want your organization to “escape” from in terms of the status quo, it’s more work to determine the opportunity space, the direction of progress, and the velocity at which the organization should move there. 

    This is often the point where organizations need external support: fresh eyes to assess the market opportunities and the organizational development opportunities (e.g., a good, better, best model). Once the organizational vision is defined, communication and socialization of that vision to every individual in the organization is critical for feedback, engagement, and buy-in.

    Step 2: Establish Strategic Focus Areas (aka Stretch Goals)

    Here’s where your organization places its bets. What are the three to five focus areas that define how your organization will escape the status quo and strategically move into a new level of opportunity, performance, or achievement? 

    Think big swings that are a stretch but still possible. Think about what would get individuals in your organization excited about the work. 

    Remember, these strategic focus areas flow from the organizational vision. Some of the areas will be quantitative in nature (e.g., grow enrollments by 20% year over year; improve satisfaction scores by 40%), and some may be more qualitative (e.g., develop an organizational decision-making framework and process). All areas should be measurable.

    Step 3: Break Strategic Areas of Focus Into Annual Objectives

    In this stage of the process, your organization works backward from those strategic focus areas to plot the annual steps of achievement and progress. These objectives are established at the organizational level.

    Step 4: Cascade Annual Objectives Into Programmatic and Functional Objectives

    In this stage, program and function leaders develop their annual objectives based on the annual organizational-level objectives and begin to determine the key performance indicators for their teams. 

    This is also the step where the organization agrees upon an objective-level primary plan owner. Which individual is accountable for progress against the objective, for escalations when progress is impeded, and for communication of wins? Does that individual agree that the resource base to support the objective is sufficient?    

    Step 5: Execute

    In this implementation stage, plans are deployed and progress is measured. 

    Steps 6 and 7: Conduct Monthly and Annual Reviews

    The Hoshin Kanri model builds in regular strategic road map and annual plan feedback loops to ensure bidirectional feedback and iteration are employed where needed.

    The frequency of your periodic reviews within an annual cycle may depend on the size and structure of your organization. The model suggests monthly plan reviews. But for some organizations, monthly reviews are too frequent and quarterly reviews are preferred. For other organizations, such as start-ups, monthly reviews are not frequent enough and biweekly sprint-level reviews may be needed. 

    The core idea is to ensure that those who are implementing against annual plans have the opportunity to discuss progress, blockers, resource concerns, and more so that leadership can determine if adjustments to the plans are necessary. 

    The annual review is the time to consider progress against the multiyear vision. Is the organization on target? Does the team need to be even more ambitious given evolving market conditions, the competitive landscape, or technological advances? Does the organization need to adjust its resource planning or design to support progress?

    Organizational Strategic Road Map: An At-a-Glance View

    As you can see from the seven steps detailed above, the Hoshin Kanri model is basically a series of embedded to-do lists with metrics and owners attached to them. The plan can be created in a document that displays the action items in a sequential order with as many words as it takes to describe the holistic plan. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as the organization can access, understand, and execute against the plan. 

    However, there is a way to develop a visual tool — without fancy applications or systems — that summarizes the entirety of the plan so that everyone can see themselves aligned with both the long-term and immediate objectives. This method is called the X-matrix. It works well with a spreadsheet tool, for example. In our graphic example below, we’ve replaced the “X” with a compass visual, but an X works just as well.

    Within a box in your spreadsheet, create your “X” by inserting crossed lines. This creates four quadrants. In Hoshin Kanri, these quadrants are classified with compass directions: north, south, east, and west (hence our graphical treatment). 

    An organization starts with the south quadrant (or bottom of the X). This is where you list the three to five strategic areas of focus. Each area of focus has its own row. In our graphic, these are the bottom three rows in the light blue, orange, and dark blue colors.

    In the west quadrant, you can list the high-level annual objectives for the year. Use the spreadsheet rows to enter an “x” where the strategic area of focus (on the bottom) matches the individual high-level annual objective (shown here as columns to the left that correspond in color). 

    Then, move to the north quadrant. This is where you list the business-level objectives that flow from the annual objectives. What are the specific tasks for each program and function? You can use the spreadsheet rows to enter an “x” where the business-level objective aligns with the high-level annual objective. In our example here, all three business-level objectives in the top rows correspond to the strategic focus area and the high-level annual objective color-coded in light blue. 

