Finding the Right Student at the Right Moment
Willamette University has been shaping lives since 1842. As the oldest university in the western United States, the private liberal arts institution in Salem, Oregon has built its identity around a simple but powerful idea: turning knowledge into action.
Today, that mission extends well beyond its traditional undergraduate population. Willamette offers a growing portfolio of graduate and professional programs, including an MBA, a master's in data science, a law school, and MFA and MA programs in art and design, drawing working professionals who are looking not just to learn, but to become more of who they are already trying to be.
Reaching those students, however, is a different challenge. Unlike undergraduates, adult learners do not fill out inquiry forms or browse college ranking websites on a Saturday afternoon. They are busy. They are balancing careers, families, finances, and ambition. And many of them do not yet know that Willamette has exactly what they need.
For JR Tarabocchia, AVP for Institutional Marketing at Willamette, solving that problem meant rethinking how the university found its audience in the first place.
"ZoomInfo helps us find prospective students who may not be looking for Willamette yet, but maybe who are ready for what Willamette has to offer them."
— JR Tarabocchia, AVP for Institutional Marketing, Willamette University
The Challenges of Graduate Recruitment
Before ZoomInfo, Willamette's graduate recruitment relied on what Tarabocchia describes as traditional, and fundamentally incomplete, sources. Inquiry forms captured students who had already found the university on their own. Conference attendee lists were broad and loosely relevant. Alumni data, organic web traffic, paid ads, and LinkedIn searches filled in the gaps, but only partially.
The core problem was not a lack of effort. It was a lack of visibility into the right people.
"Before ZoomInfo, we could see people who already found us," Tarabocchia says, "but what was really hard was finding the people who we should have been talking to."
Graduate prospective students do not behave like traditional undergraduates. They may be ten, twenty, or thirty years into a career. They span industries from healthcare and government to tech, nonprofit, and finance. They carry different motivations depending on where they are in their professional lives. A manager with two decades of experience considering an MBA is looking for something fundamentally different than an early-career professional eyeing the same degree. Generic outreach, the kind built on incomplete lists and broad assumptions, could not speak to any of them with real relevance.
Building a usable prospect pool under those conditions was slow, labor-intensive, and still fell short. "It used to take hours and hours and hours of time to piece this information together," Tarabocchia says. "And it still wouldn't be as good as what we can get through ZoomInfo."
From Days to Minutes: Building Smarter Prospect Pools
With ZoomInfo, Willamette transformed how it identifies and reaches prospective graduate students. At the end of each admission cycle, Tarabocchia and his team analyze who enrolled, building a profile of the ideal student based on where they worked, what their job titles were, which industries they came from, and where they were located. That profile becomes the foundation for a ZoomInfo query, pulling a new prospect pool of working professionals who match the same characteristics for the next recruitment cycle.
The speed of that process is, by itself, a significant operational shift.
"I can sit down with a recruiter from one of the graduate programs and we can knock it out in ten, fifteen minutes," Tarabocchia says, "and then you have 10,000 or 20,000 prospective students who you can say with pretty good confidence, this is the audience I want to communicate to. That has a lot of power."
What used to take days, sometimes weeks, now takes minutes. And because Willamette runs multiple graduate programs simultaneously, that efficiency compounds quickly. "That multiplier of only having to spend minutes or hours on creating your list instead of days," Tarabocchia notes, "adds up really fast when you have five or six or seven different types of prospect pools that you're trying to populate."
ZoomInfo's alert functionality adds another layer of efficiency. Once a query is configured, Tarabocchia can set automated notifications so that new batches of matching prospects are delivered without requiring him to manually rebuild searches from scratch. The system works in the background, so his team can stay focused on the work that actually moves students through the funnel.
The Right Message to the Right Student
Speed matters. But for Tarabocchia, the more transformative shift has been in the quality and precision of Willamette's marketing campaigns.
With richer data on each prospective student's career stage, industry, and role, the team can now segment its outreach in ways that were simply not possible before, not because the strategy was wrong, but because the data and the staff capacity to execute it were not there.
"In the past we were segmenting, maybe you'd split an email into two or three, maybe you'd do it by location because that's pretty easy to segment," Tarabocchia says. "But this year we did it based on industry and then job title and then manager level, and you can see some of those email campaigns, the click rates, the open rates, they're just way higher than our average."
That result was, in his words, an “aha moment”. Not just a sign that the tool was working, but a confirmation that the underlying philosophy was right. "It's getting the right message to the right student instead of just sending a very generic mass marketing billboard type message," he says.
That philosophy runs deeper than open rates. Tarabocchia believes it reflects something fundamental about how adult learners want to be treated. "I don't think anyone, particularly adult learners, want to be marketed to as just a mass audience," he says. "They want to understand quickly whether this specific program is worth their time at this specific moment in their life. And ZoomInfo lets you do that."
Proof in the Enrollment Data
The clearest validation came not from campaign metrics, but from the enrollment data itself.
At the end of each admission cycle, Willamette tracks origin source, the first touchpoint that brought a student into the university's system. When Tarabocchia began seeing ZoomInfo listed as the origin source for enrolled students, the case was made.
"When I see that the origin source is ZoomInfo, that tells me that this is actually working," he says. "This tells me that the person whose name we were able to procure from ZoomInfo was a strong fit for the program. And frankly, they may not have appeared in our funnel but for having used ZoomInfo. So we're not just buying random names, we're buying the names of people who are good fits for the programs that we offer."
The Balance Between AI and Humans During Recruiting
Looking ahead, Tarabocchia sees AI as a natural complement to the work ZoomInfo already enables, particularly for accelerating the early stages of campaign development, generating segmentation ideas, drafting subject lines, and helping teams get a first draft on the page faster. But he is clear about where the technology ends and the human work begins.
"This work is about connecting people with people and programs," he says. "We don't need to spend days and days developing a prospect list. If AI can help you do it in less time, that's time you can use to do outreach, to do phone calls, to meet people at a coffee shop. Because that's the work that really matters."
For other university marketers still relying on traditional recruitment tactics, Tarabocchia's advice is direct: understand that graduate recruitment is not undergraduate recruitment, and act accordingly. "Graduate prospective students are busy adults. They're balancing jobs, families, finances, and their own ambition. They need relevance pretty quickly," he says. "ZoomInfo helps us get to that relevant conversation faster. It's not just a volume game. It's understanding which people are more likely to see value in the programs that you offer, and then speaking to them in a way that respects their time."
That respect, he believes, is what turns a name on a list into a student in a classroom, and eventually, into someone whose life looks a little more like the one they were working toward.
