Introducing Blueprint

At Blueprint, we have learned over decades of experience that our checklist approach to self-assessment is essential to your enrollment success. Completing the checklists shared with you in the companion guidebook, coupled with utilizing the app itself, will raise institutional self-knowledge, especially about what is and isn’t working for your school. The Blueprint approach will make enrollment planning much smoother in the months ahead. You don’t need to worry if important data is missing or unattainable -- that simply means that Blueprint's checklists have revealed some institutional blind spots— and that’s a good thing. Exposing what you don’t know gives you guidance as to how you can improve in the future, and what you need to change in your own data inventory. This will eliminate those blind spots, and will help your institution become self-aware, which is one of the first steps toward enrollment health.

While all institutions commonly track admissions, enrollment, and institutional aid data, that data is often siloed and disconnected. Critical to the Blueprint approach is that the app integrates your data so you can see the connection between your planning and decisions, and how each area and decision affects the various enrollment levers. Blueprint will help you understand how increasing or decreasing enrollment program by program can help you achieve your long-term enrollment goals, how a variety of decisions made can impact your scholarship budget and revenue outcomes, and how you can capitalize on your enrollment areas of strength to help support and overcome your areas of enrollment weakness. So much is possible simply by integrating data you already track.

Blueprint utilizes an enrollment planning philosophy that looks at three-to-four-year average enrollment trends, allowing you to leverage your knowledge of those trends to develop and accurately predict enrollment outcome in the future. It also allows you to investigate your new data to date and identify trouble spots long before your competition would even know they have a problem. Developing sound and predictable plans, coupled with an early warning system if the plan starts to go off course, gives you a very real opportunity to self-correct and salvage an early-identified problem that may go unnoticed until it is too late to address if you had not used the Blueprint app.

As we consider how to create effective and influential scholarship strategies that help achieve planned enrollment outcomes, it is important to view your budget from many angles to see your picture clearly. With the Blueprint app, we help you analyze your budget in many ways, so you can clearly see how your plan and decisions impact your long-range revenue plan, average student unmet need, new student funding, returning student funding, funding by program and major, and funding of special groups. Any increase in funding in one place is a decision to subtract funding from somewhere else. This multi-faceted and integrated approach to developing your budget will help you make changes with confidence and know exactly how those changes will impact your overall enrollment plan.