Are they the next best thing to being there?
The Web-based campus tour is now so essential to students making enrollment decisions that not having one can negatively affect an institution's recruitment goals. Admissions officers say that virtual tours do not seem to reduce interest in personal visits, but rather encourage and supplement live contact. To develop a tour, make use of students' creativity and expertise. After you have gathered copy, audio, and visuals, follow these tips in combining them: 1) keep it simple to be compatible with a wide range of computer systems; 2) add personality, including photos and narratives from real students; 3) keep the focus on visuals; 4) be creative. Additional features might include movies, live Webcams, building tours, and interactive frames.
By Andrea Jarrell
In a word, yes.
If you're a communications or admissions officer, this answer may make you cringe. After all, we compete in a complex environment in which teenagers and their parents select or reject prospective campuses based on rankings and hire consultants to help them navigate the choppy admissions waters. We want to increase personal connections with prospects — not make it easier for them to choose or dismiss a campus in an electronic vacuum. But like it or not, the Web-based campus tour is now so essential to students making enrollment decisions that not having one can negatively affect your recruitment goals.
Three years ago, a virtual campus tour usually consisted of a series of still images accompanied by text captions. As technology has improved, tour creators have begun putting more "reality" in virtual reality with 360-degree views; live video; and animated, talking tour guides. Today, the average tour includes interactive maps with links to photographs and detailed information about buildings, departments, and programs.
While students with limited travel funds may substitute online tours for the live version, proponents of virtual tours believe they work best as an enhancement, not a replacement, to the real thing. Like all good communications tools, it's the synergy between the virtual tour and the rest of your prospective-student communications that creates a powerful impact. If your institution doesn't have a virtual tour, however, there's some good news: To produce one, you don't have to break your budget. Read on for some ideas and approaches to consider when you're creating or updating a virtual campus tour.
Who's touring and why?
Happiness, success, friendship — with so much riding on their choice, and given the plethora of campus information available, students leap at anything that simplifies the selection process.
Enter the World Wide Web. The percentage of high school seniors who use the Web as a college search resource grew from 4 percent in 1996 to 78 percent in 1998, according to a national poll of 500 students conducted by Art & Science Group Inc., a higher education marketing firm based in Baltimore. Because the campus tour is a tried-and-true ingredient in a student's selection process, you can see why the virtual version is a hit with this crowd.
Linda Moffa, associate director of public affairs for Pomona College, says that the college's online tour was the first thing that recently admitted students mentioned in a focus group she conducted. "Our students said they looked for the tour right away, and they definitely saw it as a plus."
Chris Carson founded CampusTours.com, a Web service to help students with their college choice, after his own whirlwind college search in the mid '80s. Like many high schoolers, when Carson got home from touring campuses, he remembered key characteristics, but he couldn't remember which trait went with which institution.
"I started CampusTours.com in 1997 with 180 college and university tours linked to the site," he says. "It was never meant to be a commercial venture, just a way of helping students and colleges."
In less than two years, however, more than 1,000 institutions have joined the site, and Carson has had to hire another staff person to manage it. Today, advertising revenue underwrites the entire operation. Carson believes that virtual tours have a "galvanic capacity" to make a campus resonate in a prospective student's mind.
While some recent news stories highlighting virtual tours would have you believe that "long gone are the days when you traveled to schools that piqued your interest," as the Arizona Republic reported on July 15, 1998, admissions officers say they believe virtual tours have had the opposite effect. One institution with an award-winning virtual tour says the number of visitors to its campus has increased in recent years. "We not only track people who come through the door but also the number of on-campus interviews," says Wylie Mitchell, Bates College dean of admissions. "Over the last few years that number has increased by 150 to 200." He adds that what is more striking is how informed students are when they arrive — in part because of the virtual tour. "They know so much. They want to fast-forward as soon as they get here. The level of their questions means that the role our tours play is a lot different from what it was 10 years ago."
When Mitchell asks prospective students if they've visited the Bates Web site, nearly every student says yes. "Frequently, prospective students show up and greet our tour guides, faculty, and coaches not as strangers but as acquaintances with whom they've already corresponded by e-mail," Mitchell says. "I think that is a great use of technology."
Students: Your best resource
Whether you possess the technical savvy to create it yourself or the budget to outsource it, when developing a campus tour, never overlook your students' creativity and expertise.
