Harvard Business School MBA Prematriculation
Website management, blog management, newsletter
How do you build engagement and enthusiasm among an incoming student population?
From 2013 to 2019 I oversaw Harvard Business School’s Prematriculation program, which guides incoming MBA students with resources and support from the time they’re notified of their admission to their first class on campus. On Notification Day, the Admissions team sends out acceptance letters with a link to the Prematriculation website (run by me), each student’s Prematric Checklist (also run by me), and me as their main point of contact from acceptance in December or March until the first day on campus at the end of August. During that time, students need to complete a number of Prematriculation items, from financial aid forms, to housing lotteries, to pre-MBA coursework, to filling out and submitting all kinds of form, prework, or information. All of that information was found in their Prematric Checklists and on the 100+ page Prematriculation website. My job was to make sure they (all 1000 of them) knew what was required of them, submitted their materials by the ongoing deadlines, and felt a connection to the School before they even got there.
So how did I do it?
“Tweaking for Excellence” on the Prematric Website
The Prematric program had been running well already before me, but I wanted to make sure that my students had the best experience they could. That included what I called “Tweaking for Excellence.” Since the Prematric season began in December and ended in August, every Fall I would audit the 100+ page website, analyze the analytics, hold focus groups, send out surveys, and generally understand what was working and what needed improvement. I’d also do a full refresh of all the webpages, working with nearly every department across HBS (financial aid, registrar, housing, operations, etc.) and a few “across the river” at Harvard University central.
One part of the yearly tweaking was looking at page engagement on the website. What pages were students spending the most time on, and which ones were they not? Could we get rid of those pages? If they contained necessary information, how could we get eyes on them more — like highlighting them in the weekly newsletter? Part of that was also looking at the pathway of how students were viewing pages: from the weekly newsletter, or from their Checklist, or just going directly to the site via a bookmark?
In my focus groups, I’d also ask the students their feedback on the website and its content. Was it straightforward? Was it confusing? This led to restructuring content and sections based on their feedback. For example, securing housing at HBS involves two departments and two lotteries for space on the same campus. From student feedback, I learned that they were pretty confused about how the information was laid out on the site. So I reached out to the Student Housing Committee and worked with them to restructure that page to make it more straightforward for incoming students to understand.
Beginnings: The Prematric Blog
When I took over the Prematric program, there was a blog on the site, but it was controlled by Admissions — yet no one in Admissions really had a vision for it. They were happy to hand it over, and I launched Beginning: The Prematric Blog, where I asked students, staff, and faculty to write blog posts (I wrote some, too!) that the incoming student population would be interested in — from how to navigate the aforementioned housing process, to the head of Career and Professional Development giving guidance around what be thinking about before the MBA, to students sharing their stories from campus. The blogs were always read and students appreciated reading a “slice of life” to get them excited about attending.
As I was analyzing web traffic and feedback around the blog one year, I learned an important content lesson: Your most trafficked content might not be the most memorable. I sent out a survey asking incoming students which blog post was their favorite, and I listed the titles for them to rank. When I got the list back, I compared it to the page views from the website — the favorite blog posts would be the most trafficked blogs, right? No. They were different. This meant that the blog posts that had the highest traffic were interesting in the moment, but blog posts with lower traffic in the moment were the most memorable — so much so that students months later ranked them as their favorites.
The Prematric Newsletter
Another tool I had at my disposal was a newsletter — or, rather, the ability to mass email all incoming students if they needed to be notified of upcoming deadlines or interesting news from the School. Before me, the newsletter had been sent out occasionally when needed, but I knew there was an opportunity to use that newsletter to increase engagement, enthusiasm, and connection for the incoming student population. I branded it with the Prematric logo and sent the newsletter regularly (some years, every week! other years, bi-weekly or once a month). I added a note from me, upcoming Prematric Checklist deadlines, links to new blog posts, and any other news or information that incoming students would need. It not only created a cadence from which they’d hear from me, it built relationship since they were seeing my name a lot, and got them excited about entering the school year.
