Students Need More Clarity For Parents Weekend To Succeed
Current Promotion of Parents Weekend leaves parents and students uninformed.
With Morehouse College’s annual Parents Weekend set to kickoff this weekend, questions about promotion of the event have started to swirl. Information about the event wasn’t available for much of the semester. There was a photo on the Morehouse’s website that advertised the event, but was linked to a blank page. This page didn’t indicate that there would be a fee for parents to attend or that registration would be required for the event. Recently, an page was set up with an itinerary and a place to pay for registration. I believe that Parents Weekend needs more promotion, with information made available for students and parents earlier to avoid confusion.
Parents Weekend is a three day event where parents can come to the campus to not only visit their son, but to also be a part of various workshops and activities. These programs are meant to enlighten parents on the problems that impact their sons at Morehouse. Parents are also engaged more into the life of the college and encouraged to become better acquainted with faculty and staff.
“From their discussions and from their interactions with other parents through the workshops and other programming we have during Parents Weekend, our hope is that they will become even closer to the campus community,” Parent Engagement Director Ardis Blanchard said.
The registration process for me was very confusing. I spent a big part of the semester clicking on the Parents Weekend link on the website and watching nothing be there. As a busy college student, it can be hard to remember to send an email or contact administration for questions on the event. I didn’t know about the link to pay for tickets until Saturday morning, once all the tickets were sold out. I was frustrated because I had been checking morehousecollege.edu all semester and had seen nothing there. I got in touch with Blanchard, and she told me that there would not be any onsite registration for Parents Weekend. Planning is done in advance based on the number of parents attending. As the deadline to register winded down, people continued to express their frustration on the Parents Weekend registration page.
“I thought ticket cut off purchase time was 5 p.m.,” Tiffany Burgman said.
There was also a lack of promotion of the event on Morehouse College’s social media accounts. In previous years, a flyer promoting the event would be put on the Morehouse Parents Twitter account. Seeing a flyer pop up on Morehouse’s main Instagram or Twitter page would have given me an instant reminder, along with update me on the situation. It doesn’t make sense to promote the event through social media accounts with smaller followings than Morehouse’s main social media accounts.
The only form of mass communication the school used was email. The Office of External Relations and Alumni Engagement uses a portal named Parents In The Know to send emails to parents. There were no phone calls or reminders on the school’s site until later. The payment system also isn’t flexible. My parents found out about the payment link a day afterwards, and they weren’t able to pay. Even though the tickets were made available in early March, information about the weekend wasn’t spread through enough channels so that more parents and students could have knowledge.The way in which the different events were labeled also frustrated parents. The unclear labeling made it difficult to see what needed to be paid for.
“This process was a little confusing,” Veronica Jones-Bailey said. “If I had known the luncheon was not included — as it was labeled as an individual registration — which I thought was luncheon only, I could have easily paid more. I have spent a lot of money to travel from Louisiana for this special event and will not get to enjoy the most important part with my son.”
In the future, there will be plenty of changes to Parents Weekend. This year, the weekend is during Spring Fest. The week is packed with activities for Spring Fest. It is also Morehouse College’s Board Week. These other events create competition and also take up space on campus. The cost this year is lower than what it was last year. Increased promotion for the event would make finding registration easier and decrease the disappointment of some parents and students.
My name is Torrence Banks and I am a journalism student at Morehouse College.
