Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. If only.

Oh, if only. The University may appear quiet, but trust me, there’s plenty going on. All over the University, colleagues are mopping up from the last academic year and putting plans in place for the near, not so near and the extremely distant future. Academics research; Partnerships run all sorts of events and are setting up - err - partnerships, Facilities teams repair and Estates open new buildings. Thankfully, most people find time to take a deep breath here and there, although you grab it while you can - in reality, there really is no ‘off switch’.

In Marketing, as you may have gathered from previous posts, we’re ClearingClearingClearing, and looking at getting our 2018 prospectuses ready. That’s right, 2018 already.

You can't tell me nuffin' about nuffin'

Sometimes us hacks in Marketing, Admissions, Recruitment and Marketing (MARC) – for the benefit of any colleagues reading this, I’m referring to myself here – think we know it all. Some of us have been doing our jobs long enough to have earned accolades, awards and the occasional and occasionally begrudging respect of colleagues across the Uni. Which, funnily enough, makes it even more important (for me) to escape the head-down-full-on activity and re-engage with one of our most important audiences; our prospective students.

And so I took a high powered sound archive recording device and a load of prospectuses to our Summer Schools, in Luton and Bedford. Speaking to Year 12s was a pleasure but, more importantly from the Uni’s point of view, it was also extremely illuminating. It’s surprising how views develop and diverge between different groups of people as well as different individuals. A year can make a huge difference. The only downside for attendees was being stuck in a room at the end of a long day with a befuddled market researcher, but this pain was eased with a ‘thank you’ voucher. Besides, there is such a thing as ‘too much fun’ – and after a day of taster sessions (for example, in Psychology, Computing or Business), there were still the evening’s entertainments in our bang up-to-date accommodation.

I’ve also recently worked with Adam and Donald, two Year 10 students who came to us on work experience. We were delighted to have them; both bought a professionalism and set about their tasks enthusiastically. This was the first time I’ve looked  after work experience students. The process has been informative and rewarding, hopefully for all concerned, with Adam and Donald getting involved in the Summer School as well as helping in our prospectus work and mucking in with general tasks around the office.

And those Summer Schools? Keep up to date through our Partnership Team's Twitter feed or check and see what course you can start in SEPTEMBER.

Taking PRide in our achievements

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager

Desk pride in the office today :-)

Writing award submissions takes a lot of time and commitment. From scouring our marketing reports to assess campaign performance, reviewing the market research results from our Market Research Manager, to number crunching to demonstrate a return on investment, each and every submission takes a significant investment of time and effort, alongside the day job. But here in Marketing HQ we do like to squeeze in time to do just this.

Of course it's fantastic if you secure the short-list, but it's also a great nod to the hard work carried out in the team, and provides a great opportunity to reflect on our successes which can often be overlooked in the day-to-day busyness of campaign planning and implementation. And not forgetting to mention the kudos in being able to benchmark ourselves against our industry peers.

And that's why we were absolutely overjoyed to see that we'd been short-listed for not one, but two CIPRide Awards this year! A fantastic testament to all of the hard work undertaken this year - especially since we're rather depleted in resource as of late, and have had to be more frugal than in previous years - making every penny count in our campaigns.

Hurrah! Amazing to see that we've been shortlisted twice @CIPR_Awards -Low Budget & Integrated Campaign #PRideAwards pic.twitter.com/PKBp0ayhTb

— Sarah De Guzman (@Sarah_Hampton) July 18, 2016

The short-list may be out, but it looks as though we have some stiff competition - having entered two of the most competitive categories for our region this year.

We're up for Best Integrated Campaign - for the Clearing Campaign to support recruitment for 2015 entry, as well as Best Low Budget Campaign - for the performance of our September Open Day campaign, the latter award being Kylie's very first award submission - so a great result to secure the short-list first time round!

The Awards culminate in a 'do later in the year in Cambridge, so we'll keep you posted on how we do nearer the time. We've won Gold awards three year's in a row at CIPRide, so no pressure to keep the record going! But in the meantime, we're going to take a moment to relish in our achievements, before we get our heads crammed back into the beast that is Clearing to see if we will have another entry worthy of submission next year. Here's hoping!

A team that plays together stays together

Beverley Hoare, Deputy Director of MARC

In Marcoms we’re very noses to the grindstone and drop everything at a moment’s notice to respond to some urgent press query, an event that we hadn’t been notified about or an emergency update to the website kind of people!

So to get a date that everyone (almost) could attend and in the end to pull themselves away from work for an away day was no small achievement. But the team wanted it, asked for it and valued it. Why?

Celebrating our team
achievements

Superglue - it’s important for team bonding – because we learn more about each other: likes, dislikes, motivations, because we like spending time together and we get to have fun. It gives some light relief from the day to day, a bit of perspective on our challenges and an opportunity to recognise the teams and individual achievements. 

Lots of life happens in the course of an academic year, so we celebrate too – one baby due in October, one marriage, two engagements, two 30^th birthdays and a house move.  We’ve had several losses to the team (fortunately not through natural causes) and two new staff have joined the team, but both worked at Bedfordshire previously – they loved it so much they came back.

Who do we think we are – in a Myers Briggs type approach we completed an online test to assess our personality types.  You might imagine that all marketers are extroverts, but not so, we’re quite an introverted bunch, drawing on our own internal imaginations and creativity.  As a team we are very caring, supportive and sensitive types, so be gentle with your critique – though we’re not looking for glory we do appreciate a well-placed compliment J

The Press team dominated the quiz, 
showcasing an unusual specialism in
animal trivia! 

Quiz master Andy entertained us with obscure questions about how male goats get a mate and the colour of a hippos sweat when it gets stressed – google it.  I may not be able to remember the answers to the serious HE questions but weirdly these have stuck.

It’s wasn’t  all fun and games - we ran some serious activities too, honest – we did some looking back and looking forward, focused on our objectives and the new PDA programme and generated loads of ideas for the question ‘how can we improve our brand, reputation and recruitment through social media’.  If you have any burning desire to give us some ideas please do get in touch.

Almost on to 2017...

So the final Open Day for this cycle has now taken place (yesterday) so I’m looking forward to planning the 2017 cycle of Open Days. Although we’ve been communicating with our 2017 enquirers since April, the official 2017 cycle starts from September. So I’ll be looking to finish my spring season open day report over the coming weeks so I can reflect on the good and the bad from this year, and see how we can further progress the plans for the 2017 cycle of Open Days.

And of course, while that’s happening, we’ve just kicked off with Clearing, which is the final part of the 2016 cycle. So it’s definitely still full steam ahead as Clearing is a really important time for us as a University.

I’ve also recently picked up some new projects:

Last years Best of Beds leaflet

1. Updating our Complete University Guide profile – updating the text with new messages, sourcing new images and updating links
2. Updating our Beds of Beds leaflet – updating messages and graphics with more recent stats and figures about Bedfordshire
3. Updating our Guide to your offer brochure – working with the admissions team to look at what updates are needed for this year, so we can send this guide out with offer letters

So I’m currently looking at timelines, print quantities, updates to information and so on, so I can work up production schedules and get started on the above job.
So all in all, it’s planning and evaluating for me over the coming weeks.

It's good to re-group as a team and reflect
and plan ahead!

We’ve also got our team away day tomorrow – we’re spending some time at our Putteridge Bury campus to re-group, discuss this year’s successes and looking at the next year moving forward.

Speak soon,
K