    Keep the east quadrant blank for a moment. This is where key targets or key performance indicators (KPIs) will go, and again, once you complete these, you can use the spreadsheet model to put an “x” where the target aligns with the individual business-level objective. In our version, we’ve used slightly different shades of light blue to show which KPIs go with which business-level objectives. 

    Go to the Resources section of the spreadsheet. Here you can document the accountable owner of the business-level objective, and use the spreadsheet rows to note with an “x” which owner is aligned with the particular initiative. You can use primary and secondary owners or just stick with primary owners, depending on your organization’s size and structure. These owners can then finalize the east quadrant with the specific KPIs in coordination with organizational leadership.  

    Depending on your organization’s size and structure, you can develop one master-level version of this multiyear plan, or you can develop one per program or function for ease of use. If spreadsheets are not of interest, there are online applications and services (some are free; some are fee-based) that serve as an interactive platform on which you and your teams can manage the development and tracking of objectives and progress.

    Build Your Multiyear Growth Road Map

    Engineering your escape velocity from Groundhog Day to the future takes introspection, time, iteration, and communication in all directions. Strategic tools and frameworks, like Hoshin Kanri, are not always necessary, but they can help your teams organize against a vision with plans, processes, and performance conversations. 

    No matter the tool, framework, or steps you take, the payoff of using introspection and planning to achieve your multiyear targets is escape velocity from the tethers of winter doldrums into a spring of new growth.

    The strategy and development team at Archer Education can help you develop and achieve your multiyear strategic road map goals. Contact us today.

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  • What to Expect on Your Organizational Development Journey

    What to Expect on Your Organizational Development Journey

    Next Steps to Empower Your Multiyear Growth Road Map

    In higher education organizations, enrollment management plans can be like the weather: short term, ever changing, and subject to the whims of the seasons each year. 

    But for your organization and programs to thrive no matter the conditions, a multiyear growth road map is needed to keep all parts of the organization aligned and moving toward a strategic set of goals. 

    In my last article, I discussed the importance of taking a step back to assess the people, processes, and technology of your organization to identify opportunities for improvement and high-quality growth. This critical first step results in an organizational development plan that moves your institution from good, to better, to best in class. 

    With this article, we’ll dig deeper to outline how you can build a multiyear growth road map that allows you to weather everything from regulatory storm clouds to enrollment droughts, keeping your focus on a longer-term strategy. You’ll learn how to get started, measure your progress, and ensure that feedback loops are in place for continuous improvement. 

    A multiyear growth road map helps your teams move beyond term-to-term thinking to develop activities that ladder up and contribute to a true organizational vision. Everyone has a part to play that is specific, measured, and celebrated.  

    The First 90 Days

    As with any effective plan, laying a strong foundation can lead to long-term success. In the context of your multiyear strategic road map, building the foundation involves these steps:  

    Year One: The Blueprint

    With a solid understanding of your institution’s current landscape — both internally and externally — it’s time to launch into the first year of your strategic road map. These 365 days are about implementing basic changes to boot up the structures, systems, and processes that will support growth in later years. 

    Year Two: Optimize and Accelerate 

    With a firm foundation now in place from your first year’s efforts, the focus shifts toward refinement, optimization, and acceleration of your growth initiatives. This phase is crucial, as it’s where you begin to see the fruits of your labor blossom.

    Years Three and Four: Knowledge Sharing and Independence 

    As your strategic initiatives mature, the focus will naturally transition toward sharing knowledge and strengthening your internal teams. This critical period in years three and four is about empowering your staff and shifting your role from hands-on implementer to guiding coach.

    The Journey to Sustainable Development Starts Today

    Successful organizational development requires a multiyear effort that encompasses careful planning, precise execution, and a dedicated team of leaders. From the initial 90 days to the subsequent years, each phase of the process moves your institution closer to becoming stronger and more agile.

    Our team at Archer Education has helped dozens of institutions build and execute comprehensive multiyear strategic plans. These plans are tailored to enhance enrollment and retention, setting each institution on a path to long-term success.