Two years ago, Linda Campanella, then vice president for marketing and public relations at Trinity College in Connecticut, asked Todd Coopee, assistant director for technical services and operations, to develop Trinity's interactive campus tour. For Campanella, now Trinity's senior vice president for operations and planning, the key was to enrich the tour with the same elements that make the college's real tour appealing to prospects.
Coopee accomplished this goal by working with several students who had been giving tours at Trinity. He asked these tour veterans what should be highlighted in a virtual tour — what details were important to them when they first visited the campus. He discovered that the students' perspectives were far more important than what he and other administrators thought the virtual tour needed.
Once Coopee finished creating the virtual tour, he again followed through with students, showing it to them and asking for their criticism and suggestions.
Where else can you find students who can help build a quality online tour? First, look to the Web. Perhaps a student has already created an virtual tour of your institution and you don't even know it. Actually, that's what happened at Bates College.
Four years ago, Ron Meldrum, systems coordinator for the office of college relations, and his colleagues were working on ways to liven the appearance of Bates' Web site. They stumbled on a Bates freshman's personal Web page that featured photographs of the campus. The student had taken snapshots, added some commentary, and posted them so his friends back home could see where he was.
Meldrum says his office had never considered doing an online tour, but when they saw those photographs on the Web, they knew the student was on to something — and could possibly help them. "We thought, 'Hmm, here's someone who already has the expertise. Let's hire him.' "
They quickly rescued the freshman from his job washing dishes in the campus dining hall and made his site an official Bates Web page. "We placed the tour on our 'About Bates' page and linked it to the admissions home page," Meldrum says. They named it the "Student-Guided Electronic Tour of Bates."
The student continued to work for the college relations office throughout his four years, seeing the Bates Web site through two more incarnations of what became an award-winning virtual tour.
Just shoot it
Whether your tour is a simple affair or some grander undertaking, photographs are a key ingredient. The sites and scenes you choose to represent should depend on the way you organize your live tour as well as the messages and themes you express in your recruitment materials.
The beauty of the Web is that unlike print media, Web-based photos can have a short shelf life for relatively little cost — about $25 to convert film (36 photos) to CD-ROM. The process is even easier if you use a digital camera ($300 to $700), which allows you to load photos directly into your computer. Of course, if you go with a professional photographer your expense will increase significantly — anywhere from $800 to $2,400 per photo shoot, depending on the photographer's rates and the length of the shoot. The good news is you don't have to hire a leading photographer because you don't need print-quality photographs. Once you have the photos in your computer, the process is the same as uploading any other data or graphics file to your Web site.
Putting it all together
After you've written the copy or recorded the audio to accompany the photos, you simply combine the text, voice, and visuals to create your tour. If you don't design Web pages yourself, you will need to learn or enlist the help of someone who does. You'll also need a computer that's connected to your institution's server. Here are some additional pointers for creating a quality tour.
1. Keep it simple. Although you probably want to make your tour state of the art, consider that its visitors may have limited Internet capacity. "We felt the worst thing would be for students to become frustrated if their systems were incompatible with or less sophisticated than ours. We wanted our tour to work on just about any browser," says Trinity's Campanella.
Carson of CampusTours.com agrees. "Colleges and universities have to remember that no matter how much the Internet improves, a lot of high school students are still using older computers that are very slow."
He recommends producing a basic tour that's accessible to even the most rudimentary computer, and then adding a top layer of multimedia elements that viewers can select if they have the proper computer tools.
Carefully consider the memory required to load your site, advises Crista Cabe, associate vice president for college relations at Mary Baldwin College. Cabe, who worked with an outside consultant to design her institution's tour last summer, felt a sophisticated virtual tour would contribute to Mary Baldwin's identity as a creative, entrepreneurial campus. But she was careful to provide a pared-down version that all visitors could access.
Once the tour was up and running, Cabe asked friends and colleagues with different systems — some with conventional modems, others with faster, direct Internet connections — to take the tour and tell her what worked and what didn't. She says that remembering to factor this kind of testing and feedback into your production schedule is important.
2. Add some personality. Just as prospects visit an institution to see if they "click" with the people and the environment, those visiting a virtual campus look for a personal connection. Moffa of Pomona College says her focus group students wanted to see real students and find out what their life on campus is like. While some institutions are starting to introduce tours in real time, you can give your tour some personality simply by adding student photos and narratives throughout.
Unlike viewbook photos that get stale in two years because of clothing and hair styles, you can update Web photos easily. One caveat: Include several different guides in your tour. You want to give prospects a variety of students with whom they can identify. Ithaca College's tour, for example, uses five student guides who offer personal commentary.
