5 Strategies for Reaching Out to Students

How to get students to read and respond to your messages.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Messages should come from people, not offices, and have a consistent, warm, and caring tone.
• Information should only be sent to students for whom it is relevant, or else they will tune out.
• Messages should always include a call to action rather than just being a repository of information.

College is a lot. Students need to manage financial aid, scheduling, course software, housing, career opportunities, campus resources…there’s almost more to learn about college than there is to learn in college.

On top of that, students are given guidance through more channels than ever before: email, social media, SMS, LMS, SIS. That’s why colleges are becoming strategic about what info they send to whom, when and how they send that info, and the language they use. Colleges know that a well-thought-out communications plan must play an important role in their overall retention strategy.

I work with colleges nationwide to help them better communicate with students. I lead professional development workshops on behavioral science best practices for student success, which have led partners to redesign how they communicate about enrollment, campus resources, learning opportunities, and more. Most recently, I streamlined and revamped communications from across departments at a large, urban community college to instill a consistent, caring, and motivational tone.

With this work in mind, I want to share with you five effective strategies for better student communications:

1. Make it personal

Many people understand the power of personalizing a message to the recipient, using their name and other details that you can pull from your student data. However, communications should also be personalized to the sender.

Students are more likely to respond to a person than an office. Introduce yourself and use your name. Say “I” instead of “we.” Express personal concern and a willingness to help. Your goal in any communication should be to seed a human connection, and that only happens between two people.

2. Be warm and caring

That human connection will enhance all your communications, but especially those that contain bad news. Your payment is overdue. Your grades are low. You didn’t get into the program you wanted. Even something seemingly innocuous, like a reminder to complete registration, will be less likely to panic a student who’s facing hidden personal or financial challenges.

Too many college messages are cold: The worse the news, the more dispassionate the tone. Let students know you understand how difficult things can be and that you’re here to help. When you’re writing as yourself instead of as an office or institution, it becomes much easier to share concern.

3. Send the right message to the right students

Too often, colleges send students a laundry list of resources or a decision tree related to processes like registration or financial aid. If you want students to act, you cannot expect them to sift through reams of information to figure out what pertains to them.

You have more data at your fingertips than ever before, and you should use it to target your communications. Only tell eligible students about resources and programs that could help them. Send reminders only to students who haven’t completed a task. Not only will targeting elicit a better response to those specific communications, but it also prevents training students that your messages are irrelevant and that they should tune them out.

4. Always include a call to action

Don’t share information and assume students know what to do with it. Explicitly tell students what you want them to do: schedule an appointment, attend an event, complete a survey. No matter the outcome, make sure that the message serves a behavioral purpose.

But don’t overcomplicate things: Limit your message to a single call to action. The strongest communications motivate students to take step one in a process. Ideally, completing step one naturally leads to step two (and so forth). If your message needs to describe multiple steps, caveats, resources, and decision points before students even begin, there is something wrong with that process.

5. Foster reciprocity through commitments

When you send this personal, caring, and targeted call to action, it will elicit for students the sense that someone at the college took the time to look at their situation and reach out. They will feel seen. That feeling, in turn, will engender reciprocity and motivate students to complete the desired behavior.

You can build on this reciprocity by committing to your own call to action. For example, if you want students to reply to an email or complete an application, let them know how long it will take you to respond. The duration itself is less important than the fact that the promise indicates that you respect students’ time and, thus, motivates them to comply. Also, your commitment creates an informal contract in which students won’t bother you until you violate your self-imposed deadline.

Bringing it all together

Using these five strategies, you can craft messages that stand out to students and motivate behavior. The medium doesn’t matter: When all constituents at your institution leverage these strategies, your communications will take on a more consistent tone that creates a culture of caring, reciprocity, and support.

What now? I recommend compiling and auditing your student communications across departments, like I did with our community college partner. Not only will you streamline your messaging by reducing bloat and redundancy, but you will also begin to draft a strategic communications plan that consistently engages students and helps to boost retention.