Wednesday, April 25, 2018

The Lost Files Vol. 14: WSU Alive! Orientation


            Whether you are a lentil farmer, an app developer or a lentil app developer, evolution is the key to keeping up with the ever changing technologies of our time.

            If it is societal changes, new platforms to communicate with the world or just a new Starbucks in town we live in an unstable world that is ever growing.

            I spoke with Amanda Morgan who has been the Director of Alive!, the incoming student orientation at Washington State University, since 2013 and working for the program for ten years. She touched on the importance of changing to stay in line with the needs and demands of your target audience.

            In the case of Alive! Amanda Morgan talked about the significance of finding out what your audience wants and transforming your organization to fit these desires. “Alive! uses student and parent evaluations at the end of the program … they were pretty robust,” Morgan told me referring to the general positivity of the results in her years as Director.

This can be defined as a retroactive marketing plan in that it relies on results of events that have already occurred.

            “Students want a shorter program so we cut back half a day from the freshmen program and condense the information,” the Alive! Director discussed.

I am fascinated by the successful revolutionaries like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King Jr., who bucked the trend by being ahead of the change curve. In other words, proactive marketers. These visionaries were able to rock the world with their ideas, not because they yielded to how the world was changing at the time — we know their names because they correctly forecasted how the world would change in the future.

How does this relate to the Alive! program at Washington State University? What about the power of first impressions? Why is being ahead of the change curve the most crucial thing you can do to be successful?

More importantly in what ways does shortening the length of an orientation program that welcomes incoming students to our university improve their experience? It seems that this action would have the reverse effect and not give students as much time to ease into the college environment.

While Alive! meant well when they reduced the length of their program this move did not do anything to make the experience better for incoming students and parents.
           
What Alive! needs to focus on is the preferences of high school students and all individuals who are considering going to Washington State University but still making up their mind. By adjusting their program to cater to the desires of students who had just gone through the program, Alive! is using retroactive marketing practices. They should be more proactive by marketing themselves to students who are still considering what university to attend with Pullman being amongst the options.

Alive! can accomplish this by being more active on Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media applications dominated by millennials. Alive! should also strive to include the opinions of high school kids and all prospective Washington State Cougars when designing their orientation. Alive! representatives should make traverse varying high schools around the country selling students on all that Washington State University has to offer.

My main plea to Alive! is don’t market yourself to the audience you already have; target the individuals who are still trying to pick a college by differentiating yourself from the pack.     


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