Take your next college fair online by banding together with other universities in an online consortium event this fall. You'll attract new prospective students earlier on, add new dimension to your marketing plan, and as always, and have twice as much fun. Best of all, Chat University will take the reigns so you can sit back and look forward to it all.

Consortium events group you with your peer institutions - probably the same school you continually run into from one college fair to the next. Students are then able to ask general questions in a main lobby, then jump from one chatroom to another, talking to a different college with the click of a mouse.

You don't have to relearn anything. The rules for consortium events are the same as the chat events you already hold. Chat University will help you pick a time for your consortium that is most convenient for students. We'll even send initial and reminder e-mails so your students don't get duplicate emails from each school.

The Ohio MBA Network conducted a consortium event last year with great success. Chat University sent the email and provided the tech support. Upon the completion of the event, each participating school was sent their transcript and guest book.

Properly coordinated consortium events can be a valuable asset to any marketing plan. Implementing them is easy. If you are interested in learning more or would like to propose a consortium chat event, please contact Chat University at (800) 642-8868.

Do your alumni already play an active role in your admissions recruitment by attending college fairs and conducting in person interviews? Maybe they don’t and you’re looking to get them involved. Try inviting alumni to attend your next chat with prospective students. You just may find out that your recent college graduates can add a fun and genuine twist to your admissions chat room. As with your current students, alumni can share their experiences as students at your university but they add a new dimension from their life experience and perspective.

But wait! Before you invite the entire class of 1997 to your next chat, be sure to make a good impression and follow these pointers.

Your graduates are a genuine voice that your prospects want to hear. Don’t ignore them. Today, Chat. Tomorrow, Alumni Recruiter!

Visit the admission website of a Chat University client lately and you might have noticed a pop-up window asking if you want to participate in an upcoming online chat. This easy-to-add feature for your website is the new trend in attracting more students to your online chat events.
Appearing to prospective students when they visit your admissions page, the pop up window simply asks students to leave their email address if they’d like to participate in an online chat. The exchange takes only a few seconds but its benefit will last much longer.

Edwin Wilkes, Executive Dean of Law School Enrollment Services, suspects that the pop-up window has helped the Quinnipiac University School of Law generate chat attendance and may have helped to pick up new inquiries during the chat. Quinnipiac is not alone. Tony Cardenas, Assistant Director of Admission at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne believes that his pop-up window does more than drive chat attendance. “The majority of the students that gave us their email addresses had not been in contact with us prior to our chat events. We have been able to talk to students that we don't meet at the college fairs and high school visits. The students that use the pop-up window are not the types of students that call our office. They live on their computers and this gives us access to them.” From Connecticut to California, schools who’ve added this feature to their website continue to get results with some universities collecting as many as one thousand email addresses in a year from the pop-up window, of which many have made the online chat their first contact with a school.

If the numbers don’t convince you, perhaps the price will. It doesn’t cost anything to add a pop-up window to your admissions website. Chat University will email you the link to your pop-up window so your webmaster can place it on your site. Once it’s up, Chat University will begin storing the email addresses your students enter. Just let Chat U know when you’re getting ready to send your email invitation and you’ll receive an excel spreadsheet of the students who’ve requested a chat with you. Its that easy.

If you’re interested or you know already that you’d like to add a pop-up window to your site, please email popup@chatuniversity.com