Six Summer Sprints to Supercharge Enrollment Success

Summer is quieter than the rest of the year…and it flies by as special projects sit on the shelf for the next break. The opportunity you have right now isn’t months; it’s a handful of half-days, scattered across a slow month…and that’s enough.

It’s been a minute since I worked on a college campus during the summer, but I still remember it well. In the mid-90s, I ran the Multimedia Center at Emory University. At the time, it was the only place on campus where students and faculty could scan images, edit digital video, or burn a CD-ROM (on a $17,000 machine that failed half of the time). For a recent graduate of Emory’s film program, it was a toy store of exciting, exotic, and expensive creative tools.

When summer came, the campus emptied, as did the lab. I had months of down time to tinker, update software, learn new technologies, and develop training materials. And before I knew it, the summer ended, the students returned, and we were busy with project requests and deadlines again.

Below are six sprints, each doable in an afternoon, each aimed at the unglamorous plumbing that makes your funnel work better come September. No retreats required.

1. Audit Your CRM

You don’t need a full system overhaul. You need two or three hours and a willingness to look at the parts of your database you’ve been quietly ignoring since spring. Here’s where that time tends to pay off:

Remove duplicate records. When the same prospect is entered twice—once from a fair sign-up sheet and once from a web inquiry form, for example—you’re left with different notes and different follow-up history. Merge what you can find in a couple hours. Duplicates split your data on that student across two records, which means whoever’s calling them is working from half the picture. Most CRMs have special tools for identifying and merging duplicate records, so start with a Google search on how to do this if you’re unsure where to start—or delegate to your system admin.

Update stale lead statuses. Pull everyone still marked “new” or “contacted” from more than sixty days ago. Some of these are genuinely dead. Some are just mislabeled, students who actually moved further down the funnel but nobody updated the field. Either way, your reporting is lying to you until this gets fixed. It only takes an afternoon. Consider labeling cold leads and adding them to a lead nurture process.

Review workflows and automations. As CRMs age, outdated workflows stack up, often muddying your data or complicating outreach. Spend an hour reviewing what’s there and either pause those that aren’t useful, or note them for team review (especially if workflows are developed by a range of users at your school). Some are firing off outdated triggers or conditions that no longer make sense, and a few are probably just quietly broken. You will not remember what half of them do until you open them back up. As you review, consider new or redeveloped workflows that work better. You don’t have to build them now (and maybe you’re not the person to do that anyway). Just jot down ideas and decide later what to prioritize.

Clean up audience lists and segments. Audience lists and segments drift over time: a “prospective 2025 fall” list that should’ve been archived, a geographic segment built around a recruiting territory you no longer prioritize. An afternoon spent archiving stale segments keeps your reps from working lists that don’t reflect this year’s actual strategy. It also removes junk that make it harder for reps to find the current lists they’re seeking.

2. Schedule Triggers to Reduce Summer Melt

Summer melt (enrolled students who never show up in the fall) is invisible until it isn’t. By the time you notice it in September it’s too late to do anything about it. For many colleges, summer melt is no longer something they can afford to ignore.

Melt rates range from 10–20% at four-year colleges and climb to 30–40% at community colleges—and they grew by nearly 50% between 2021 and 2024. Two forces are amplifying the problem: the 2024 FAFSA debacle and the Enrollment Cliff.

Often, these students just need routine encouragement to keep them making progress. Spend half a day mapping specific calendar dates—say, mid-July, early August, two weeks before move-in, etc—to specific actions: a phone call at this checkpoint, a text campaign at that one, an escalation to a faculty advisor if a deposit hasn’t converted to a housing form by a certain date.

If your CRM handles automations with email and SMS delivery, these can easily be configured in a few hours. If you don’t have automation tools, there are inexpensive options like HeyMarket for bulk text messaging or MailChimp for automated email campaigns.

3. Refresh Your Reps’ Call Scripts

Admissions counselors are often working from scripts that are probably a year or two stale, built around objections and hooks that made sense for a different applicant pool. Block half a day, pull your reps in, and rewrite the scripts around this year’s objectives.

Counter objections. Ask your team to track objections in your CRM (or note them elsewhere) and review these annually. Include them in your script and “race to the objection”—a classic sales tactic to address your prospects’ concerns before they raise them (if they do).

Keep it real. Remove anything from the script that sounds like it was written by a committee. Encourage reps to familiarize themselves with talking points rather than reading from a script. Reps who sound like they believe what they’re saying convert better than reps reciting a script. Today more than ever, students can smell a sales message. They crave authenticity and candor.

Make it personal. Encourage your reps to share their own stories about your school or stories of students who struggled to succeed whom they’ve helped. Your team is addressing significant fears: what if I fail? What if I don’t belong here? What if I graduate but can’t pay off my loans? An admissions counselor who approaches each prospect as a coach will outperform those who act like salespeople. They will also reinforce your school’s brand and mission.

4. Improve Your Budget Request Approach

Few colleges have expanding budgets these days, while many are facing enrollment shortages. The pressure to do more with less falls on Admissions, of course. Spend a few hours preparing for the next board meeting or budget planning session by considering marketing spend differently.

Flip the script. Most boards still measure enrollment marketing ROI on volume: leads generated, close rate, yield. Spend an afternoon building a one-page narrative around lead quality instead: conversion rate by source, yield by touchpoint, cost per enrolled student rather than cost per lead. It’s a more honest story and, not incidentally, a better argument for keeping your budget intact.

Consider a consultant. Hiring an outside enrollment marketing consultant brings objectivity, ideas, and advocacy. Even a small, informal discovery process ($3-7k) can identify leaks in your funnel, suggest marketing programs you may not have considered, and amplify your budget requests to leadership with the authority of experience backed by data.

5. Run a Post-mortem

Before the memory of last cycle fades, spend half a day asking what actually worked, and be suspicious of your own conclusions. If yield went up after a new campaign launched, that’s a correlation, not proof. Pull whatever data you have on source-to-enrollment and separate what you can actually attribute from what you’re hoping is attributable. Vendors will always tell you their channel was the hero. Your job this afternoon is to be the skeptic they’re counting on you not to be.

6. Reactivate Your Stale Leads

Every funnel has a graveyard of inquiries who went quiet: opened a few emails in March, then nothing. Give your reps half a day to personally reach out to the twenty or thirty most promising names in that pile, not with an automated drip, but with an actual call or a short personal video. Volume doesn’t matter here. A handful of real reactivations from a quiet inbox is worth more than another blast to the whole list.

None of these sprints require budget, consultants, or a strategic offsite. They require an afternoon and the willingness to do something small instead of nothing, which is the actual trap of a slow summer. The campus may be empty, but the work that makes fall go smoothly doesn’t have to wait for the parking lot to fill back up.

About Potent

Potent helps small colleges, schools, and training companies succeed through enrollment optimization, digital marketing, and consulting. As a subsidiary of Partners Marketing Group, we have over 25 years of Higher Ed marketing experience with institutions like Emory University, Kennesaw State University, and the Technical College System of Georgia.