College Night Project

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College Night Project

• Mike Hawkes
• ECMC
• June 9, 2009

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Project Description

• Series of college information sessions
• Multiple locations
• Virginia and Oregon
• All on the same evening in each state
• Events held in November
• Think College Goal Sunday but with a different
  focus

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Project Goals

• Provide useful, consistent and accurate
  information to students and families
• Serve second language students
• Spanish
• Russian
• Vietnamese
• ASL
• Get potential students on a college campus

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Project Goals

• Help financial aid officers with overload of
  speaking requests
• Opportunity for access providers to cooperate
• Secure participation of Congressional
  representative
• Demonstrate value of guaranty agencies

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College Night Curriculum

• Based on existing ECMC publication
  Opportunities
• Topics covered
• Choosing the right college
• The financial aid process
• Scholarship searches and scams
• Program runs from 630 to 900pm on a Monday

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College Night Curriculum

• How do we get people to show up?
• Bribery works
• Free pizza and soft drinks
• Four 500 scholarships offered at each location
  and some hosts supplement these
• Scholarship drawing at end of evening
• Pull winners names out of a hat
• Must be present to win

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College Night Finances

• Site agreement with host sets out
  responsibilities Tie to HEA Section 485D
• ECMC provides funding for
• Travel, food and lodging for site administrator
  and train-the-trainer meetings
• 500 publicity grant paid to site host
• Up to 1,000 per site for pizza, drinks, etc.
• Scholarships

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College Night Publicity

• Created separate Web sites for each state
• www.collegenightinva.org
• www.collegenightinor.org

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College Night Publicity

• ECMC produced publicity toolkits containing
• Posters
• Flyers
• Postcards
• Graphics and text for web site
• Suggested P.A. announcement text
• Screensaver for computer labs
• College outreach staff take to high schools

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College Night Publicity

• Hosts have used the 500 publicity grant in
  interesting ways
• Paying for activities buses
• Open the colleges childhood development center
• Mail postcards to entire senior class
• Printing of materials for distribution to local
  Hispanic organizations
• Radio/newspaper advertisements
• Ads in school newspapers and sports programs

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Results

• Attendance
• Oregon almost 3,200 attended averaging 225 per
  site
• Virginia almost 3,000 attended averaging 211
  per site
• Additional colleges, high schools have expressed
  an interest in being a host site

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Results

• Began collecting demographic and aspirational
  data in 2008 to use as baseline
• Collected via evaluation form based on CGS
  evaluation
• Intend to use data to identify
• Publicity methods that appears to be most
  effective
• Identify hosts that need to do more outreach to
  underrepresented populations

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Mike Hawkesmhawkes_at_ecmc.org804-267-7101