The Global Campus won a national award last week for its successful, innovative recruitment efforts that produced a record increase of 61 percent in incoming online undergraduate students for fall 2020.

Patty Milner, assistant vice provost for student outreach and innovation at the Global Campus, accepted the "Excellence in Enrollment Management Award" on Dec. 3 during the UPCEA Marketing and Enrollment Management Seminar. UPCEA awarded this honor to only one U.S. institution of higher education in 2020.

UPCEA, based in Washington, D.C., is a leading national association for professional, continuing and online education and has more than 6,000 individual members from major public and private institutions across the U.S.

"This enrollment success resulted from a strong, strategic collaboration between the recruitment and marketing teams, their eagerness to tackle change, and their unyielding commitment to ensure that every prospective student had the right information at the right time to make informed decisions about beginning an online undergraduate degree program at the University of Arkansas," Milner said.

Undergraduate applications for online degree programs grew by 154 percent, an increase of 1,213 applications between fall 2019 and fall 2020. The Global Campus promotes online degree programs on behalf of academic colleges at the University of Arkansas.

"The Global Campus endeavors to provide U of A colleges with the best support and services possible, and this award recognizes how outstanding our recruitment and marketing efforts are," said Cheryl Murphy, vice provost of distance education. "We are proud of our staff members who worked hard and developed innovative strategies to help the U of A enroll more online students."

In March 2020, the height of online program recruitment season, the COVID pandemic stripped the Global Campus of many traditional recruiting efforts. This disruption included the U of A's ban on travel to recruitment events at conferences and two-year institutions.

Staff pivoted quickly to develop new enrollment strategies and tools to help incoming students throughout the inquiry and application process. Staff:

• Planned virtual recruiting events and "coffee chats,"
• Increased Online Student Liaison Office interaction,
• Provided live chat six days a week,
• Developed a "schedule a call" option for incoming students,
• Used social media and website information to promote virtual recruiting events,
• Created digital recruitment flyers and materials that could be emailed to students,
• Added new self-service, on-demand information clusters, such as Frequently asked Questions to website pages,
• Expanded the Slate email messages to provide timely, relevant information to prospective and new students,
• Developed self-service website information, and
• Shifted roles and duties internally to manage incoming student communications.

The new strategies deployed March through August 2020, in response to pandemic-related challenges, required no increase in overall budgeted expenditures for recruitment and marketing. 

The Global Campus Office of Student Outreach and Innovation encompasses three teams: Recruitment, Student Outreach and Communications. Office staff include Milner, Cleston Murray, Noel Sharif, and Christina Smith. Recruitment Team members are Jaime Ashmore, Sarah Holmes and Kim Snow, and Student Outreach Team members are Colleen Whitman, Christal Kennedy, Murray, Sam Ownbey and Kati Williams. Communications staff are Kay Murphy, Caroline Chandler, YaYa Jenkins, Vicki Martin, Leonard Ridley and Jacob Warren.