Audit of activities supporting student enrolment

Objectives of the audit

Universities, in particular the non-public ones, allocate a considerable part of their budgets – often in an amount as high as PLN 1000 per student, for promotional and marketing activities with a view to attracting students. Activities supporting student enrolment usually comprise:

Outdoor advertising (billboards, citylights, LED displays);
Advertising in magazines addressed at high school students and their parents;
Promotional activities in high schools (lectures, alumni visits)
Participation in education fairs;
Organization of open days at the university;
Promotion on the university websites, often supported by SEO mechanisms;
Online advertising.

PCG Polska offers the analysis of efficiency of such activities. Using any customer data and advanced tools such as Business Intelligence and Data Mining, we provide the persons in charge of the enrolment with information regarding the optimum ways to allocate the university’s promotional budget, not so much in order to obtain the highest number of candidates as to match all places to students best suited to the programs offered.

Course of the audit

Audit of the enrolment process may be performed as one-off analysis or as a continuous service, allowing to trace the effects of the activities performed. Each of the modes comprises the following elements:

Specifying the scope and elaborating a detailed audit plan;
Signing an agreement providing the university with a way to securely transfer its strategic information;
Analyzing data on the promotional activities of the university;
Questionnaire and interviews with the employees of the promotion department and with selected students;
Launching a Business Intelligence application, integrating it with the key university databases (including the system servicing enrolment and the didactic process), configuring reports and key performance indicators;
Elaborating a report on the efficiency of enrolment activities;
Elaborating a model enabling the optimization of enrolment activities.

Benefits of the audit

The audit enables the superposition of the data regarding the enrolment and the efficiency of pro‑enrolment activities and the data on potential new candidates, comprising:

Demographic information on the candidates’ schools of origin;
Historical examination results of alumni of respective schools;
Historical results of alumni of various high schools in respective fields of study.

As a result, the university may adapt its activities to the expected results of the enrolment, taking into account not only the number of candidates, but also their quality and the consistency of their expectations with the programs offered by the university.