We’ve had the highest quality of recruits in 20 years.
The University Athletic Band Recruitment Solution
If you are involved in recruiting for a university athletic band or band program, you may want to have a look at this...
OVERVIEW
Bandwindow is a cutting-edge communications platform built specifically for university band programs to:
- Increase the quantity and quality of musicians you recruit for both your marching band, concert bands, and music majors
- Drive higher attendance to band events (ie. concerts, Band Day, etc.)
- Streamline audition-related communications (and the countless other nuances of recruiting in the university band world)
This tool provides enormous relief and powerful capabilities for time-starved band directors, band recruitment committees, administrators.
Check out some of our materials below and if it seems like this might be a fit, we invite you to get in touch.
ATHLETIC BANDS
Recruit Your Highest Quality Athletic Band
"Even during the pandemic, the UNT Green Brigade has developed more prospective members than ever."
How do you make a prospective marching band member passionately feel that they belong inside your marching band community? By infusing relevance into every interaction with modern and engaging tools that get attention from a Gen Z band student.
This 4-minute video illustrates one example of how to win over a potential marching band recruit. These tools are being used every day by bands like Illinois, Georgia State, UTEP, and about 100 others.
150+
University Band Programs
And Counting
RECRUITMENT
Change Your Recruiting Game At High School Visits
Put your organization in the leader spot in the prospective music student’s mind.
Recruiting at high school visits comes with several challenges:
- The high school teacher wants the visit to be educational for the students - completely understandable - so there is not an opportunity to give a detailed pitch about joining.
- Passing out paper forms to capture the students' information is clunky - you can't read the student's handwriting, it takes hours to type into a spreadsheet, and it's a boring and lame first impression.
- If you hand a student a business card or tell them to visit your department's website, you know they are probably never going to do anything.
This video below gives one example of how to change the way you recruit at high school visits to create an unbeatable first impression with prospective music students.
To see how something like this might be molded to your unique organization, please book a product walkthrough.
University Music Department Recruiting Is Competitive
The highly digital Gen Z music student has many competing options. At the same time, young students are questioning if they should even continue music at the university level.
The old-school traditional ways of recruiting have significant gaps with the Gen Z music student audience.
To attract a higher quantity and quality of music student, you need a modern engaging approach that instantly puts your music department in the leader spot in the student's mind.
"I knew this would be a successful tool if we could have 57 students enroll with a music scholarship. That's what we were aiming for. In our first year using Bandwindow, we actually ended up enrolling 91 music students. Our faculty couldn't be more excited."
Dr. Peter Folliard
Dean of the Augustana University School of Music
RECRUITMENT
1-To-1 Recruiting Outreach Instantly
When we find out that Kaitlin plays Tuba, is interested in Music Ed, and likes Athletic Bands, if our communications are not speaking directly to those music-specific interests, that is a gigantic missed opportunity.
"Billboard-like" communications are static - they are unchanged by a person's interests and appear the same to different people who want different things. This style of outreach makes your prospective students feel like they are "just a number in a database," making you 5-8 times less likely to recruit them 😞
The dream is to package a precise set of information to speak directly to the one individual student's unique musical interests. This can also include videos, events, audition materials, faculty spotlights, student testimonials, social posts, web pages, and documents. This might be based on the student's instrument, talent area, academic interests, ensemble interests, musical backgrounds, and timelines. Visual Explainer
By matching the right content to the student's interests you create a WOW experience. "Wow, I knew that Ipsi College had a music department, but these guys really seem to be the perfect fit for my needs."
What used to take dozens of hours per week can now be done instantly with Intelligent Content.
"Our university's overall enrollment is actually down and this is a focal point for the university, but thanks to the tools and strategy from Musicwindow, the Music Dept. is up about 50% in enrollment this year compared to last year!
Get Prospective Music Students To Reply Back
A prospective student has expressed some level of interest, but they haven't yet signed up for an audition. Hmm...
Previously, you would email your list of students to announce events, audition days, and other opportunities. The problem is, static, plain, mass emails are not getting their attention. Students might not even being checking the inbox these emails are going to!
In 2023, a single mass email will never move a student over the large hump of deciding which university to study music. It's too high-impact of a decision.
It's the conversation that moves mountains.
Conversation Center empowers your faculty to reach out to and get replies from the prospective students for their unique area (ie. a studio, ensemble, a section with the marching band) using proven messaging best practices. It's the easiest way imaginable to initiate conversations that get replies. See An Example
"Our faculty have been very pleased with how responsive students have been to these texts. I feel like we're meeting these young students where they are at."
What Bandwindow'ers Are Saying...
Our audition numbers are through the roof higher than in the past.
This is going to revolutionize how we find students to come here.
The product has clearly provided value, reduced the manual amount of work that we had to do, and improved our recruitment results.
I will sing Bandwindow's praises as the best recruiting tool for any bands. I just won't tell anyone within 300 miles of us because I want it to be our hidden advantage!
Our instrumental area is up close to 50 students over last year.
Musicwindow saved our audition day this year. The submission process worked seamlessly and allowed our faculty easy, straightforward access to auditions while working from home.
We’ve signed up 39 freshmen in the last month! That is the largest freshman class we’ve ever had at HPU.
We are able to reach all of our constituencies, whether it's prospective members, whether it's alums, fans, or parents.
Musicwindow is an intuitive way to reach students with dynamic messages. There is less time spent on each individual so we can focus on creating a larger reach. My faculty have more time back... that's huge.
Students are responding to our texts. We previously didn't feel like we had an open line of communication because when you send an email, it just sits there. The way our music faculty are texting back and forth with prospective music students is a game changer for a music school recruiting operation.
