A fast and easy way to find 10 great student or alumni testimonials in 1 hour to help enroll more students at your college or university

One of the biggest problems facing higher education marketers is the coming enrollment cliff.
Video storytelling is a way to get ahead of that problem, but it’s not an easy task to find compelling stories from students willing to be on camera.

In this podcast episode I suggest a unique approach that allows higher education marketers to market more effectively to prospective students, and at the same time tell better stories by having plenty of options at their fingertips of stories to choose from.

Show notes:
-Download: The Unignorable College Enrollment Video
-Transcript of this podcast below for those who prefer to read

Transcript of this episode:

Let me ask you a question. If I said to you. “tell me six stories that demonstrate your school's impact.” Could you think of any? Like, real stories with a before and after that show some positive transformation? Like your school was a big reason why this person went from point A, you know, with challenges to overcome. Maybe they struggled academically or they had a rough home life and didn't have much support, or they just didn't know what they wanted to do with their life.

To point B, where they're now living their best life making a difference in the world. Maybe they're an alumni living out a career that's fulfilling and making them money and all that. Do you have six of these at the ready? Maybe you do, but most marketing teams I work with and marketing teams in general, whether it be for, you know, for-profit business or nonprofit, churches even you know, they would need to do some digging to come up with some stories. They'd have to ask around different department heads or professors or managers to find stories within their midst.

And in a climate where more and more marketers are realizing the immense power that storytelling has on their marketing efforts, and I hear more and more higher ed marketers say that storytelling is crucial to their strategy, it seems odd that collecting stories on an ongoing basis isn't part of the strategy but I don't say that without including myself because I identify with that.

It makes sense. Collecting and archiving stories for future use takes commitment. But storytelling… really doing quality storytelling is an ongoing effort. And hear me when I say you want options. You want options to pick from. When you go to tell a series of stories, or you go to tell a student success story, you don't want to just tell the only one that some professor could dig up for you and give you.

You know, that student that would be willing to do an interview for a story. You want options, you want the most compelling ones and the only way to do that is to be a collector of stories. So when the time comes, maybe you're going to do a big fundraising push or something, or it's enrollment season and you want to be getting lots of great content in front of the right students, you're not starting then and there trying to dig up stories and then just settling for whatever you can find. You've got a backlog of options that allows you to choose the most strategic and the most compelling stories. I think a big reason this is tough is that there's not an automatic flow of stories coming in on their own.

So students or alumni don't just willingly tell you their story, like unprompted for a couple of reasons. Number one, we’re more motivated to share negative stories than positive ones, right? If you go to a restaurant, you had a great meal. The service was great. The atmosphere was great. How often is it that you go home and you write a great review on Yelp for that restaurant, or you call the manager at that restaurant to praise the server by name, who you had a great experience with.

But my gosh, if you have a bad experience, it is so tempting to go running to Yelp or Google or whatever and go like, “if I could put zero stars I would” and just smear the heck out of them. Negativity spreads so much more naturally and more quickly than positivity. And number two, why this is why this effort is tough of collecting stories is people might not even realize they have a story.

They might be thinking, you know, they just went to college like you know, people normally do and they graduated. Eventually they landed a job they like. And that's about as far as it goes. Like they might not really be thinking that deeply about their college experience and how much that prepared them for where they're at today. Like, if you ask me to tell you a story about the significant role college played in my life - I went to art school, College for Creative Studies here in Detroit. It was an overall good experience.

And I loved the school and I studied abstract painting, and I thought I was a I was going to be a gallery artist full time and all that. And I am I still I, you know, I still show my work and sell paintings and stuff, but my full time gig is running a video business. So like, college was cool.

You know, I, I smoked clove cigarettes. I had long swoopy hair, I had tight pants, tight shirt, I was super cool lip ring plugs in my ears, nose ring at one point, all of that. I, you know, I managed to land on my feet in a creative career, albeit different than I had planned, but I wouldn't put that in the story category.

I wouldn't really couch that as, like, a great story worth telling you know? But if you were to dig deeper and ask me more specific questions about my college experience, like maybe what stands out as something particularly meaningful I got from college, I would tell you that the mentorship I got from my professors and one professor in particular was was particularly meaningful. My one professor, Gilda Snowden, she's a very well-known and celebrated Detroit artist.

