Sustainable Enrollment Growth in Online Nursing and Healthcare Programs

Like many university administrators across the country, Nancy Schreiber, Provost and VPAA of Salve Regina University, faced a tough decision around an underperforming program.  Her options were fairly straightforward: shutter the RN-BSN program or go online in order to compete.  After extensive deliberation, she felt the best path was moving online.  She decided to partner with iDesign, an online program management (OPM) company known for flexible service offerings, robust instructional design support, and specific niche expertise in nursing and healthcare programs.

Eighteen months later, it appears Salve Regina made the right decision.  The RN-BSN has already achieved over 270% growth in enrollments. In response to overwhelming reception from the market, the university is now offering a suite of nursing programs including a Master of Science in Nursing - Family Nurse Practitioner (MSN-FNP) and a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP).

Schreiber reflects on the iDesign partnership decision, saying, “We really saw this as an opportunity to focus on who we are and what we do, which is to be an educational institution with a long history of serving the nursing and healthcare community as a mercy-driven institution.”

Mission, Brand and Partnership

Alignment with mission and brand is one key dimension of an OPM partnership that every university should consider.  While revenue-generation is necessary for a successful OPM partnership, it is not sufficient.  Without mission alignment many partnerships and programs fail.  Salve Regina’s Mercy mission is woven throughout the fabric of the university and is predicated upon preparing people for responsible lives by imparting and expanding knowledge, developing skills, and cultivating enduring values.  

“We didn’t want the Salve Regina brand to look different online than we do on ground.  We have some very fundamental values that we share here, particularly around service and social justice.  Everything that we do has to reflect that,” explains Schreiber. “We have been very upfront with iDesign in telling them ‘You are ambassadors of our mission and you are proxies to this when your team works with these students.’”

To better understand that mission, team members from iDesign spent a significant amount of time on campus (when that was still a possibility) inundating themselves with the culture of Salve Regina and building strong relationships with all key stakeholders involved in the initiative.  That process showed Salve Regina stakeholders that iDesign offered a cultural fit with the university that was unique among OPM  providers.  This was particularly evident in iDesign’s engagement with faculty.

iDesign prides itself on providing best-in-class, white glove instructional design support to partner faculty.  The quality of the online experience and the support of the university’s faculty is foundational to long-term programmatic success.  

“I think if you talk to any of our nursing and gen ed instructors who teach in this program, they are very impressed and comfortable with iDesign,” recounts Schreiber.  “There’s no question that every faculty member that developed their course with iDesign had a very robust and disciplined experience in creating high quality education.  And you just can’t compromise on that.  Salve Regina University and iDesign are truly partners.  This is simply not just another vendor relationship.”

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‍Hospital Partnership Network ‍

In addition to comprehensive support for design, digital marketing, recruitment, and student success coaching, iDesign’s effort around hospital partnerships emerged as a major value-add to the relationship.  iDesign deployed a devoted Employer Partnership Executive to build tuition benefit partnerships with hospital systems on Salve Regina’s behalf.  In return for preferred tuition, hospital systems agree to promote programs internally.  Today, Salve Regina maintains 91 hospital partnerships across the Northeast and other regions.  Approximately 75% of the RN-BSN students enroll through hospital partnership channels.

Schreiber describes the importance of hospital partnerships, saying, “So it's really critical. We see the cascading value proposition of these employer partnerships that go well beyond the nursing programs. It not only addresses the needs for this particular program, but again, it builds those relationships and those connections for other programs. As you think about some of the different components of the service stack, like employer partnerships, I would encourage you to ask yourselves, could you see your own institutions going out and doing these things? Do you have the resources to go out and build these types of relationships?”

Suite of Nursing Programs

Through these hospital relationships, Salve Regina began receiving incredible partner feedback.  A recurring theme began to emerge: “Yes, we love the RN-BSN, but do you have an online MSN or DNP?  That’s really what our workforce needs?”  In particular, Salve Regina received repeated MSN-FNP requests from Boston-based partners.  Realizing that the Boston-area nursing workforce was already largely BSN qualified, Salve Regina decided to convert its MSN-FNP and DNP into online offerings in partnership with iDesign.  

Within two months of launching the nursing suite, the Employer Partnership Executive signed 12 new Boston-area hospitals including one of the largest systems in Massachusetts.  These partnerships quickly yielded enrollments for the program.  For the first start in January 2021, Salve Regina achieved 72 unique MSN and DNP enrollments.  This occurred after only 3 months of marketing (compared to 12 months for a typical program to generate similar enrollments).

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“Salve Regina University and iDesign are truly partners.  This is simply not just another vendor relationship.”  Nancy Schreiber, Provost and VPAA of Salve Regina University

Clinical Placement Support

Growing a full suite of online nursing programs necessitates robust support to scale clinical placement capacity.  Each clinical placement requires: an appropriate site with preceptor availability; negotiation and execution of relevant agreements (clinical site agreement and/or faculty-student-preceptor agreement); site access verification and documentation (licensure, immunizations, background check); and robust documentation of the student’s clinical experience and its alignment with the curriculum.  Historically, Salve Regina met placement needs through local partnerships and in-house coordination. But capacity was limited and Salve Regina was not looking to hire personnel to support more students and a broader geography.

iDesign provides Salve Regina with comprehensive clinical placement support through a combination of services and software.  Though certain core responsibilities remain with Salve Regina, iDesign’s clinical coordination personnel and systems facilitate clinical placement at scale.  Important functions include: maintaining a database of prospective sites; facilitating clinical partnerships; placing students; facilitating agreements; managing site access documentation; mapping clinical experiences to the curriculum; and documenting clinical experiences.  iDesign and Salve Regina collaborated to ensure that clinical experiences occur on the backend of each program, providing more time for each placement and more time for each student to develop skills and buy-in prior to clinicals.

Conclusion

Salve Regina initially partnered with iDesign for an immediate, practical solution to a tactical problem: stabilizing the RN to BSN program.  A partnership based on trust and alignment with the Salve Regina mission and brand emerged.  Salve Regina and iDesign then leveraged that partnership to move from addressing a short-term tactical problem to initiatives with the potential to move the strategic needle for the university.  Examples include: developing capacity around online delivery; building employer partnerships and collecting actionable market data; offering new online program suites that serve employers and enhance the economics of marketing and enrolling students; and creating robust clinical placement solutions which serve partners and

students while differentiating Salve Regina among both audiences.  In this context, students, employers, and the university all win, which is the definition of a truly sustainable online program.