One Question That Changed How I Build Communication Flows

The most common top-of-funnel comm flow mistake has nothing to do with subject lines or send frequency. It starts with the question you ask before you write a single word.

It was my first week on the job in admissions. I'd been in higher education, but this was my first taste of enrollment, particularly, building an enrollment communication flow. I remember sitting in a conference room with a team of smart, well-intentioned people. It was the beginning of cycle prep, the first meeting of early spring to discuss communication for the new cycle year.

I was eager to see the magic. I would be taking over, so I was paper and pencil in hand, ready to take notes.

Standing at a white board, leadership opened the meeting with this question:

"Okay. What do we want students to know?"

I spoke up almost immediately.

"Shouldn't we be asking what they want to know?"

The room got quiet. As the newbie, I realized I had maybe spoken out of turn. Some people looked at each other. And then someone said:

"I don’t know. I’m not sure we know how to answer that."

Come to find out, this is how they always built it. It was based on what they felt were the challenges to getting students to choose them. No students had been consulted in the information, no surveys had been sent. So, the comm flow was built that year anyway. Around what the institution wanted to say.

Today I now know...that is the mistake. It shows up at every stage of the early funnel: prospect, inquiry, application start. It produces the same thing every time: a series of emails organized around institutional priorities, sent to students who are carrying a completely different set of questions.

That moment stuck with me and that question became a repetitive one I've asked more times than I can count throughout the course of my career since.

So, what do students want to know? If you're eager to find out too, here's what I suggest.

Start with the data

You cannot build a student-first comm flow without understanding what students actually need. And the most common reason enrollment teams do not have that understanding is not lack of time or effort, it's just that nobody has formally asked.

Here is the good news: you do not need to conduct your own primary research before you start building something better. Companies and organizations that serve higher education have been surveying prospective students for years — at scale, across institution types, across demographics — and most of that research is completely free to access.

Here are some of the resources worth reading before you build:

• RNL High School Student College Planning Report — surveys more than 2,200 high school students on how they search for colleges, what information they value most, and what makes them disengage. Free at ruffalonl.com.

• RNL E-Expectations Trend Report — published annually, designed specifically to help enrollment teams understand what college-bound students want to experience during the search process. Free at ruffalonl.com.

• EAB enrollment research and blog — regularly publishes findings on student search behavior, communication preferences, and what moves students through the funnel. Available at eab.com.

• Carnegie Higher Ed research — focuses on communication friction, digital behavior, and what prospective students experience during the search process. Available at carnegiehighered.com.

• SimpsonScarborough research — conducts brand and perception research in higher education, with published insights on how students form impressions of institutions before they ever visit. Available at simpsonscarborough.com.

• Ologie research — a brand strategy and marketing firm focused exclusively on higher education, with research and insights on how institutional brand connects to student recruitment. Available at ologie.com.

• CampusESP parent research — focuses specifically on family and parent engagement in enrollment, with data on how parent communication shapes student decision-making. Available at campusesp.com.

• Niche research — publishes student-generated data and reviews on college experience, giving enrollment teams a direct window into how students perceive and talk about institutions. Available at niche.com.

Will this research tell you everything specific to your institution, your region, and your student population? No. That is where institution-specific primary research comes in.

But it will give you more than enough to stop building a comm flow around what your institution wants to say and start building one around what students at the inquiry stage need to hear.

Next is voice

Once you understand who you are talking to, the next question is how you talk to them.

This is where institutions (particularly those that pride themselves on prestige, tradition, or academic rigor...speaking from experience) sometimes get the early funnel wrong.

There is an assumption that professional means formal. That institutional credibility requires institutional distance. That the voice used in a faculty newsletter or a board presentation or even on your website is the voice that belongs in a prospective student's inbox.

It does not.

Your brand is not your register. Your brand is who you are — your values, your identity, your institutional character. Your register is how you talk to the person in front of you. And a 17-year-old prospective student sitting in a high school cafeteria in October, holding a phone, reading an email you sent...that person needs a very different register than a board trustee or an accreditation committee.

A research university that prides itself on intellectual rigor can still be warm, curious, and human in email without compromising its identity. A regional school known for community and access can lean into that warmth even more. The brand does not change. The voice that carries it into a student's inbox has to be appropriate for them.

• What that sounds like in practice: a human being wrote it. It uses contractions. It acknowledges what the student might be feeling, not just what the institution wants them to do. It invites questions rather than just delivering information. It sounds like the beginning of a relationship rather than the opening of a transaction.

• What it does not sound like: formal salutations, passive voice, institutional jargon, and sentences pulled unchanged from the website or viewbook.

Students know the difference. And they decide whether to keep engaging based on it.

Ready? Take action

Reading the research and rethinking your voice gives you direction. Here is how to start moving.

1. Change the question in the room. The next time your team sits down to build or review a communication flow, open with this: What is a student at this stage of the process thinking about right now? Not what you want them to know. What they are carrying? What are they feeling? What gives them anxiety? Those type of questions will reframe every decision that follows.

   
   

2. Bring your counselors and ambassadors into the room. Before you build anything new, ask your admissions counselors what questions they hear most often from prospects and inquiries. Those questions are a direct map of what your current communications are failing to address. Then, ask your students. Ask them about their college search, the concerns and anxieties they had. Even ask them to read some of your emails and review them for you. They are free primary research that most teams never formally collect.
   

3. Audit your voice. Print out your first five emails and read them aloud. Ask honestly: does this sound like someone who wants a relationship with this student, or someone who wants the student to take an action? If the answer is the latter, the content may be right but the voice is wrong — and voice is what students feel before they ever process the information.
   

4. Pick one email and rewrite it. Do not rebuild the whole flow. Find the email in your current sequence with the lowest open or click-through rate, that is where the disconnect is loudest. Rewrite it as if a human being sat down and wrote it for one specific student, at one specific moment. Then compare. The gap will show you everything.

   
   

5. Commit to one cycle of testing. Student-centered comm flows are not built in a single summer. They are built through iteration — testing subject lines, adjusting tone, watching what moves students and what does not. Commit to documenting what you learn this cycle so next year's build starts from evidence, not assumptions.

The bottom line

The communication flow mistake almost every enrollment office makes is not technical. It is not about send frequency, personalization tokens, or template design.

It starts with the question asked at the very beginning of the process.

"What do we want them to know?"

The answer to that question, built into email after email, produces a communication flow that serves the institution. And it misses the student who is standing at the door, wondering whether anyone in there sees them.

Somebody in that first meeting I was in asked the right question when they admitted they did not know what students wanted. That moment of honesty was the beginning of something better.

You do not have to wait for a perfect answer. Start with what the research already tells you.

Rethink your voice.

Rewrite one email.

Build from there.

---

Building a student-centered communication flow, especially one informed by real data about your specific students, is work I do with enrollment and marketing teams every day. I go in, develop primary research, run surveys, and use what we learn to build or rebuild comm flows that actually connect. If that sounds like what you need, let's talk.