ABOUT
Enrollment By Design is an innovative approach to enrollment consulting that will help you plan and innovate your programs and services. From strategic enrollment planning and marketing to budgeting, revenue and strategic space planning, Enrollment By Design will utilize Design Thinking strategies and sophisticated data science methods to help your institution realize its aspirations and its potential. Our expertise bridge the enrollment, academic, and financial divisions and our associates have experience at the two and four-year undergraduate levels as well as within the graduate studies and continuing education space.
Enrollment Planning Meets Design Thinking
The current 21st century education landscape is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) and many institutions are struggling with traditional linear modes of problem solving to address their planning and innovation needs. This is exactly the right time for organizations to embrace a complimentary process to traditional planning modes and embrace a design thinking mindset. Enrollment By Design has structured a design-thinking process to context its analytic, modeling and marketing tools that is educational-centric.Our hope is that we can work with your team(s) to instill an optimistic and energetic approach to problem solving that leads to innovative thinking within your organization. We can help you create stronger service delivery mechanisms, recruitment and outreach approach and academic and co-curricular offerings that resonate with both your potential and current students, thereby intentionally building mission-based brand loyalty and demand for continuing education and alumni engagement. We hope to enliven your team and co-construct an approach to their work that ensures a student-centric ethos that is comfortable with iteration and adopts a maker mentality. Such an environment will offer a means to evolving the organization toward a collective mindset that continually and purposefully cultivates and values creativity and innovation beyond the design-team and furthering the goal of solidifying a sustainable financial foundation.
HOW IS DESIGN THINKING RELEVANT AT MY INSTITUTION?
The process of Design Thinking facilitated by Enrollment by Design will provide a common, student-centric language to clarify the opportunities available to the enrollment, academic and student success functions. If you are interested in more than modeling and financial aid leveraging (we do this as a core business, but do so much more), we can support you through a problem framing and emergent thinking process that allows the design and core functional groups to work through a common understanding of both the challenge and possible solutions– together.What are Key Concepts and Process?
Key Concepts
Some of our concepts – empathetic vision, problemscape (external competitive and internal and external cultural landscape), collaborative alchemy, innovative praxis, proto-viz and paces are part of a toolbox that we draw upon to ensure we can jointly ensure collaborative pursuits ensue between design, marketing, systems and operations. This helps ensure we create a powerful platform to both support incremental improvements (reduction in time to launch, increased ROI/margin, better services and market mix) and to drive innovation and change where required. The by-product of this work is stronger more nimble teams all working toward innovative praxis which results in stronger outcomes for the organization.
Empathetic Visioning
To help innovate and grow programs and services, our process will help you dig deeper into your “user-needs” and uncover critically valuable insights into their perspectives on your services, programs and outreach strategies rather than only pursuing the more conventional approaches of defining a potential market and trying to fill it in a forced and often unnatural.
ProblemScapes
We undertake with you a very careful review of external competitive forces, potential markets and the internal and external cultural landscapes of your organization and/or functional areas.
Collaborative Alchemy
We review the internal and external forces noted above in relationship to your internal structure, governance processes, communication strategies, tools and technologies looking for key mis-alignments as well as opportunities to improve and enhance and better leverage synergies toward realizing targeted outcomes.
Innovative Praxis
We assist you in assessing opportunities for “re”-aligning your internal culture (or functional workstreams) with the external brand(s) you offer and/or services provided ensuring you have the proper context for optimizing our work (analytics, modeling, cognitive computing, marketing and outreach) and building capacity to utilize.
Proto-vizualization
This is step is where you visualize and assess early prototypes (affirm or disconfirm) and prepare to launch.
Paces
This is where you implement your prototypes and ensure they are optimized for creativity, agility, efficacy and innovation.
Design-Thinking Charettes (DTCs)The facilitative approach we use to promote an innovative ideation and action planning process among is a design-thinking charrette framework along with a set of related meeting protocol(s). The goal is that this will aid your institution in ensuring there is both adequate space to ideate using design-based thinking protocols and the requisite tools are available to assist your team deeply engage problem contexts and innovate solutions to address the complex challenges they face daily. For more on a history of charrettes, please visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette
LET'S GET STARTED
The first interview is with you! Connect with us today and let us learn a little bit more about your institution and your challenges. We’ll map a Design Thinking approach and get you on the road to innovation.