As a Director of Enrollment Management, some years ago, I found myself wondering how I could get a better understanding of my applicant funnel, especially as it related to financial aid. I wanted to dig deeper into the demographics of my financial aid applicant pool to pinpoint where the families were coming from and at what volume. The patterns, I believed, would lead to valuable insights for refining my strategy in the coming year. However, I did not have the resources to sink into a massive research project.

I needed a quick data win.

That led me to search for a fast and easy-to-use (read: free) online mapping service, and I found a tool that quickly became a staple in my strategic enrollment toolbox.

BatchGeo is a free-to-use mapping site that allows you to paste in address information, and in return you’ll receive a link to Google Maps with all those addresses pinned.

With the free version, you can choose a few options, including cluster view, which, at different zoom levels, gives you a more easily digestible heatmap of your data. You can also overlay multiple datasets, which are colour-coded, for an even more detailed view.

Transforming Data into Insights

By pre-segmenting my address data for different groups such as applicants, enrolled students, full pay, high pay (85%+), high need, grade level, and even feeder program, I could see where those students were coming from each year. Perhaps more importantly, I was also able to see where those students weren’t coming from on a year-over-year basis. By overlaying the same dataset from different years (e.g., students from X feeder school over the last 2 years), I was able to watch how the map of my enrolled and applying students evolved.

Turning Insights into Actions

With that information, I could pinpoint trends and respond by working closely with my marketing department to determine where we might need to direct more focused efforts. Sticking with the feeder school example, if I saw holes or gaps in certain neighborhoods or towns that were associated with that feeder school, it might be a signal to enhance the parent or student ambassador's presence in that area. From a financial aid standpoint, if my goal was to bring more students in from a certain geographic area, I could narrow down which students actually enrolled from that area, what their average awards looked like, which award packages failed to yield students, and then determine some financial aid strategies to increase that metric.

While there are certainly more sophisticated tools out there that can help you glean the most impactful insights from your data, BatchGeo is a fantastic (and free) place to start. The data that you spend all year gathering and tracking isn’t just for board reports; it has many useful stories to tell as long as you have the right tools to help you hear them.