DePaul University Case Study

DePaul University, Chicago, IL, 2017/2018: 1,572 international students enrolled, representing 115 countries.

International students comprise 6.9% of total enrollment.

DePaul’s international admissions office was tasked with determining how best to allocate their budget due to recent cuts. To do this, they needed to understand the conversion rates of their marketing and recruitment initiatives, as well as analyze which markets were generating the most interest to effectively target those students most likely to enroll.

DePaul University has partnered with IDP Connect for a number of years to build its international brand awareness and translated content. While DePaul was able to see the value in IDP Connect through international student inquiries and referrals to the university’s website, tracking those leads through enrollment remained a challenge. The university’s recent implementation of Slate CRM allowed the international admissions team to pull accurate lists of international applicants, admits and enrolls for the first time.

The new functionality gained with Slate enabled DePaul to run the IDP Connect Enrollment Matcher Tool (EMT), which matches the institution’s list of international students with registered IDP Connect users from its Hotcourses international sites. DePaul uploaded their lists of international students in each stage of the enrollment funnel for the 2017/2018 academic year to determine which international students can be attributed to DePaul’s presence on Hotcourses international sites.

The IDP Connect EMT allows partner institutions to match enrolled, admitted and/or applied students with students who have registered on Hotcourses international sites. IDP Connect generated over 40,000 page views for DePaul University in 2017. It’s important to note that IDP Connect does not force the 37 million international students visiting its Hotcourses international sites each year to register, so not all users who research DePaul are able to be included in the EMT matches. The matches generated from the EMT is the minimum return that can be attributed to DePaul’s partnership with IDP Connect.

DePaul University was able to attribute between 4.5 to 5.8 percent of the international students in their database, depending on their enrollment stage, to IDP Connect.

Considering DePaul’s current service level with IDP Connect, the cost of tuition, and the number of enrolled students, the partnership with IDP Connect generated a $293,480 return on investment for 2017/2018.

Running individual EMT reports based on applicants, admits and enrolls gave DePaul University visibility into IDP Connect conversion rates between the different stages of the enrollment funnel.

“The functionality within Slate, combined with the IDP Connect EMT, allows us to easily view the data in a more manageable way.”

– Dino Pruccoli, Director, International Admission at DePaul University.

When comparing international student conversion rates, students attributed to Hotcourses sites had higher conversions between applicants to enrollments and admits to enrollments versus DePaul’s overall international student conversion rates.

Five out of the six Hotcourses international sites that DePaul has a profile on generated enrollment matches. DePaul used these EMT results to inform future international strategy. After uncovering Vietnam as the international market generating most interest, DePaul’s international admissions office plans to further examine their marketing recruitment strategy in the country.

“With this information, we plan to enhance our travel and communications in Vietnam. We’ll do more intentional posts on Hotcourses international Facebook pages, targeting its Vietnamese followers to announce visits prior to going, connecting with students while in country, and encouraging them to apply after visits.”

– Dino Pruccoli, Director, International Admission at DePaul University.