    If you’re ready to transform your organization and achieve remarkable results, reach out to us at Archer Education. Let’s make your educational vision a reality together.

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    Melanie Andrich

    Melanie Andrich is vice president of strategy and development at Archer Education. Melanie is a results-driven higher education leader with 20-plus years of experience in developing and supporting high-quality, accessible, and scalable academic programs and services. She spent the first half of her career at Rutgers University running study abroad programming and leading the first fully online professional master’s degree program for the university. She then moved into management consulting to help colleges and universities with academic innovation, enrollment management, and organizational transformation initiatives.

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  • Busting Roadblocks in the Community College Enrollment Cycle

    Busting Roadblocks in the Community College Enrollment Cycle

    Top Student Enrollment Roadblocks and How to Overcome Them

    In my more than two decades of steering enrollment management at various institutions, I’ve seen students encounter numerous hurdles on their journey to and through higher education. 

    My experience has consistently shown that the decision to enroll is heavily influenced by four critical factors: 

    Understanding these priorities is critical to attracting and retaining students in the community college space. By aligning your enrollment strategies with the needs and expectations of prospective students, you can ensure a smoother, more engaging educational journey that benefits both the students and your educational institution alike. 

    Common Ease of Enrollment Roadblocks for Students

    The pursuit of higher education is a daunting task in itself. When students encounter challenges at the enrollment phase — before the actual coursework even starts — it can be easy for them to bow out of the process altogether. To ensure that doesn’t happen, avoid these common pitfalls in the community college enrollment journey: 

    Complex Enrollment Processes

    Orientation and Information Overload

    Confusing Websites

    Placement Testing Delays

    How to Overcome Ease of Enrollment Roadblocks

    So, those are the potential enrollment roadblocks for community college students. But what are the enrollment solutions? Solutions for overcoming enrollment roadblocks for community college students include the following: 

    Common Clear Path to Graduation Roadblocks for Students

    Now that you’ve mowed down the enrollment roadblocks, it’s time to ensure that the ride stays smooth. Remember, it’s never too late for students to change their direction. They might do so if these issues persist: 

    Course Registration Problems

    Technology Barriers

    How to Create a Clear Path to Graduation

    Constructing a clear path to graduation isn’t easy, and with limited resources, it can be difficult to avert every bump in the road. But in my experience, you can keep most students on track by focusing on these two key areas: 

    Common Reasonable Degree Completion Roadblocks for Students

    You’ve cleared two major hurdles by easing the enrollment process and creating a clear path to graduation. But you’re only halfway home. Here are some common mistakes institutions make when it comes to the time it takes to complete a degree: 

    Inadequate Academic Advising

    Lack of Clear Communication

    Social and Emotional Challenges

    How to Help Students Reach Their Goals in a Reasonable Amount of Time

    When it comes to keeping students on track, intervention is key. Follow these tips: 

    Common Cost/Benefit Roadblocks for Students

    You’ve now reached the last but never the least critical roadblock in higher education: return on investment. It’s why your students are showing up, and if the numbers don’t make sense, they can — and should — turn back. Here are some financial concerns that your students are likely to face: 

    Housing and Transportation Challenges

    Cost of College Data Is Hard to Find

    Ways to Help Students With Their Financial Concerns

    Your institution is responsible for ensuring that students understand their financial obligations and how to meet them. Here are a few ways that you can do this: 

    Bust Down Roadblocks by Partnering With Archer 

    In my 20 years of experience, I’ve helped lots of institutions navigate these potential roadblocks to enrolling and retaining more students. And I’m far from alone in my expertise at Archer. Our full-service team partners with colleges of all kinds to help them build and scale their capacities. 

    Is your institution ready for a collaborative partner who takes the time to get to know you, then makes custom recommendations based on decades of experience? Reach out to us today

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    Brian Messer

    Brian Messer has over 20 years of experience overseeing all aspects of university administration, including online, operations, academic affairs, enrollment management, marketing, financial management, and human resources and student affairs. Specifically, his extensive experience in scaling marketing and enrollment initiatives in all sectors of nontraditional higher education have contributed to student success and growth at many institutions of higher learning.
    Messer holds a doctorate in higher education administration from Saint Louis University.

