Design Thinking for Innovation Final Project 1/26/2017

Fabio Sameh

Challenge and Selection: The challenge I would like to review has to do with recruiting potential students to a graduate  advertising program where I work.  We are a small program, only 200 students, and we have a  different way of funding as compared to most graduate programs at public institutions.  Our  operating funds are directly related to the students we can recruit to our program, meaning if we  don’t get 100 students each year, we might not be able to make certain purchases, hold events  or hire new staff or faculty.  Interestingly enough, while our students are highly successful after  graduation (we have a 99% placement rate after 6 months and hold a recruiter fair where almost  300 recruiters come to interview and hire 100 students) we always had a difﬁcult time getting  enough qualiﬁed recruits each year to ﬁll the tracks.  Many times we would only get 190  completed applications where our goal was at least 300.

Clearly there was a disconnect and we were certainly missing something important.  In this  case, we used a form of visualization to try and ﬁgure out what was going on.  We needed a  global view of our data and see the “what is” before we moved to the next steps (of course I did  not know these steps in the names that this course has given them at the time).

Application: As mentioned above, we can get plenty of data from our application process and qualitative  data from our current students as well.  We pulled data from the start of the application  download process where students tell us about themselves, how they heard about us, where  they lived, etc.

We also did a poll of our current students gathering other data that included questions of the  application and acceptance process and their impression of the number of students that apply  versus the 100 that get in.  We also asked the current student how they found our school and  who were the inﬂuencers in their decision to attend.

And we pulled data from the faculty who reviewed applications and accepted students.  Then  things got interesting.  What we found out was that in some ways, we were the major stumbling  block to our own recruiting efforts.  Much like the Good Kitchen example, we could not just “ﬁx  the menu” but needed to look at our entire process.

Insight: As we went to a white board and laid out that data, we saw interesting areas that had  “gravitational pull” or areas that showed commonality among responses.  Our ﬁrst and major  insight from our data is that our program, while ranked #1 in the nation by business periodicals,

was not as well known to potential students as we thought.  We were not telling our own story  well enough.  Our “front-end” story needed a lot of work.

Orbiting that insight closely was where our prospects went for information on graduate schools  for marketing and branding.  We were off base and needed to recalibrate our marketing and PR  efforts.  We also saw a pattern of data that told us our application, rigorous to be sure, was  actually preventing prospects from applying!  We found that there were almost 2000  applications requests and downloads but only around 200 actually completed the process.   Why?  The data also made us question if our application was too rigorous and pushing qualiﬁed  applicants away from attending the school.  And ﬁnally another area of “data gravity” was our  approval process.  We saw that our faculty took too much time to accept students, sometimes  late into May.  Many applicants by this time either had taken full time jobs or could not get the  ﬁnancial and other resources together to be at our school by the last week in July.

By using a form of visualization (via a whiteboard, markers, sticky notes, etc), we were able to  see the “what is” in our difﬁculty getting the desired number of qualiﬁed applicants and how  many of these problems were inter-connected and of our own doing.  We had met the enemy  and they were us!

Approach: Reﬂecting back on how we did our own “what is” analysis and used a form of visualization, I  would have liked to have known more about the next steps in the process learned in this class  (what if, what wows, etc.).  I feel we jumped to learning launch products too quickly without the  proper foundation.  For example, the school hired a ﬁrm to optimize our search results via  Google, but we did not have the completed story yet ready to tell based on those searches.  But  with that said, even using one of the tools learned in this class on a real world problem helped  tremendously.

Right now, I have been asked to look at our online education presence and come up with ideas  that might enhance and advance these efforts.  This is a perfect opportunity to utilize the skills  learned in the class.

