Blog Post: Define Your First Stakeholder

It will be your choice to decide who to direct their mailers towards. One obvious stakeholder is the prospective student, but there can be several influencers on the decision to attend an institution. To better target the stakeholder, you’ll want to be more specific about who that student actually is. Rural / urban? 18 years old or a transfer student? Are their parents alumni? Do they attend sporting events? ACT score? Household income? Come up with a statement that pinpoints the stakeholder. Examples are below:

• 17-19 years of age, ACT/SAT accepted scores, Income: $90,000
• North American Females (17-23 years old) who have already been accepted to OU
• Entry level employees and recent graduates (21-30, avg. age of 23)
• High school seniors who are National Merit Scholars that are trying to choose a school. (17-18 yo)

You can see with how with these different publics, that you would want to target different messages. For someone with the ACT score to qualify at you, you may be encouraging them to apply. For a female that has been accepted, you may be inviting them to join an on campus organization. For someone who already who has already graduated, you may be targeting them for grad school. You could come up with hundreds of different individuals, at different stages of the recruitment experience, that would require different messages.

Once you’ve defined your stakeholder, you’ll want to write a short blog post brainstorming who this stakeholder is and what messages one might be directing towards them. Tag your post Stakeholder.

Once you've published the post, submit the URL to blog post.