Want to share best practice? We’re on the CASE!

So I recently attended the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) European Annual Conference 2015 in Manchester. For those who may not be familiar with CASE, it’s an organisation that helps people within the education sector to share knowledge, best practice, and training. Each year they hold an annual conference, and this year I got the opportunity to attend.

An informative three days of networking and sharing knowledge!

It was a three day conference in Manchester (starting off with a 6am train the day after Bank Holiday Monday!), and it was three days packed full of presentations, case studies and interactive sessions. There’s something for everyone; people working in communications; alumni; marketing; management (strategy) and fundraising. And there were even people from the Netherlands and Australia in attendance. So lots of networking, note taking and learning!

I tried to mix up the presentations that I attended. I attended mainly marketing focused sessions, but I also went to some communications ones too.

A couple of things I’ve taken away from the conference:

• The contribution of location to the HE service scope
  
        A really good session which was run by Portsmouth Business School looked at the research they had done into how UK universities talk about themselves and how the majority of universities use location as a main focus. They also spoke about other factors such as physical, social and sociological dimensions that universities use when communicating to their audiences, and there was a group discussion about whether an emotional or cognitive response is more important. The conclusion was it doesn’t seem to make a difference in ‘who’ a university is or where they are in the UK; all universities want to ‘tick all boxes.’ As we’ve recently embarked on a verbal branding project, which we are now rolling out across the University, this was a particularly interesting session for me to take part in.

• Working with your research community
  
        Another great session run by the University of Huddersfield in which they presented the ways they worked with their research community to produce valuable content to show the gravitas of the university and its achievements. This was really interesting as the University of Bedfordshire have had a real focus on this, and it was good to see how another university has tackled this. They discussed the research literature they produce, including how items are distributed and to which audience and also discussed how they encourage academics to use social media to showcase their work and also link in with the universities core strategy around research. Food for thought…

The overarching themes that stood out in the sessions which I attended were the value of authenticity, producing more dynamic content and being more interactive are key to reaching the student audiences in 2016 and beyond!  

Events like these are invaluable for networking, meeting peers and sharing knowledge with people in the same industry. Market research is a big part of Marketing, and events like these go that little bit further in terms of discussing what’s happening within other institutions and learning from each other.

I hope I get the opportunity to go again next year.

Speak soon,

K