Helping community colleges connect to
and engage adult learners
What is Reset?
A strategic initiative for community colleges to re-envision how to connect, engage, and restructure for adult learners
From strategic branding to systems change
Why It’s Needed
Adult learners need to understand
how their community college is relevant to them.
They need to:
- Understand who your institution is in a way they can connect to.
- See themselves in your campus, classrooms, and community.
- Know you understand their needs, priorities, and context and will help meet their goals.
Reset to Connect:
CONNECT TO AND ENGAGE ADULT LEARNERS.
Refine your strategic brand for adult learners through your:
Institutional identity
Physical environment and sense of place
User-centered digital infrastructure
- Messaging, website, social media, materials
Columbia Gorge Community College (top left), County College of Morris (top right), South Central College (bottom left),
Madera Community College (bottom right)
Madera Community College (top left), Northwest Shoals Community College (top right), Great Falls College (bottom left),
Madera Community College (bottom right)
Reset to Engage:
BECOME A WELCOMING PLACE WHERE ADULT LEARNERS FEEL LIKE THEY FIT.
Ensure a consistent institutional identity across the institution by:
- Enhancing your institutional culture
- Aligning language, policies, and practices to your identity
- Ensuring a common approach across departments and services for adult learners
- Infusing a sense of collective institutional pride
- Fostering internal and external champions
Reset to Support:
ALIGN SERVICES, OFFERINGS, and STRUCTURES FOR ADULTS.
Show adults you understand their needs and priorities and will support them by:
Designing services and processes optimized to adult learners’ goals
Providing seamless pathways to credentials – from CPL to micro-pathways and CBE
- Aligning efforts to your strategic priorities, enrollment plans, and facilities plans
Ensuring digital, physical, and academic
related processes are easy to navigate
Great Falls College (top), College of Eastern Idaho (middle),
County College of Morris (bottom)
Results We’re Seeing
- 25+% increase in ENROLLMENT
- Stronger sense of INSTITUTIONAL PRIDE from students, faculty, and staff
- Deepened connection to EXTERNAL COMMUNITIES
- Increased RESOURCES for adult learner engagement
This project has been a blueprint for us. We understand what is needed, have the confidence on how to achieve it, and can show the results to get the resources and support to sustain it.
—
Columbia Gorge Community College
We went from the best kept secret to the jewel of our county.
—
County College of Morris
In many communities, community colleges are still the best-kept secret for achieving economic progress. We're grateful to partner with StrategyForward to equip colleges to better connect with potential adult students.
—
Mary Laphen Pope, Strategy Officer, Lumina Foundation
StrategyForward is an amazing and insightful institutional strategy setter for direct recruitment of the adults who have intent to enroll.
—
Jack MacKenzie, president, CollegeAPP
We are a strategic partner to help community colleges become a place for adult learners.
We guide you through a process using our Reset framework – our proven approach to help institutions.
- Phase 1: Institutional Identity – Hone in on who you are to your community and what is needed for prospective adult learners to see themselves at your institution.
- Phase 2: Awareness and Engagement – Make your institutional identity visible across your campus and to your regional community. Develop and implement a plan to engage current and prospective adult learners and leverage your institutional identity to grow enrollment.
- Phase 3: Restructure for Adults – Optimize and expand your services, programatic offerings, and systems to meet adults where they are at.
- Phase 4: Iterate and Sustain: Take the work to the next level. Infuse efforts into policies, practies, culture, strategic priorities, facility plans, and your overall way of being.