She believed in me, and it almost brings me to tears. She passed away about ten years ago. But my relationship with Gilda and how much advice she gave me and encouragement she gave me, you know, the times I would just sit in her office because I had a problem I was dealing with, or I had a question about the business of being an artist or whatever.

So many things. That mentorship was so important to my growth as an artist, and I bring that growth as an artist into my video work. And so I would say that was a transformational experience, and that's a story worth telling, especially, you know, if your school is one that touts its close student faculty relationships. But I had an epiphany yesterday in the middle of the workshop, I was doing a creative direction workshop with a particular college marketing team.

We're getting ready to work on some commercials. We sort of discovered that it might be a good idea for them to have intentional conversations with students in a particular program to get to know their ideal student or their ideal customer on a deeper level. And at the same time, we were trying to come up with some stories and the thought hit me, “what if you could kill two birds with one stone here?”

What if there's a way that marketers could get to know their students on a deeper level so that they know how to market more effectively to students like them and collect stories at the same time? So I think every organization, my company included, would benefit from having intentional conversations with their customers I know that for me, when I really sat down and got focused about coming up with a content strategy for my audience, I just scheduled a bunch of phone calls with college marketers and really found out what your problems are and what you know, what's keeping you from making more videos and what's keeping you from doing more storytelling and stuff like that.

And I got so much golden information out of those conversations, so, so worth every minute. And I think every organization would benefit from having those intentional conversations with their customers and find out who they are, what they care about, what problems they have, what's motivating them, what do they want to achieve and why. It's it's in these conversations, you can really get some of the richest, most useful insight into your students that you can't get any other way.

It's in these conversations where we can access their emotions in these conversations. It's not just about finding out what motivates them or what they love about the school, but how those things make them feel. And when you start to get below the surface and you start to talk about feelings and emotions and meaningful things below the surface, with a student like that, you start to uncover stories.

So let's say, for example, you're talking to a nursing student. You ask them what drew them to the nursing profession, and you find out this student watched her mother go through cancer and the treatments and procedures that went along with that and the comfort that a particular nurse brought to the situation and how that made her want to learn to do that for someone else.

That's a great story. I love telling the story about when my first daughter was born. It was our first labor experience. You know, my wife and I, mostly my wife. So we didn’t know what to expect and the contractions are hurting. You know, here she is. She's in active labor. It's painful. And for whatever reason, like noise was just… my wife was just really sensitive to noise.

And so if I was trying to encourage her and be like, come on, you can do it, push, honey, you can do it, she'd be like, stop talking to me. Don't talk to me. I only want Nurse Katie to talk to me. So Nurse Katie was this lovely nurse that was just so sweet, so comforting, so down to earth, just so reassuring and just made my wife feel so much more comfortable.

Like, she didn’t need me. She didn't. She didn't want to hold my hand. She only wanted to hold Nurse Katie’s hand, you know? And so it's funny. And afterwards she wrote a glowing review about Katie, and she like, to this day, if you ask her about Katie, she'll be like, oh, my gosh, Katie was the best.

And so I love to tell that story because it was a nurse in the nursing profession and just her being there with the right tone. With the right words in the right moment was so transformational for this labor experience that we had. And that's not a story affiliated with any college. But imagine the school that Katie went to using that as a marketing piece for the nursing profession to inspire prospective students with the value and impact that nurses have in the world.

So maybe your school prides itself in having really close student faculty relationships. Faculty are strong mentors to students, like I mentioned, was the case with me in art school. You discover that talking with a particular student that they were a failing student all through high school, and teachers just looked past them and they didn't see much potential in them.

And for the first time, somebody saw something in them, a professor saw something in them that they didn't even see in themselves, and they nurtured that student. And because of that, that student has done a total 180. You know, that's a good story, but that student's not going to raise his or her hand and be like you know, “I was ignored in high school, I was a terrible student, and this school turned me around and this particular professor turned me around. Please tell my story to the whole world.” They're probably just not going to do that. You have to draw that out of them. And the way to do that is through meaningful interactions with students and with the desire to get to know students and learn more about the demographics in your school and do some focused research.

