Paydirt

(Candid academic advising shot from
Stonehill College's First Year Experience blog.)

What do you do when someone asks for your opinion of a college? Recently I connected with a mother who was curious about Stonehill College. What did I know? Here's the email I fired off:

Smallish, Catholic-affiliated, known for personal attention & accessible faculty. They have been making great strides towards offering more & better housing (the "knock" on Stonehill at one point was that they didn't have enough).

Construction photos from new dorm: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27102&id=100000192345675

Catholic roots translate mostly into a social justice /service orientation, see commencement speech:
http://www.youtube.com/whystonehill#p/a/f/1/bPt74PXsj20

Some of the more popular majors include business, psychology, and the social sciences. They're also pretty serious about athletics (DII):
http://stonehillcounselors.blogspot.com/2010/06/stonehill-wins-presidents-cup.html

See also http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=stonehill&s=all&id=167996 for some good statistical information.

Definitely worth checking out...

Stonehill's coherent social media presence helped a lot. Their Twitter stream led me to their First Year Experience blog, which in turn led me to a stream of candid orientation photos and reminded me to check YouTube & Facebook. Their website is serviceable, if a little text-heavy in spots, (and hey, how about some social media callouts on the front page?), but the main thing that mattered to me was that I could pull together a student-specific, multi-media Stonehill snapshot pretty easily. Which means I could help move this mom from caring about my opinion to working on her own.

Paydirt.

(Thanks to MS for asking the question!)