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  • Improving the Student Experience – Archer Education

    Improving the Student Experience – Archer Education

    Attract and Retain the Right Students for Your Institution

    Choosing a higher education program is often a defining moment in a person’s life. Whether it’s a teenager deciding on a traditional, on-ground undergraduate program, or someone in their late 30s selecting an online master’s program — it’s a big decision, and one that can be heavily influenced by the experiences they have with the institutions they’re considering. 

    Your students don’t just deserve a great experience, they expect it. Which is why identifying opportunities to enhance the student journey at your institution is essential. 

    In the competitive world of higher ed enrollment, the ability to attract and retain students goes beyond offering picturesque campus views or flexible online scheduling. It hinges on understanding and navigating the complexities of the process a student goes through, from their initial awareness of your program all the way through to their graduation, and identifying where students can get stuck, or worse, drop off. 

    When it comes to enhancing the student journey, I’m often asked, “Where is the best place to start?” To that end, this article dives into some of the most common areas for improvement. Focus on these areas and you’ll be on your way toward delivering a stand-out student experience. 

    This article explores:

    Common Bottlenecks in the Student Journey 

    Institutions aiming to enhance the overall student experience need to understand where students tend to get stuck. By pinpointing these bottlenecks, your university can devise strategies that streamline the journey and boost student engagement and retention. Some common points of friction in the enrollment process include: 

    Top of the Funnel: Driving Awareness               

    Every student journey begins with awareness, but getting potential students to visit your institution’s website to gain awareness of its programs can be a stumbling block. Many universities face challenges due to poor audience targeting, ineffective creative strategies, or a lack of investment in organic channels like websites and content strategies. 

    If your awareness efforts are falling short, your potential students won’t land on your university’s digital doorstep. This means opportunities to engage and inform them go untapped, which sets the stage for a cascade of engagement issues downstream. 

    It’s called an enrollment funnel for a reason — if you don’t attract enough qualified traffic at the top, the bottom of your funnel will fall short of your goals. 

    Mid-Funnel: Generating Interest

    Let’s say your awareness efforts are working, and your brand, story, and program marketing tactics are finding prospective students. Once these prospects are aware of your institution and have visited your site, the next challenge is to convert them into active inquirers. In other words, getting them interested enough to raise their hand by filling out a form, contacting an enrollment advisor, or even starting their application. 

    This stage often suffers from two main issues: 

    If your paid ads told one story and your website tells a totally different one, it can be a turnoff for prospective students. If the content does not resonate with potential students’ academic aspirations, they are less likely to take the next step. If you’re not highlighting what makes an education at your institution truly unique or how it connects to your target audience, it’s likely that your content won’t resonate, even if you did identify the right audience. 

    Bottom of the Funnel: Growing Application Submissions

    What’s every enrollment leader’s least favorite word? Melt. Even after marketing to the right audience and generating inquiries, there’s often a drop-off before the application stage — commonly known as the application melt. 

    This is a delicate phase, where bad strategy moves and overly clunky processes can cause big problems. This could include generic follow-up communications that fail to engage the interests of prospective students, a lack of personalized experiences that can make students feel valued, or insufficient time spent nurturing and managing these warm leads. Each of these factors can lead to a significant reduction in the number of completed applications.

    Methods to Identify Student Experience Bottlenecks 

    Now that we’ve covered the most common bottlenecks, let’s talk about how to identify where these bottlenecks are showing up in your student experience. Once you identify them, you can target improvements effectively and efficiently. Methods to identify bottlenecks include: 

    Benchmarking               

    A powerful starting point for identifying pain points is benchmarking your institution’s performance against your peers or similar programs. Benchmarking involves a comprehensive comparison of your processes, outcomes, and student satisfaction levels to those of other institutions. 

    By evaluating where you stand in relation to your peers, you can identify specific areas where you lag behind. Benchmarking provides a clear, external perspective on your institution’s relative strengths and weaknesses, guiding you toward the most impactful areas for enhancement.

    Leveraging Internal Data

    Once you understand the external picture, you can dive in internally. Your internal data is an invaluable resource for tracking the effectiveness of changes in the student experience. By analyzing metrics such as enrollment rates, drop-off points, and student feedback before and after implementing changes, you can gauge their impact. 

