Maximizing Your Higher Education Budget for 2024

Even if you’re not a finance director at your institution, your college’s budget impacts your day-to-day. 

You have an opportunity to maximize the resources you’ve been granted. Let’s explore how to make the most of the budget you’ve been allocated for the upcoming fiscal year, including higher education budget best practices.

While this article focuses on tech solutions specifically, these same concepts can apply to other types of vendors and initiatives.

1. Revisit Your Tech Stack

The higher education budgeting process can feel overwhelming. That’s why we recommend starting simple. 

Open a spreadsheet and list every vendor in your tech stack. Then, add a column for the cost per month or per year.

Then ask yourself:

• How much budget do we have left?
• What’s working?
• What isn’t?

In other words: what can you cut right out the gate? How much money does that leave you to explore new opportunities?

2. Create a New Strategy to Use the Tools

Then, the big question: How can our team utilize our budget and tools more effectively?

Here are a few questions to spark this thought process:

1. Can the remaining budget dollars be put towards better utilizing the tools you currently purchase? 
2. How can you utilize the tools you have more effectively without throwing more money at them?
3. Are there any tools you’d like to add to the tech stack with the remaining dollars?

Consider what the goal of each tool is. Is it to build your funnel, or move students through it? Are you looking to connect prospective students to members of your community? Zooming in on the purpose of each tool could help you identify duplicative tools, or, that your strategy leans too heavily on one source.

3. Brainstorm with Your Team

Now that you have some ideas on how to better utilize your team’s budget, it’s time to talk about it.

Here are some questions to get the conversation started with your team:

• Which platforms do you enjoy using the most? The least?
• What new student recruitment tools have you heard about?

Even better: ask them these questions before your higher education budget meeting. Ask your teammates to come with recommendations and findings on other solutions in the market.

4. Sell the Strategy to Your Team

The main points you’ll likely want to cover are:

• Where the budget allocation currently stands
• What you recommend the team cuts
• What you recommend the team invests more time and money in 
• What new things you think the team should pursue

Also be sure to consider how you’ll present this information. Do you have a report of successes and ROI to share? An overview video on a new tool you’re pitching? 

Your goal is to present the value of the vendors you are recommending or the new strategy you plan to take.

Here are some other ways to further maximize how you spend your time and resources:

• Time track your days. How are you really spending your time? What busy work can you cut? What can you automate? Use this to determine how you could optimize your time and resources.
• Organize a team training. Do any of the vendors in your tech stack offer free trainings to help your team use the tools even better? Often these resources come with your subscription. (If you’re a Scoir customer, your dedicated Customer Success Manager is just an email away for a quick answer or training session. Our onboarding page for colleges includes some training videos as well!)

With these higher education budget best practices in mind, you’re well on your way to maximizing your dollars.

Is Scoir a part of your tech stack, but your team is spread thin? If you’re a Scoir customer, Managed Subscriptions can help.

With Scoir Managed Subscriptions, our Engagement Strategists (all of whom were previous Admission Marketing professionals) will develop, execute, and monitor your end-to-end 12 month content and communications plan tailored to your institutional objectives.

Not only will our team provide ongoing progress reports and performance insights, but we’ll use unique data to make real-time adjustments to your Scoir presence in effort to maximize results. Request a consultation to get started!