Open day success

Open Days

Signage at our open day

I mentioned in my last blog that I was working on the UG open day. Well, the open day took place on Wednesday (24 September) and it was a huge success for sign ups. We had 315 students sign up for Bedford, with 191 people attending and 512 students sign up for Luton, with 204 people attending. We were all monitoring the sign up numbers on a daily basis and getting excited about the amount of signups we had generated. Although there is still work to do around the dropout rates (which we are working on), it was great to see that the activity in the open day plan generated some really good numbers. Recruitment also did a lot of work getting busloads of schools onto our campuses, so as you can image, we were busy, busy, busy!  I’m looking forward to doing the evaluation for this campaign and seeing where the signups correlated with the marketing activity.

Our next UG open days are in October and November, so next week I will be putting plans together for these events. However, due to the close proximity of the events, these will have a shorter lead time.

Our PG open day plans are also underway now, with Google adwords, emails to students and social media activity already taken place. And we have lots of activity happening around our campuses in the coming weeks, as the students return. It would be great to see the same success for the PG open day, as we seen for the UG open day.

UG16 prospectus

Work has also started on the UG16 prospectus. I have booked photography for the end of October, and put the production schedule together. In the coming weeks I will produce a flatplan and work with quality on the courses lists. We also have two days of agency pitches next week, where design agencies come in to pitch to us and show us their ideas for our prospectuses and campaigns. There are 10 of us sitting on the panel, and following these pitches we will collectively decide who we feel is the best agency.

Training

Myself and my colleague, Clare, also attended a print workshop this week with Belmont Press, in Northampton. It was a really informative day; we learnt about different forms of printing, paper stock and took a look around the facilities to see the machines in action.

Lot’s going on as usual.

Speak soon,

K