Top Priorities for Calling & Texting

  1. Encourage action. Calling and texting should be restricted to campaigns. In other words, you should have a specific reason for calling or texting, encouraging action.
  2. Avoid marketing messages. Any calls or texts should be helpful, timely, and relevant. These are not appropriate channels for general marketing messages. Again, focus on a call to action.
  3. Target specific populations. If you have an audience segment that you wish to target, calling and texting could be ideal. For example, you may be trying to increase enrollment from a particular group. A call or text may be perfect to encourage applying.
  4. Plan in advance, if possible. It’s helpful to know in advance that you intend to take advantage of calling or texting so we can effectively coordinate communications to students. Please include this information in your annual marketing and communication plans, if possible. If the need arises during the cycle, please communicate your intentions so we can share the plan and avoid redundancy.

OUA’s Calling & Texting Campaigns

Within the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, text messaging is utilized mostly for event reminders and calls to action, such as encouraging students to complete their applications before the deadline. Calling campaigns are also focused on getting a certain population to take action.

Campaigns vary from year to year and are often in response to particular issues that arise during the cycle.

How to Measure Success

With calling and texting campaigns, the measure of success should be clear if the campaign is built around a call to action. We can monitor the students who have been contacted to see if they take the action we encourage.

Other Considerations

We can only call someone if we have a phone number attached to their record, and we can only text someone if they’ve provided consent.

Many of our inquiries do not have phone numbers, and even fewer have provided consent to text. Once a student has applied, we have a phone number, but we still do not necessarily have consent to text. In fact, that percentage has been historically low.

Every cycle, we work to increase the amount of phone numbers we have in our system, and we encourage students to provide consent to text.

If you’re considering adding text messages to your communications plan, make sure to review our texting policy.