An Inside Look at Helicopter Helen

At Converge, we take creating our user personas very seriously. User personas are vital in getting our marketing messages right. They help us deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Recently we created Helicopter Helen, a persona that represents the parent of a traditional student.

During our time at the Target X User Summit back in July, we were lucky enough to have our booth right next to Render Experiences. As it turns out CEO of Render, Jeff Kallay is an expert on Helicopter Helen. Thanks to him, our Helicopter Helen persona is even more fine-tuned.

Jeff and his team at Render create campus visit experiences for colleges and universities. They spend most of their time face to face with potential students and their parents. We got to talking about the recent change in the student visitors and mostly the change in parents. Today, members of Generation X are parents of traditional college students. They are presenting higher education institutions with a whole new demographic and, in some cases, a new challenge.

In recent years, Jeff has seen the Baby Boomer generation disappear from campus visits. They’re being replaced with Gen X’ers. The differences in parenting styles and personalities between the two generations are obvious. Baby Boomer parents were excited to be there. They had questions like:

• “What is the dorm food like?”
• “Where are all the fun parties?”
• “How many hours per week will my kid be in class?”

Today’s parents have a different tune. One of, what will your school do for us?  They ask questions like:

• “What is the crime rate on campus?”
• “How safe is your school?”
• “What is the graduation rate?”
• “What sort of careers do your alumni have?”

The current traditional student is starting to roll into the next generation,Homelanders. These are kids born after 2000. They have not experienced a life without war. They’ve never experienced airport security where you don’t have to remove your shoes. They have grown up with advanced technology. They went from crawling to walking to typing.

Parents of this generation are different. They have been very involved in making decisions for their children. This means they are more involved than ever in making the final decision of where their child attends school. Today, it’s the parent of the potential student that colleges must make a good impression on. The campus must be clean. Safety information must be readily available. Your recruiters need to show these parents the ROI they will get by sending their kids to your school.

So how do we get the right message to all of the Helicopter Helens out there? Here are a few ideas:

• Publish blogs about the safety of your school.
• Create alumni spotlights to highlight some of the successes of your recent grads.
• Have new students submit blogs on a weekly basis about their life during the first semester of college.

Want to learn more about personas or creating an inbound strategy? Check out our services to see how we can help or register for our post-conference workshop on content strategy at Converge 2015!