Over the past four years, Capture Higher Ed has tracked more than 200 million visits to our partner websites and served more than 15 million pieces of dynamic content to those visitors through Capture Behavioral Intelligence, part of our behavioral intelligence platform designed specifically for higher education.
This has led to some interesting insights. Today, we look at what we’ve learned about how behavioral intelligence mitigates the stealth applicant problem.
The Problem: Stealth Applicants
The stealth applicant problem has three prongs: 1) It’s difficult to communicate with a student when you don’t know who he or she is; 2) Stealth applicants make it difficult for a school to plan for its class; and 3) An admissions office has a tough time gauging how engaged a student is if he or she has not filled out an inquiry form, been on a campus visit or otherwise engaged with the admissions office.
The Solution: Capture Behavioral Intelligence
Through identifying students who are engaged with a school’s website, Capture Behavioral Intelligence brings these students out of stealth mode and enables Capture’s partner schools to know who these students are and communicate with them individually.
Through progressive identification forms, Capture identified more than 13,000 students for Fall 2018 who went on to complete their application who would have been stealth applicants otherwise. Capture identified about 9 percent of all our partners’ apps before they applied.
Capture Behavioral Intelligence also enables the school to market to a student based on his or her interests without knowing who that student is. Across all our schools, more than 800 stealth applicants clicked on dynamic content before they applied.
The technology also enables schools to measure the level of engagement of these students through the Capture Affinity Index (CAI). The average CAI of these students is 86, or more engaged than 86 percent of all visitors. These students were very engaged, the school just didn’t know who they were — yet.
By bringing students out of stealth mode, by marketing to them based on their interests before you even know their name and by gauging their engagement with the school, behavioral intelligence makes the stealth applicant problem a thing of the past.
By John Foster, Senior Data Analyst, Capture Higher Ed
