October 25, 2013 | SharkAdmin [image 1]NVC hopes to encourage students to graduate through the stories of its alumni. This semester, the NVC Public Relations team created and launched the alumni campaign in an effort to promote retention and completion among currently enrolled students. “A few months ago, we conducted four focus groups with students to further enhance our student communication, “ says Renata Serafin, director of Community and Public Relations. “Students told us that they like our messages about graduation and completion but that they wanted to know how well NVC alumni were doing with their associate degrees. That gave us the ideas to move forward with our graduation campaign.” In collaboration with the NVC Alumni Relations, the NVC Public Relations team reached out to dozens of alumni over the course of the summer. Forty posters were created with alumni pictures and were placed in all of the classrooms on campus and at the Westside Education and Training Center where NVC offers Advanced Water Treatment and Community Health programs. [image 2]In addition, the team wrote profiles on 30 of the alumni and featured them on the alumni Web page. Digital signage and website billboards were created to further highlight the alumni of the week. Since the campaign was launched in September, the traffic on the NVC Alumni website increased from 200 unique visits to over 2,000 visits per month. In addition, the Public Relations team has received positive feedback from alumni, faculty, staff and students in regards to the campaign. Students receive weekly announcements through social media prompting them to view the alumni of the week. “As a college, we are dedicated to helping students earn an associate degree. While the Web traffic is promising and there is more activity on the NVC Alumni page then before, we know we still have a lot of work to do to help students understand the path toward an associate degree,” said Serafin. The next step is to help students visiting the alumni Web page make a connection with the graduation Web page. “We’re creating a new set of billboards and icons on the alumni page that will further prompt students to click on information about degree completion,” said Shawn Harward, NVC senior multimedia specialist, who designed the alumni and graduation Web pages. [image 3]
