QualPro Helps University Increase Donations and Improve Students
Tucson, Arizona | Posted: Tuesday, November 2, 2010
By Dale Dauten
The Corporate Curmudgeon: Keep ideas flowing, but zero in on winners
“New ideas pass through three periods: (1) It can’t be done.
(2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. (3) I
knew it was a good idea all along.” - Arthur C. Clarke
What’s the most important thing you can learn from doing
market research?
Humility. Do enough testing and you begin to understand
that you are not smarter than the market. Sure, once you
know the outcome of marketing ideas it’s easy to say, “Of
course - makes sense.” But ahead of time? Not so easy. An
example:
Say you are in a leadership role at a private university and
you have twin goals of increasing donations and increasing
the quality of students. Which of these proposals would you
green-light?
A. Increase the response rate to direct-mail solicitations for
donations by improving the envelopes (adding color, for
instance, or by adding stickers with pitches like “Spe-
cial Message from the Dean”).
B. Instead of having students give campus tours to pro-
spective students and their parents, recruit and train
professionals to “sell” the university.
C. Have financial-aid counselors contact prospective
students early on, after they have asked for information
about the school but before they have applied.
Well, if you thought you should pick just one of these ideas,
you’re wrong. At least that’s what they found at Lincoln
Memorial University (a school of more than 4,400 students
in Harrogate, Tenn., and 11 other sites). They tested dozens
of ideas, and the result was that during the test period, they
increased donations by 83 percent and the number of ap-
plicants from the highest-caliber high schools by 95 percent.
In THIS economy.
That’s the power of experimentation, and thanks to a re-
search company called QualPro, and their process called
MVT (multivariable testing), the folks at LMU were able to
test 20-30 ideas at a time, with results in 30-90 days.
I spoke with Cindy Skaruppa, a vice president responsible
for enrollment and recruiting students for LMU, and with
Cynthia Whitt, VP of university advancement (which
includes development). Each has now tested many dozens
of ideas, so many that I asked them if it had become a prob-
lem coming up with new items to test. They laughed. Each
had recruited panels of students, employees and alumni, and
each had ended up with far more items than they could test.
The problem was paring down the list to “only” 20-some
items.
Imagine the energy of getting to test that many ideas, of
getting to really see which ones work and which don’t. The
founder of the testing company QualPro, Charles Hol-
land, has watched thousands of “factors” get tested, and the
results are consistent: About half of the ideas have no effect,
about one-quarter improve outcomes and the other quarter
actually hurt results.
Notice what’s happening with that 50/25/25. Most of
QualPro’s testing is with sizable corporations, full of bright
MBAs and knowledgeable industry veterans, and yet ... and
yet ... three-quarters of the ideas these insiders decide to
test do not work. No wonder so many executives stop in-
novating. And that’s a shame, because the pace of corporate
evolution depends on the pace of experimentation.
You’d think that the more ideas you implement, the faster
you evolve. No, not necessarily, not when as many ideas
hurt results as help. The formula requires one more step:
The more ideas you test for effectiveness and the faster
you implement the winners, the faster you evolve. It’s how
Mother Nature does it, and it’s how the companies that are
going to survive and thrive do it.
Dale Dauten is co-founder of AgreementHouse.com, a company that
resolves business disputes. Contact him at dale@dauten.com.