Wow, this one’s really interesting.  It seems that 1st Financial Bank USA has launched a site called CollegeData, a place where students can search for colleges, sort through the financial aid process, and perhaps most interestingly, calculate their odds of getting in with the Admissions Tracker.  Credit card and student loan offers also abound on the site. The Admissions tracker is interesting because students can indicate whether they’ve applied to a specific school and also if they’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or denied.  Other students can then assess their chances of getting...

I’ve posted a fair amount about the video content that we’ve been creating for prospective students from the Admissions office at Hope.  Along with creation, I’ve been trying to promote and syndicate like crazy.  In the process I inadvertently learned how to develop and submit a video podcast to iTunes.  Here’s my stress-free process for doing so: 1.  You’ll need to put together some content. Depending on your setup, this can be fairly easy to do.  I’ve outlined our process for putting together our monthly updates in a previous post.  What we end up with is a...

My first post on AD back in July was about Wufoo, a site that allows you to create embeddable forms fast. I haven’t spent a ton of time working with the site in the meantime (travel season, you know), although we did use it for registration for our East Coast Plane Trip.  In the last few weeks Wufoo has become of great use as we look ahead to our spring programming.  Once you start using the site your imagination will run wild, but I thought I would point out a few things that make Wufoo really shine: 1. It’s cheap. If you consider the time and resources needed to hard code forms like...

Like many of you, Hope College Admissions has created a “page” in order to have an additional presence on Facebook.  What you begin with is pretty basic, but there are some tricks to get a more interactive experience going, particularly with the page’s profile picture/box.  I realized this after I came across the Facebook page for another institution.  My first thought: What a huge value-add to be able to have students link back to our site… I want this now. The first thing I did was take a look at the source of that other institution’s page.  Somehow they were able...

I’m pretty excited about the latest project we have going.  We recently picked up a Kodak Zi6** (pocket video camera), a cheap ($159) camera that shoots in HD at 720p.  I was initially intrigued at the idea of taking quality video from campus events (traditional events, athletics, arts events, etc.).  I then realized that video could be a great medium for delivering short messages about admissions-related topics. The following video is our first attempt at addressing one of these topics; in this case, a brief reminder to students to apply by our early notification deadline.  We shot the...