That's a great excuse to get into a conversation that's going to provide the content for stories to emerge. And at the same time, you're getting really valuable information that helps you truly understand your ideal student and what they need to hear in your marketing in a way that's going to move them to action. So just putting a mass email out and saying, “Hey, who's got stories?

Submit your stories. You know, we're trying to we're trying to do a storytelling series.” I mean, historically, I have not seen that be very fruitful. But if you are directly asking students saying, “Hey, I want to know more about you, our you know, our school is just looking to improve, looking to learn more about our students, what's working, what's not.

We'd love your feedback. Can I ask you some questions and get some of your honest answers?” A lot of students would be like, sure, because maybe they have things that they don't like about the school that they really want to tell you. You know, but in the in the process, you can get some some valuable information that that leads to, you know, stories emerging.

OK, so I titled this episode a fast and Easy Way to find ten great student or alumni testimonials in one hour to help enroll more students at your college or university. So where's that ten students student stories in one hour thing coming from? Well, here's here's a method that I think would would work and would speed up the process.

So I listen to a podcast by Amy Porterfield. It's called Online Marketing Made Easy. Super good podcast if you want to check it out. Episode 447 of her podcast is titled This Sales Strategy Converted at 44% and Now I'm Teaching It to You. So if you want to go listen to that, go for it. But she talks about this idea of creating a, a concierge team that you can deploy to have these market research calls.

And so she talks a lot about, you know, assembling the team and giving them a script and things like that. And you can do that however you want. But the basic idea is get a group of people together who can divide and conquer and schedule calls with students and have these calls. So it's not just one person doing it all and it taking up a lot of time in their calendar.

So if one call took you 30 minutes and you had five people on your team, that's two calls in an hour. Times five is ten calls. So you could potentially have ten great stories by the end of that one hour with a team of five people doing that. And you can just keep repeating that.

I mean, what if you did what if you guys spent 3 hours or what if you did it once a week? That would just add up and add up and add up. So so that's the idea behind this method. I encourage you to try it. And of course, you can just have these calls as a one man or one woman band.

So what do you do once you uncover a great story or two? So I'm glad you asked. You could write a big, long, text based article and there's some merit to that. I, I, but I was reading one of these long articles the other day because I like to see what various schools are doing regarding storytelling. It was like a student story, like a big long article about this one student success story.

And I have to say three paragraphs in it was a very well-written journalistic article, but three paragraphs in and still I was feeling the urge to click away from it. It was just too much of a commitment. And had that been a story told through video in a compelling way, I probably would have been sucked in more and more interested in sticking around to see what happens in the story.

And if you're marketing to a Gen Z crowd, trust me if I find it hard to get through an article that's right in my realm of interest, higher ed storytelling, if I find that hard, how much more is a 17 year old with a billion other things that I could possibly click on to spike the dopamine in their brain going to find that difficult to commit to reading.

So if you're wanting to do more videos or maybe you're already doing video storytelling and you want to level up, I have a free resource for college and university marketing teams on how to execute storytelling in a compelling way because how you craft a story makes all the difference in the world. Once you've got a story, you can't fumble the ball.

You have to you can't just it's not just about saying it to the world. It's it's about crafting it in a way that sucks people in holds their attention and gets them to stay to the end. So in this resource, I give you a simple template that's a tried and true, scientifically validated way to tell a powerful story.

And in addition to that, I give you a whole list of questions you can ask that will result in deeper more emotional, more story rich responses like for you if you're going to interview a student for a video or an article or something like that. And with that question list, you can use those as some of your market research questions to get to know these students more.

And these questions are not your typical like, why do you like this school? They really they're really designed to get at more under the surface responses. So you can only use a lot of these questions when you do these calls and try to mine for stories so you can go to Unveild.tv/unignorablecollegevideo. Unveild is u-n-v-e-i-l-d and download that today and I'll put a link on this page too that you can click on.

Thank you so much for listening. And if you are wanting to put a greater focus on storytelling at your college or university, or if you just have questions, shoot me an email. My name's John Azoni. You can reach me at John@unveiled.tv Thanks so much.