Boost College Recruitment with Interactive PDF Materials

A new trend is emerging within America’s colleges and universities: admissions rates are increasing for the first time in decades. Various factors contribute to this ongoing change, but a few key reasons include an aging population and fewer overall applications.

Faced with this shrinking market, postsecondary recruiters must up their game to attract a complete campus of students. Traditional college recruitment materials—such as brochures or pamphlets—are no longer up to snuff in our modern world of technologically literate, digitally engaged young adults.

Instead, dynamic online platforms—such as those fueled by FLIPpages interactive PDFs—increasingly help capture browsers’ attention and incite their interest in educational institutions. When leveraging them properly, interactive PDFs become crucial to your college admissions marketing.

Why college recruitment needs interactive PDFs now more than ever

Everything about education is going digital. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools have been racing to migrate more of their institutions online—from classes to admissions and recruitment.

Schools must get this digital transformation right and tailor their online presence to resonate with their primary target audience: teens and other young adults. That means using modern digital recruitment materials for colleges to reach prospective students—interactive PDFs are the most effective tools in a recruiter’s kit.

Using interactive PDFs, your school can:

• Boost engagement: Interactive content gets users to stay on your page longer as they discover different aspects of your institution. Interactive platforms garner over 50% more engagement than static web pages. Plus, young adults have been scrolling through dynamic apps for most of their lives—meaning interactive web pages offer most users a familiar experience (if not a minimum expectation).
• Further digitize your admissions process: Since 2009, well over 80% of college applications have been submitted online. Admissions offices began digitizing their services decades ago, and that shows no signs of slowing down. Interactive PDFs can help you create an in-depth catalog of your classes, instructors, entry requirements, and other institutional information to further facilitate your digital transformation.
• Save your budget and the environment: Printed materials are costly, difficult to distribute, and rarely held on to for long. Excessive paper production and the energy needed to deliver brochures harm the environment. Interactive PDF recruitment materials, however, are:
  • Far more cost-effective to produce and disseminate
  • Last online forever
  • Have next to no environmental impact compared to paper products

Interactive brochures for colleges provide the modern solution to many issues facing admissions offices, budgetary departments, and our environment. But what about them enhances your recruitment process for students and administrators alike?

Key features of interactive PDFs that elevate college recruitment

For the last decade, students have increasingly declined to purchase static materials, such as textbooks, and now spend less than half on course resources than they did ten years ago. If they reject flat, textual materials in their classes, they likely don’t appreciate them in the admissions process.

Luckily, modern college recruitment tools, such as interactive PDFs, enhance the admissions experience with:

• Interactive forms: Rather than students typing up (or printing and filling in) long, arduous online forms, interactive PDFs expedite the process with drop-down lists, auto-fills, and other helpful features—simplifying applying to schools or requesting institutional information.
• Embedded videos and slideshows: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a high-quality video or collection of professional photos is worth a million. With interactive PDFs, you can embed clips of full campus tours, faculty introductions, and student testimonials to liven up the text around them. Slideshows also allow you to share multiple photos on a single topic without readers having to scroll from page to page.
• Clickable calls to action (CTAs) and links: Clickable CTAs can increase conversion rates—the percentage of people who take a desired action on your web page—by over 300%. Place a link imploring your readers to submit an application, attend virtual events, or learn more about your institution at the end of your interactive PDFs—it’ll inspire more engagement with your page and online presence.

Interactive PDFs are the modern path to a convenient, accessible admissions process, and FLIPpages make implementing them on your site simple.

How FLIPpages helps you create powerful recruitment tools

With FLIPpages, you can choose from one of several premade templates to craft your custom interactive PDF. Then, you can personalize the look of your document with your school’s logo and colors to match your overall aesthetic.

After deciding on the layout and style of your PDF, start filling in the body sections with the information you’d include in pamphlets, brochures, and other recruitment materials.

If you already have this literature in PDF format, simply upload it to FLIPpages for an instant upgrade. Unlike normal PDFs or other standard recruiting mediums, you’ll also be able to include the following:

• High-quality videos
• Photos and slideshows
• Links
• Interactive forms

These features distinguish interactive PDFs from aging recruitment techniques and should be included for aesthetics, information, and convenience. While capturing videos, shooting professional pictures, and writing body copy takes technical skill, creating interactive PDFs with FLIPpages doesn’t.

Another effortless feature of FLIPpages in mobile optimization. No matter the online activity, Generation Z (the ages entering college in the coming years) are more likely to use their smartphone than a computer to do it. If your site and the interactive PDFs it hosts aren’t optimized for mobile browsing, you could miss reaching your most important demographic.

Transform your college recruitment strategy with FLIPpages

College recruitment materials are due for an upgrade, and interactive PDFs are the next revolution in the admission department. Interactive PDFs let you embed pictures and videos from your campus, compel your readers to click through links to your other pages, and help prospective students access information about your school more easily. They’re also more cost-effective than standard brochures and are less damaging to the environment.

FLIPpages helps recruiters, administrators, and other educational professionals design brilliant informational documents. With preloaded templates ready for customization, you can create a fully interactive, visually breathtaking PDF in just a few clicks.

Contact FLIPpages today to start building your interactive recruitment materials and stay ahead in the digital recruitment game.