RECRUITMENT
Generate Recruitment Content That Moves Students Forward
Prospective music students and band members are making a high-impact decision. For many, there is fear that comes with deciding to pursue music as a major or continue band in college.
Having the right content (ie. videos) in a recruitment campaign is important. You are wondering, "Gosh, how do we ever find time to produce all this content?" Creating videos is typically a time and resource-intensive process that isn't always an option for music departments with limited bandwidth.
At the same time, a "hype video" - while attention-grabbing - doesn't directly speak to the desires and fears of a prospective student who might be on the fence about auditioning. It's good for marketing, but not really for recruiting.
The solution is Video Stories. The most compelling content to convert these students, is an authentic story, told by one of your current students, over video. To build the trust necessary to cause the recruit to move forward, you need authentic human-told stories.
Video Stories enables music departments to collect this content in the easiest way imaginable.
University of Northern Iowa
The University of Northern Iowa School of Music was under pressure to fill audition slots for both music majors and ensemble members. Their biggest struggle was getting attention and trust from high schoolers who no longer responded well to the static email format.
Purdue Bands & Orchestras Case Study
How the Purdue Bands & Orchestra is leveraging a team of 20 student ambassadors to recruit 500 freshman per season and transitioning their operation from pen & paper to an all-virtual format.
Cornhusker Marching Band
The UNL Cornhusker Band wanted to increase the pool of talent auditioning and they needed to attract, book, and coordinate hundreds of students for precise audition time slots. The impact made to their band program was significant.
Detroit Institute of Music Education
Prior to using Musicwindow, DIME had casually looked at software for its critical event promotion needs but found nothing that offered the right functionality that they needed. Most of the other products were over-priced for the size of their organization.
RECRUITMENT
Cutting-Edge Tools To Spark Interest With More Potential Music Students
Recruiting students for a music department is more competitive compared to other departments within the university. Students are questioning if pursuing Music is the right choice in this economy. There is a finite pool of talent out there that competing music departments are all going after. It's challenging.
It's becoming less and less effective to try and hook a Gen Z student's interest with a basic call-to-action like "fill out this form so we can send you more info about our music offerings." First of all, every university is saying this. It's unclear to the student what's in it for them. This and other old-school approaches are not getting attention from today's young student.
Interactive Visual Quizzes give music departments a powerful competitive advantage.
By meeting the student "where they are at" in a fun, interactive, TikTok-like medium, with an attention-grabbing hook, you can build interest with more prospective student musicians. Check out this 2-minute demo to see an example.
To see how something like this might be molded to your unique organization, please book a product walkthrough.
Commonly Asked Questions
It Sounds Like This Is For Our Admissions Office
Somewhat, but not exactly... We'd love to loop in Admissions after you take a look and decide if it's a good fit for your music department. We're very focused on the countless nuances of music departments and typically like to start with you, the music faculty.
Recruiting for a music department is more competitive compared to other departments. Students are questioning if it's a good idea to become a music major or participate in music in college. The students who are sold, are shopping around and looking at competing institutions. There's a finite pool of quality talent out there that all music departments are fighting to win over. It's very challenging. For these reasons and others, music departments require specific tools that have more competitive capabilities than the typical tools used within the university at large. This is the lane that Musicwindow is focused on and it supplements what Admissions does quite well.
Musicwindow is a very different product than what your university currently has implemented. Our objective is not to admit students into your university - you already have this covered. Our role is to provide a music-centered process, touchpoint strategy, and tactical execution to create an emotional layer that excites a Gen Z prospective music student to choose your music department. This is through a unique set of capabilities which cannot realistically be offered by an Admissions department, especially one that is slammed supporting the needs of 60 other departments on campus.
Is Our IT Department Going To Approve Of This Tool?
And if so, how does that process work?
The software is just one component of our offering, and we've never had an IT department reject the software.
It sometimes takes a few weeks to go through the IT Office's approval process (university IT teams are super busy helping everyone out!). If you anticipate IT would like to review some information, we encourage you to initiate that request early after seeing our demo.
We have the following documents available for your IT team:
- Technical overview document - Covers the commonly asked IT questions
- HECVAT - A 300+ row spreadsheet detailing all the specs that IT typically likes to know
- VPAT - For the accessibility team to review how Musicwindow adheres to accessibility standards
Please request these documents via the form below. We will follow up within 1 business day. The approval is typically pretty straightforward from there.
How Do I Learn More?
A typical process goes like this:
- Schedule a demo. We'll meet over a Zoom and look at how this might work for you.
- Afterward, with your permission, we provide a recording of the meeting and any PDFs, short videos, client references, or materials you can use to best introduce this to any additional decision makers.
- When you're ready we'll decide to either A) get it rolling, B) schedule an additional meeting with other staff members, C) plan customized next steps as you see fit, or D) do nothing.
At any point, if you decide we’re not the right fit for you (or vice versa), we'll just part ways professionally.
Does Musicwindow Integrate With Slate?
Yes, we are pleased to offer an integration with Slate and other Admissions tools so that data can flow seamlessly back and forth between your music department and the admissions office. This is done through a live JSON object which updates automatically. There are other options as well to suit a range of needs and situations. Let us know what works best for you and we typically have no issues getting all departments what they need.
I Have A Different Question
Book A Demo Today
One of our Musicwindow magicians would love to give you a brief walkthrough of how Musicwindow can work for your band program or music department...
Contact
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Ypsilanti, MI 48197
+1 248-410-1667
Would you like to join our growing team? hello@shopwindow.io