- By leveraging government data, AAHHE identified organizations they knew would benefit from connecting with their audience. They regularly send targeted communications detailing their benefits and pricing these institutions that need their service.
- Pricing the association’s job board significantly under market value helped AAHHE stand out from the pack, encouraging members to sign on with them rather than the competition.
- A tiered membership pricing structure incentivized educational institutions to become institutional members of AAHHE.
- By keeping both current and lapsed members in the loop about their new job board, AAHHE can advertise its benefits, encourage posting, and incentivize sign-ons and renewals.
According to Education Trust, Hispanic Americans make up only 22% of adults who’ve earned some form of college degree—compared with almost 50% of their white counterparts. While Hispanics remain the largest ethnic minority population in America, they’re still highly underrepresented in both graduate and undergraduate enrollment rates. The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) is on a mission to ensure this underserved population has a voice in higher education.
As an equity-centered member-based organization, AAHHE works collaboratively within all sectors of education, business, and industry to enhance educational aspirations, empower more Hispanic Americans to pursue careers in higher education, and meet the growing needs of the Hispanic population in the United States. In August of 2023, AAHHE announced its nineteenth year as the premier national association representing Hispanic faculty, administrators, students and professionals in higher education.
With almost two decades of success in promoting Hispanic voices in higher education, it’s no surprise that within just a few short years of launching AMS solution MemberClicks Professional, AAHHE experienced significant leaps and bounds in terms of growth. As AAHHE Director of Operations Lucia Gutierrez explained, this significant uptick in revenue can be partly attributed to the association’s job board. With yet to leverage a newsletter or any other distribution mechanisms to advertise the job board, AAHHE has experienced enormous growth, return on investment, and value generated for their members with the power of Job Board.
The problem
The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education views itself as an agent of change for Hispanic professionals everywhere. But to connect Hispanic professionals with jobs and other opportunities in higher education, they have to be able to reach them first. Prior to launching a job board through MC Professional, AAHHE had only a round-about way of connecting with potential job seekers. For years, AAHHE operated with only a manual job board, which potential employers could access by sending in a form for staff to review and post manually. The process was not particularly efficient.
“Many of our faculty members or admin members are high up. We have Deans and Provosts, Presidents and Chancellors. We’ve had university higher ups directly contact us to post a job,” said Lucia about the group’s prominence in higher education.
As Lucia explained, AAHHE was due for an upgrade. The association needed a simple, streamlined platform for higher education institutes to post jobs, connect with candidates, review resume banks, and above all, connect the country’s growing Hispanic population with jobs and other opportunities in higher education.
The solution
In 2020, AAHHE launched MemberClicks Professional with Job Board. Shortly after launch, the team took the time to set up the association’s new job board, transitioning from the old manual model and onto Job Board’s modern, user-friendly interface.
Once AAHHE had their job board up and running, it was time to alert their member base. AAHHE has two categories of membership: institutional and individual. For institutional members, or those belonging to a larger educational institution, posting a listing on the job board comes at no additional charge.
“It’s the institutional niche,” Lucia said. “Institutions are always posting jobs. We have small, medium and large institutions depending on the number of students, and posting for any kind of opening on campus. We opened the job board for only institutional members.”
To maximize the impact of their new job board, AAHHE reached out directly to higher education human resource departments and informed them that unlimited job board listings were now an added benefit of membership. For frequent posters, this meant it was cheaper to become a member than to continue posting without the full benefits of membership. This strategy served as both a way to incentivize membership and to increase member value.
Strategy and results
For many associations, exponential growth results from a well-established job board. For AAHHE, the growth was profound—but not immediate. In the first year or so after launching, the job board received little attention from institutions. Then AAHHE began ramping up their own efforts to promote the board and get in touch with institutions they knew would benefit from using it. The association’s strategy was twofold: a targeted membership campaign followed by leveraging government data to connect with new users.
“During the membership campaign, we’ll switch off,” Lucia said, “so one year we’ll target lapsed members and try to bring them back in. Then, we’ll target all the prospective institutions and give them a deal to bring them in. With both, we really try to highlight what the job board is, because that’s their niche. They need that. And because many of these institutions are Hispanic serving institutions, they want to advertise to certain communities and populations. So that’s where our job board comes in.”
As Lucia explained, Hispanic-serving institutions receiving financial support from the government are more likely to advertise on a Hispanic job board. Armed with this knowledge, AAHHE intentionally sought out potential customers they knew would have a need for their services, working off the federal government’s list of 200+ institutions. This provided the association with a stream of free leads in need of services to contact. Many of those contacted saw the immediate value and became full members. Of the institutions who didn’t, many still ended up purchasing a bundle of listings or posting a couple of jobs through AAHEE’s board.
A list of leads to work from was certainly useful, but how did AAHEE manage to stand out from other Hispanic serving job boards? The answer came in the form of some ingenious pricing on Lucia’s behalf.
“I did a google search for competing Hispanic job boards and priced ours at a much lower rate” Lucia said. “Charging way under market value for non-members greatly incentivized choosing AAHHE, both for large and small institutions. One institution ended up posting 970 jobs in one year — that’s a value of $438,000. But, with membership priced at such a low cost, they’re only paying about $2.05 per listing.” Talk about ROI!
In 2021, the association started to experience massive growth. Combining word of mouth and AAHHE’s own outreach efforts, the value of their job board spread. Users began to flock to the site, resulting in unprecedented growth for AAHHE — who generated job board revenue totalling 16X the value of their AMS in 2023. Their story serves as an important reminder not to feel discouraged if your association doesn’t see immediate results from a job board or another add-on service right away. And with the right approach and competitive strategy, it’s never too late to establish yourself as a leading job board in your industry. In less than two years, AAHHE established worthwhile and sustainable revenue growth.
AAHHE’s journey from a manual job board to the modern, user-friendly interface of Job Board powered by MemberClicks, reflects the association’s dedication to meeting the dynamic needs of its members and stakeholders. By leveraging this platform, AAHHE streamlined the process of connecting job seekers with opportunities and also enhanced the value proposition for institutional members, thereby fostering a stronger sense of community and collaboration within the Hispanic higher education ecosystem. And with Hispanic Americans remaining underrepresented in both enrollment rates and career opportunities, initiatives like AAHHE’s job board play a pivotal role in bridging this gap and promoting diversity and equity in academia.
As demonstrated by the exponential growth and remarkable return on investment experienced by AAHHE, the Job Board serves as more than just a recruitment tool—it provides opportunity for Hispanic professionals across the nation. Moving forward, AAHHE remains committed to advancing its mission and leveraging innovative solutions to continue driving positive change in higher education. In the future, Lucia tells us she has plans to promote AAHHE’s job board through a monthly newsletter and to leverage Job Board’s automated distribution alerts for new postings to drive even greater impact. With the growth they’ve managed to achieve already, we can only imagine how unstoppable they’ll be in the future.
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