Outward Bound USA · Executive Director Briefing Material
The headline, unchanged
We still have a top-of-funnel problem. Lots of families are finding us — +51% more visits to the course catalog this year — but too few of them are making it all the way through to a finished application. That part of the story hasn't changed, and it's still the biggest opportunity in the data.
What's new: when we looked more closely at what happens once a family actually opens a course page, we found something worth knowing about — and worth acting on separately.
Here's the plain-English version: more people are browsing, fewer of them are drilling into a specific course, and the ones who do are converting at a noticeably better rate than last year. Those last two facts have been pulling in opposite directions and roughly canceling out — which is why total applications look flat even though a lot changed underneath.
That means we're not looking at one conversion problem. We're looking at two separate opportunities, at two different points in the journey, and they call for two different kinds of action.
This is the piece we've already been talking about, and the data still says it's real and still says it's the larger of the two. Families are landing on our catalog in record numbers, but they're not clicking into individual courses at anywhere near the rate they used to — down 60% on a per-visit basis. When we watched how much time families spend on the catalog versus on course pages, the picture flipped entirely from last year: two-thirds of a family's research time now happens on the catalog itself — filtering, scrolling, comparing — instead of on course pages. Last year it was the reverse.
That's not a family losing interest. It's a family who can't tell which of our ~86 course options is the right one for them, and giving up before they get far enough to picture their kid actually going.
What we're asking EDs to support
What it's worth, in applications
| If we recover the "depth ratio" toward... | Course-detail visits become... | At today's (already-improved) conversion rate, that's roughly... |
|---|---|---|
| 1.2 pages per catalog visit (partial recovery) | 157,000 | +450 applications |
| 1.5 pages per catalog visit | 197,000 | +1,060 applications |
| 2.45 pages per catalog visit (last year's level) | 321,000 | +3,000 applications |
Here's the part that's easy to miss if we only look at the top-line numbers: once a family actually opens a course page, they are converting to an application at a meaningfully better rate than they were last year — up from about 1 in 108 to about 1 in 64. Fewer families are getting that far, but the ones who do are more likely to follow through. That's genuinely good news, and it means the improvements already made to course pages and the application flow are working.
It also means this is the highest-value real estate on the site, dollar for dollar. Every family who reaches a course page has already cleared the hardest part — deciding to seriously consider us. A small improvement here reaches a highly motivated audience, and the math below shows why even a fraction of a percentage point matters.
Where the friction still is
What it's worth, in applications
| If course-page conversion improves by... | On this year's traffic, that's... |
|---|---|
| +0.25 percentage points | +320 applications |
| +0.50 percentage points | +640 applications |
| +1.00 percentage point | +1,290 applications |
Both are real. Both are worth EDs' time and support. But they are not the same size, and we want to be straightforward about that: fixing how families find and narrow down a course (Lever One) has roughly three to five times the potential impact of fixing what happens once they've found one (Lever Two) — simply because so many more families touch the top of the funnel than the bottom. That's why simplifying the catalog and the search experience remains our number one ask. Lever Two isn't a consolation prize, though — it's the fastest-to-implement, highest-conversion-rate-per-dollar-of-effort piece of this whole picture, and the two together compound: a family who has an easier time finding the right course is also a family who arrives at the application step already more confident and more likely to finish it.
An important caveat before we set expectations
Everything above reflects January through June, in both 2025 and 2026. That's intentional — it's the fairest apples-to-apples comparison we have — but it's also, by a wide margin, our biggest shopping window. Most of our courses run in the summer, and the bulk of families who are going to enroll in a summer course make that decision in the first half of the year, especially the ones enrolling later in their planning process.
As we move into Q3 and Q4, we still see meaningful traffic — some families are early shoppers planning next summer, and this is also when adult, young adult, and some youth courses that run through the winter get most of their bookings. But historically, that traffic converts at a noticeably lower rate than what we're seeing right now. There's simply less inventory to sell, fewer open spots left to fill, and a smaller, more specific pool of people shopping.
What this means practically: we should not extrapolate the conversion rates or application pace we're seeing right now across the full year. When we report back later this year, we intend to look at Q3–Q4 on its own terms — and possibly define our "shopping season" by something other than calendar quarters — rather than measuring the back half of the year against a Q1–Q2 yardstick it was never going to match. We wanted to flag that now, so nobody is caught off guard by a normal seasonal slowdown being mistaken for a new problem.
Source: GA4 (outwardbound.org, via Windsor.ai), Jan 1 – Jun 30 both years, page-path and session data. Application counts (1,964 / 2,015) provided directly from enrollment tracking, not GA4. Applications-per-course-page-visit and applications-per-catalog-visit figures are calculated from these two sources together. Scenario figures in the impact tables are illustrative sensitivity estimates, not forecasts — they show what today's traffic would be worth at a hypothetical conversion rate, holding all else constant. Prepared as backup/briefing material for OE strategy conversations with Executive Directors, July 2026.