Meet the team at one of our Open Days

One of our responsibilities within the Marketing department is to work with the Recruitment team to help plan the Open Days throughout the year. Before each season Kylie puts together a plan for the Open Days which includes emails, postcards, and digital screens etc. One of my roles is to help implement the plans, which includes drafting email communications for different audiences, working with designers to produce any printed collateral, and creating digital artwork for our digital screens and LRC screens around campus. 

Yesterday I also got to help out at our Luton Open Day. Helping at the event is a great way for us to gain insight into the events, which we can then use in our marketing materials. It also provides us with the opportunity to talk to some of our student enquirers and applicants, and their friends and families, to find out how they've found the day, and what they're looking to achieve. 

Our Student Ambassadors are also on hand at our Open Days, taking enquirers on campus tours, and showing them where to go for the various talks throughout the day. The Student Ambassadors are great as they're able to answer any questions about what life as a student at Beds is really like, and can provide useful tips about being a student and living in the area.

But the work doesn't stop once the event has finished. After each event we send a further email thanking everyone for coming, as well as an email to anyone who couldn't attend, letting them know about our next Open Day and inviting them to one of our regular campus tours.

You can find out more about our Open Days and campus tours here.

 

And the award goes to…

This time of year tends to feel like we’re in an award season frenzy. It’s not only Hollywood that has a busy calendar with A-list celebs oozing glamour on the red carpets of the Oscars, Golden Globes and Baftas to name a few, it’s also pretty busy in Higher Education too - although perhaps with a little less glamour.

The Communications Team have been pretty busy helping to launch a number of internal awards and initiatives of our own, including the Student Experience Awards and the Annual Staff Conference, both of which recognise and celebrate our achievements and remind us of reasons to be proud of the University and its passionate staff and students. 

Although, when you’re so busy and engrossed in the day job, or with your studies, it often seems hard to find the time to enter awards or nominate someone deserving, adding yet another task to the to-do-list. But one of the privileges of working in communications is that we get to learn of so many great things that our staff and students are achieving. Therefore nominating someone for a student experience award really is a great way to highlight impressive projects, students and staff and give them the recognition they deserve.

Even if no award procures, just the exercise of making a nomination, writing an award submission or being shortlisted is a real boost to your motivation and helps you put your efforts into perspective and reflect on what you have achieved, which many of us often don’t often take the time to do.

In fact, here in Internal Communications, we were really chuffed to recently be shortlisted for an Institute of Internal Communications regional awards for our staff newsletter @beds. We very nearly didn’t make the time to do it, but the effort has paid off and we're pleased we did it.

If you needed any more inspiration, below are a few more reasons on why it’s worth nominating someone for an award or submitting one yourself:

•  It helps to bring external recognition for you and your organisation and which positively impacts on reputation
• It’s great for your CV and your linked-in  profile
• It can help with your internal profile and can spark other ideas in other teams
• It can help you gain more prestige with external contacts
• It boosts your morale

So if you know of someone that you feel deserves some recognition, check out our awards and get nominating.

However, even if there aren’t any awards or nominations that you want to make this time around, just a simple celebration of work gone well or showing gratification to staff and students for hard work undertaken can also make a real difference.

A league of our own?

Hmm. The relevant question here is: Who are our competitors?

The OED defines a business competitor as "an organisation competing with others in business.”

Right, so we might be a business and we might have customers. Or not. We might have partners rather than students who may or may not be entitled to all sorts of associated contractual rights and an ‘experience’. Or, indeed, a right to enjoyment. Or not. All or some of these apply (or don't) depending on any given policy, briefing and/or individuals’ point (or points) of view.

Blogs are supposed to be clear and fun. Admittedly, this one's already a "BIT OF A MESS". However, the element of marketisation I’d strongly suggest can’t be fudged or denied is that we, along with every other HE provider, have competitors.

By competitors, we usually refer to those institutions to whom our UCAS applicants are most likely to apply. Applicants have five choices, remember, so everyone we see and everyone who hopefully and eventually enrols with us may have applied to four other universities. Or more if they’ve come through Clearing. Or deferred. Et cetera.

Our UCAS competitor set is – and for some time has been:

• ·         Anglia Ruskin;
• ·         Bucks New;
• ·         Hertfordshire;
• ·         Middlesex;
• ·         Northampton, and…..
• ·         Coventry.

Coventry?

Yes; Coventry. Shiny, friendly, happy, dynamic, league table bustin’, sector-irritating Coventry. Being sent to Coventry is no longer a bad thing and its once deserted, ghosty streets are now full of deliriously happy students, plaiting each others' hair, being impeccably hip and getting firsts. As a community, Coventry’s council, uni and press have decided to coexist and help each other out. The uni has expanded, both within the city (Coventry University College has a different model delivering a more blended, flexible and less costly offer) as well as setting up campuses in London and Scarborough.

How do they do it?

Today Scarborough…… tomorrow THE WORLD

What is Southampton Solent?

The rest of our UCAS competitors, as anyone worth their salt will have spotted, are local. Easy. Except that this isn’t the full story; our competitors vary by subject. Southampton Solent, anyone? Who? For most subjects, ‘Solent’ are small fry, but some of what they do, they do well enough to lure students away from us and are particular threats to us in Biological Sciences, Law and Mass Communications & Documentation.

Locality is important to our students and we recruit heavily from Bedfordshire and London. And bits of Herts and Bucks. The trouble is, so do Herts, Middlesex, Northampton et al. And the bigger picture presents even bigger problems. Like toxic gas, competitors are all around us, pinching, poaching and getting up to the sort of hijinx the sector didn’t used to tolerate. Nottingham Trent and Lincoln are current ‘outliers’ making an impression at events and (in Trent’s case) in Bedfordshire’s schools. While neither are within commuting distance, they’re not so remote, particularly for students north of Bedford whose sights aren’t set on either Sport or Education.

In this context, DeMontfort are also in the mix and will pose a significant threat in the forthcoming years, what with their slick, almost constant advertising and a prediction of a fabulously rosy TEF score.

Serious stuff; serious money, by the look of it.
Without the sound on, it made me chuckle

So there you have it. In summary, defining our competitors is, I’d suggest, an art rather than a science. I’ve looked at institutions in the East Midlands; add the complexities of all sorts of institutions in London and your head will start to whirl.

Then the International Office have their own competitor set, and in my own work and analysis, I look further than the same old trusty and faithful six listed at the head of this blog; when a task suggests it, I might peek at aspirational competitors (e.g. City, Brunel, Oxford Brookes) or other institutions, nationwide, who have a similar reputational standing, but who may do things differently and – potentially – give us some ideas we may want to ‘adapt’ for our own institution.

This look at competitors highlights some of the challenge we’re increasingly facing in MARC (and elsewhere in the Uni), even as internal resources are "challenged" and the amount of work we're asked to do increases. We're always happy to help, but please, try and help us plan, bring your own insight to play and, as far as possible, ensure that outcomes are clearly anticipated and realised.

For more information about MARC’s work with competitors, including a breakdown of subject specific competitors, please see our intranet page.