Is it 2014, 2015, or 2016??

Clearing

As Clare mentioned in her previous blog, everyone in MARC has been heavily focused on Clearing, trying to recruit last minute students for the 2014 cycle. Every day we’re monitoring numbers and working on additional activity to further support the original campaign plan. There’s definitely a busy buzz around the office!

Workshop banner

As part of the Clearing campaign I recently manned the Clearing stand in Luton Mall and supported the flash mob during their performance at the Mall a few weeks ago. I’m sure you’ve all seen it, but if not, take a look here. As well as that small contribution to Clearing (its minor compared to some of my colleagues), I’ve created pull-up banners for the recruitment team to use for the workshops they are running in Luton Mall as part of some additional Clearing activity. And I’m sure there will be more jobs to come as we continue through the process. It’ll all be worth it in the end!

Open days

The next round of UG and PG open days are approaching, trying to recruit for 2015 entry.  After evaluating the previous events, and taking in to consideration our new target of increasing footfall to open events by 25%, I’ve been working on the open day plans for our 24 September UG open day. So far we have implemented mostly digital activity; Google adwords and display ads, emails to enquirers and website banners. We’ve also printed postcard invites for enquirers and pushed promoted tweets, which is a new feature on Twitter, which we are experimenting with. We have more activity to do over the coming weeks with external agency activity, CRM snippets, further emails and ring rounds. This is the first time we have run a UG open day in September, and due to the Clearing campaign running alongside the open day campaign, it’s been quite difficult to get the balance of activity right. We’ve already utilised most of the activity for Clearing, ie homepage banners on the website and Google activity, so we’ve had to be even more strategic when implementing these open day plans.

Our Luton Open Day brochure

On top of implementing the plan, I’ve also been working on the open day brochures, which we send out to all registrants ahead of the event to let them know what to expect on the day. They went to print last week, and will be arriving in office on 4 September, ready for our first mail out on 8 September. Following these going to print, I will now be working on our UCMK and Aylesbury open day brochures.

Our next PG open day event is also approaching on 16 October, so I will be putting plans together for this campaign this week.

Planning ahead

As well as the above, I will be starting work on the 2016 publications from early/mid-September, so I’m already thinking about photography requirements and how we can progress the prospectus for the next academic cycle in light of the verbal branding work that we have been doing.

I’m also working on an e-zine recommendation report, so we can progress the e-zines for the next academic year. As we have now completed a full cycle (12 editions) of the e-zine, we are looking at how we can improve these, as they are an important part of our conversion activity. I have been analysing the stats on all of our e-zines to see what worked well and what didn’t work well, so we can look at improving the content to get more traction and clicks. I’ve also been looking into what other universities do in terms of newsletters/ e-zines, to see if they can inspire us to do anything differently. So far it would seem we are ahead of the sector in terms of our e-zine activity, which is a nice feeling!

And a few other bits…

I mentioned previously that I was working on updating five of the subject guides. I am still working on these; I have had two back from the designer to proofread and I'm still working on amending the other three.

I’ve also been working on August’s edition of B4Beds, which was sent on Friday 29 August, and this was the last applicant edition. This month’s addition will be aimed towards enquirers, so a big shift in content.

I also mentioned last time that I had put together a content schedule for out PG social media platforms to ensure we are posting regularly and engaging with our audience. It’s been great to see that we have seen an increase in the amount of people our posts are reaching, which is a real positive. We’ve also seen a steady increase in likes/followers. Keep a look out for our #wisewednesdays posts every week.

Well, that’s the biggies from me for now; I won’t bore you with the rest!

Speak soon,

K