The October Pressure Point

October is where the fall recruitment cycle compresses. Applications accelerate. Events pile up. Outreach becomes constant. And across nearly every admissions team, the message is the same: keep it personal.

That’s a good goal. It’s also a nearly impossible one—unless you change how your team decides who to engage, and when.

This is the month where well-meaning strategies start to strain. Counselors are managing large inquiry pools, covering travel territory, and trying to maintain thoughtful engagement with students who are in very different places in their decision process. It’s the moment in the cycle where teams either start to drift toward generic outreach, or double down on intentionality.

The problem is not that counselors don’t care. The problem is they’re being asked to do too much guessing, with too little signal. And when that happens, personalization becomes improvisation.

You can see it in the patterns. Some students get multiple emails and texts in a week because they happen to be at the top of someone’s list. Others don’t hear anything—even though their behavior suggests they’re one nudge away from applying. Counselors want to focus. But when every student looks the same in the CRM, and every list feels outdated, the result is often scattered attention and uneven follow-up.

The issue isn’t volume. It’s clarity.

At this point in the cycle, it’s not enough to know which students have applied or visited. The real questions are: Who’s showing forward movement this week? Who submitted a form but hasn’t responded since? Who’s attending events but hasn’t taken the next step? Who just re-engaged after weeks of silence?

Those are behavioral signals—not statuses. And they’re the signals that allow your team to be both personal and precise.

Because personalization isn’t a tone of voice. It’s a timing strategy.

It means sending the right outreach to the right student on the right day—because something in their behavior changed. And it means helping counselors do that without asking them to run reports, sort spreadsheets, or work from instinct alone.

We’ll spend the next few weeks breaking this down. Not just what personalization at scale looks like—but what it requires. How daily prioritization helps counselors stay human. How behavioral signals replace gut feel. And how leadership can support teams who are trying to do more than just “keep up.”

At the end of the month, we’ll talk with Reggie Hill from the University of Missouri–St. Louis about how his team is navigating October with focus. Reggie will share how they’re using real-time behavioral data to help counselors prioritize students who are ready for connection—and detect early melt signals before they show up in enrollment reports. It’s a practical conversation grounded in real work, and it’s exactly what this month demands.

October is a pressure point. You can’t slow it down. But you can give your team the clarity to move through it with purpose.

Join us October 28 to hear how UMSL is making personalization scale in the busiest month of the year: crowdcast.io/c/vpreggie