3. Look sharp. Remember that your tour is primarily visual. Moffa says her focus-group students liked the Pomona tour because it's not text heavy.
4. Be creative. "Because competition is so fierce, creativity can make or break a lot of small college Web sites," Bates College's Meldrum says.
At Ithaca College, the tour offers factoid sidebars and answers to real questions about the institution from high school students. The tour also highlights key phrases, which link to information on topics that might pique the interest of prospective students, such as "keeping kosher" and "vegetarian diet" when the tour stops in the dining halls, "open-mike night" and "student government" in the campus center, or "close-knit community" and "safety" in the area on residence halls.
Bells and whistles
Once you have the simple stuff down, think about getting fancy with your tour. Ithaca, for example, offers a three-part tour that includes three-dimensional, panoramic movies in addition to its walking tour and interactive map. Mary Baldwin College immerses visitors in panoramic vistas of the campus that they can zoom in on for a closer look at specific areas. Olivet Nazarene University positions six Webcams around campus that provide site visitors with a live video feed. Olivet's tour also allows visitors to enter buildings and move through hallways and into adjacent rooms, where they can find key points of interest, or "hot spots," that they can click on for more detail.
One of the remarkable aspects of the Olivet and Mary Baldwin tours is that both use a new video file format (Reality Studio by Live Picture) that can run without help from outside programs called "plug-ins," small software applications that enable a computer to perform a very specific function, like play music or a movie. When your tour requires a plug-in, viewers have to download the plug-in program before they can take the tour. For some visitors this is more trouble than it's worth. Remember, the easier your tour is to access, the better.
In-house or outsourced?
To create your virtual tour, you can use the talent in your own shop, collaborate with other campus offices, hire an outside firm, or employ a combination of these options.
Bates College, for example, decided not to hire outside professionals to develop its virtual tour. With a staff project manager shepherding the production, Bates' in-house team comprised Meldrum, two writers, a designer, and the freshman who started it all.
Mary Baldwin's Cabe interviewed several firms that specialized in Web-site development. In the end, she selected Hal Warren of Warren and Associates to create the virtual tour as well as work with her on reorganizing the college's entire Web site.
At Olivet, the university's Webmaster, Keith Reel, says he and his colleagues started out using a consulting firm, "but once we caught on to the technology we realized we could do a better job ourselves." Although the outside firm's technology was first-rate, they couldn't produce a tour that meets the specific needs of Olivet's audience as well as the in-house staff could.
Greater expectations
Remember that virtual tours are not just for prospective students anymore. So no matter which department takes the lead, you'll want to have key offices like college relations, admissions, alumni relations, and computing services on board before you begin developing your tour.
The Bates tour, for example, has now gone beyond being only an admissions tool. "It is much more comprehensive. We keep in mind that alumni who have been away for 10 or 15 years are also taking the tour," Meldrum says.
Campanella sees Trinity's tour as part of the institution's overall marketing strategy. "We have a number of audiences — potential professors, funding agencies, and collaborating institutions — that visit our site." Soon the college will offer a different kind of tour aimed at each constituency within the Trinity community. The tour will focus on the college's plans for buildings and grounds by featuring an artist's rendering of facilities currently under construction as well as those the institution won't start building for another five years.
Wave of the future
For now, most virtual tours still focus on campus grounds and building exteriors, but that is rapidly changing as more and more campuses add building interiors and interactive frames. Also, prospective students want to go beyond a straightforward tour and make virtual campus visits. That's just what the folks at Albion College gave their prospects when they presented Albion's first virtual open house last year. It featured live students, faculty, and staff members answering admissions questions in real time. Looks like the next best thing to being there just got better.
Outsource Resource
Who to call to learn more about virtual campus tours
Although CURRENTS doesn't endorse companies or their products, here's a sampling of some vendors who provide online tour development services:
* CampusTours.com, 517 Hill St., Suite 100, Sewickley, PA 15143, (412) 741-4210 or www.campustours.com. Contact: Chris Carson, president.
* Collegiate Choice Walking Tours, 41 Surrey Lane, Tenafly, NJ 07670, (201) 871-0098 or www.collegiatechoice.com. Contact: Cliff Kramon, vice president.
* Internet Association Corporation, 520 South Main St., Akron, OH 44311, (800) 968-6004 or www.interactivetours.com. Contact: John Bryson, interactive project manager.
This article is from the March 1999 issue.