The viewbook's gone online
Office of Admission's newest marketing effort adds a new dimension to recruiting students.
by Rick Waters '95
The new digital viewbook offers sounds, moving graphics and hotlinks.
The last thing Liz Rainwater '00 wants for TCU's viewbook – the university's signature student recruitment piece – is for it to wind up in filing cabinets in guidance counselors' offices across the country.
Fortunately, the days of high schoolers flipping through college catalogs at school are all but over.
As director of marketing for the Office of Admission, Rainwater still mails out about 70,000 each year to TCU's growing prospect pool.
But this year, however, Admission has launched a new way of keeping prospective Horned Frogs informed about all things TCU. The viewbook has gone digital. (To see for yourself, check out the link at the bottom of this story.)
"It's created on a Flash platform, so it's pretty cutting edge," Rainwater said. "Other universities have put their viewbooks online, so that's not new. But they don't have anything like what we have."
Most other online viewbooks are based in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the predominant computer language for pages. TCU's was created so it would have animation – essentially moving parts.
"A lot of online viewbooks are the same on the screen as they are in the book," Rainwater said. "With ours, there are sounds and images that move and pop. There are hotlinks. It is interactive and much more dynamic."
While the online viewbook contains images and video from the Virtual Experience and other printed pieces, TCU Admission felt like it needed to offer more than what students see in the mail.
"Paper and the Web don't translate directly. They're not interchangeable," Rainwater said. "So it gave us another avenue to show some creativity."
It will likely be the direction all university admission offices go in coming years, she said. But for now, TCU will continue to print and mail paper versions.
"Obviously, parents are an integral part of the college decision-making process, and our research shows that they still favor something tactile," she said.
"So TCU will continue to offer the best of both worlds."
On the Web:
http://editorial.prismdb.com/tcu/tcu_flash/index.php
www.experience.tcu.edu
Related story:
Admission launches TCU Virtual Experience