    This approach helps you identify which efforts are helping the student experience and which aren’t, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. It also enables you to adapt your strategies dynamically, continuously improving the student journey as students’ needs continue to evolve. 

    Intuition and User Testing

    As we all know, data alone isn’t enough. Intuition and direct feedback play a crucial role in creating the full picture of your student experience. Conducting user testing sessions in which potential or current students navigate your enrollment process can reveal obstacles that data might not capture. This can be as simple as a conversation or as intricate as a survey.

    Additionally, personally walking through each stage of the student journey yourself can provide you with insights into the emotional and practical challenges prospective students face. Think of it as acting like a secret shopper — fill out an inquiry form and see what happens. This method helps you uncover hidden roadblocks that might not be evident from quantitative data alone, adding a human element to your analysis.

    Fixing Bottlenecks With ICE Scoring 

    Now that you’ve got a list of bottlenecks to fix, you need a system to prioritize them. This next critical step ensures that you properly allocate your time and resources. The ICE scoring framework, which stands for impact, confidence, and effort, is a structured approach to evaluating potential fixes and deciding which ones to tackle first. 

    Impact              

    The first step, impact, involves evaluating how much a potential fix could enhance the student experience. 

    Fixes that address issues at the top of the funnel, such as increasing awareness and initial engagement, often get a high score because they can influence the largest number of prospective students. The more qualified prospective students you can get into your enrollment funnel, the more you’re likely to enroll. 

    By prioritizing high-impact fixes, you can see substantial improvements in overall student engagement and satisfaction.

    Confidence

    Confidence measures how certain your institution is about the effectiveness of a proposed fix. This assessment is based on evidence from user testing, adherence to best practices, personal experience, and insights from experts in the field. 

    For example, if you get a large volume of inquiries outside of business hours, you can give a high confidence score to an effort that would engage students at any hour, like Onward or a chatbot. 

    A high confidence score indicates a strong belief that the fix will achieve the desired outcome, reducing the risk associated with resource allocation. You are more likely to succeed when you base your decisions on robust, tested solutions.

    Effort

    The final component of the ICE framework is effort, which estimates the time, financial investment, and organizational energy required to implement a fix. This step also considers the level of internal buy-in necessary to move a project forward. 

    Effort scoring helps you understand the resource demands of each potential fix, allowing you to consider its feasibility against its expected benefits. Implementing a new learning management system (LMS) is a huge project that requires organization-wide input and execution. This equals a high effort score. Refreshing your creative assets? Much less effort. 

    Prioritizing fixes that require reasonable effort but offer significant impact can lead to more sustainable and effective improvements.

    Implementation and Iteration in the Student Experience 

    Improving the student experience is not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process that demands continuous attention and optimization. As your institution implements changes,  you’ll need to monitor the effects and iteratively refine your efforts based on the outcomes. 

    Monitoring Results

    The first step after implementing any change is to closely monitor the results. Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cost per lead, application melt, enrollment numbers, student retention rates, and satisfaction scores, are a gold mine. Continuous monitoring validates the effectiveness of new strategies and highlights areas that may require further attention. 

    Rinse and Repeat

    Once the initial results are known, the next step is to apply the ICE framework again — this time to any new bottlenecks or existing issues that were deprioritized in earlier rounds. This iterative approach ensures that your resource allocation remains dynamic and responsive to the evolving needs of your students and your institution. 

    Ready to Improve Your Institution’s Student Experience

    At Archer Education, we understand the transformative power of full-funnel data visibility when you’re improving your student experience. Our commitment to transparency and knowledge sharing drives our partnerships with colleges and universities, helping higher ed leaders and marketers exceed their online learning growth and enrollment goals. 

    Our experienced team is adept at identifying and addressing the bottlenecks that can hinder student journeys, utilizing strategies like those outlined in this article to maximize impact. By applying the ICE framework, we help institutions prioritize and implement improvements that significantly enhance the student experience. 

    If you’re ready to transform your student journey and achieve remarkable outcomes, contact our team today, and explore how our offerings can bring your educational goals to fruition.

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