Topics: faculty, adoptions, campus stores, cost of education
For campus stores that sell textbooks, the adoption process is fundamental to business health. Several years ago, Salisbury University Bookstore made changes to its adoption process that have brought excellent results for us and made it easier for students to reduce the total cost of college. In the process, we’ve learned some things that other stores may find useful.
Topics: faculty relations, adoptions, faculty engagement
Counting faculty members among a campus store’s target markets seems counterintuitive. College store professionals already work hard to coordinate faculty textbook adoptions. Without such efforts, fewer faculty and students would have essential educational materials. Why increase faculty engagement?
Topics: faculty, adoptions, communicating with faculty
Your campus store's business health, adoption rate and value to students depend on increased faculty engagement. For that reason, you must be strategic about writing campus store emails to faculty. It’s essential to invest time and energy in developing an interconnected set of emails that increase engagement. If effective, a powerful message entices readers to open your emails and do what you ask them to do.
When you’re planning how you’ll reach faculty, it’s essential to start with a question: What do faculty really need to know?
With an adoption completion rate of 99.92% seven weeks before the start of spring term, Chemeketa Community College is inspiring. Recently, we sat down with Chemeketa’s Director of the Bookstore and Auxiliary Services Meredith Schreiber and the Bookstore Course Materials Coordinator Bonnie Perry to discuss their approach to faculty adoptions and student affordability.
As spring rolls in, course material adoptions come back to the forefront of concerns. Finding ways to communicate the importance of early adoptions to faculty can be a challenge. Are you doing enough? Are you doing too much? Students, faculty and college stores benefit from working together. Finding that happy medium where the faculty is informed enough to understand the importance to the student and the store, but does not feel harassed about the subject requires finesse. Here are four best practices when building professional relationships that will create a lasting rapport.
Topics: faculty relations, adoptions
First, an apology: Before I started working for MBS, I spent more than a decade in college classrooms oblivious to the needs of campus retailers. Although I can’t speak for all faculty members, I doubt my ignorance was unique.
Topics: faculty relations, adoptions
In my first week at MBS, I told a colleague something about faculty adoptions that stunned him. He was writing a blog about why it’s essential for bookstores to get all their adoptions in early.
“Impossible,” I said.
Topics: faculty relations, adoptions
Persuading faculty to turn in adoptions early can be like trying to turn the Titanic. It often seems like academics exist in a world apart from administrators and retailers. In a way, they do: Many see their work as a last refuge for higher ideals within capitalist society. They take pride in how little they think about things like business and money. So, how can a humble retailer hope to catch their attention?
Topics: textbook affordability, faculty relations, adoptions
It’s a distraction, an onerous bit of red tape or just an abstract requirement that seems out-of-step with classroom reality: Your earnest early-adoption request ends up deleted, routed to junk mail or ignored because faculty don’t understand why you’re sending requests out so early. If you want teachers to cooperate with the college store schedule, it’s critical to anticipate their questions, understand confusion and offer succinct, concrete answers.
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