Clearing and the countdown to Canada

It feels like the Communications Team at Bedfordshire hasn’t stopped for the past couple of weeks. We had preparation for Clearing, then we had Clearing itself, and now we have a moment to take stock and catch our breath (famous last words!)

The majority of my prep for Clearing was around case studies. I’ve spent a lot of time digging around looking for former students who went through Clearing and went on to have successful careers. We have graduates all over the place, working as BBC journalists, actors, nurses and many other professionals, but we also have those who have gone on to start their own businesses, including Ann Akin, who set up her own theatre company.

.@Harts_Theatre AD & @uniofbeds alumna @Ann_Akin reveals what it's like to work in the #theatre https://t.co/Uz8EXA8Bcn #MakeitBeds pic.twitter.com/GeZXuUNm5P

— UoB Press Office (@uobnews) August 30, 2017

I’m always really grateful to all the students and graduates who agree to be case studies. We can be incredibly busy during the working day, and the fact that these guys take time out to talk about their experiences and read through the content of their case study is amazing.

.@uniofbeds student @OneWalshMeister shares his experience of going through #Clearing #MakeItBeds #BedsNews https://t.co/A0xSsEHEyF

— UoB Press Office (@uobnews) August 17, 2017

I was also saddened to hear about the imminent closure of one of our local newspapers, the Bedfordshire on Sunday. This will be a huge blow to the local community and also local journalism in general. I completed many a work experience placement on local papers, and although I never had what it takes to be a 'real' journalist, I loved every minute of my time working as one and the experience ultimately helped me get into the ‘dark side’ of public relations, which I love! Best of luck to the Beds on Sunday team and their future adventures!

I’d also like to mention that I’m on Canada countdown – next week I’ll be jetting off to Toronto for some much-needed downtime with my parents. It is a country I have always wanted to visit and though I’m only there for a week, I fully intend to take it all in and enjoy every moment, and hopefully see a moose!

I wonder if I could bring one home as an office mascot...

Hanging out with aliens; understanding applicants and enquirers

In this blog, I'll try and offer some thoughts on the year 12s and year 13s I've recently had the pleasure to meet and have tried to understand.

First off, the terminology. Customers, consumers, partners, stakeholders? Or maybe students? How about students? Let's wrestle these poor souls away from the marketplace, if only for this blog, and recognise, perhaps, that the whole seller/customer model has a place in £9k fees, but isn't the be all and end all, especially for many 17 and 18 year olds.

So, students. More to the point, potential University of Bedfordshire students. Do we know who they are? Do we need to know who they are? Do we understand them? Should we care?

If your answer(s) to the second and/or last question is/are "no", then contact ODTU for Customer Service 101 or nearest equivalent. And I would suggest a reality check for anyone who claims to have supreme confidence in saying they fully know and understand our emerging cohorts.

Beds' Mkt Research Manager
in 'sales mode'

Over the last few months, I've joined the charm offensive that is 'student recruitment'. Granted, I’m less charm/more offensive, but given recent team shrinkage, I've 'had a go'. I've also been lucky enough to have had access to Summer Schools, thanks to Tam and her lovely colleagues in Partnerships. And here’s a roundup of some of the questions I’ve been asked while hoofing around various places (Luton, Norwich, Ipswich, Chatham and, err, Luton again).

Could you tell me about the course?

Is emo still a thing?

Perhaps I shouldn't admit it, but this was a question I often had to deflect. With the best will in the world, when a 16 year old goff/emo person asks me about fashion it’s not going to go well. For either of us. This is why descriptions in the prospectus and signing to the web need to be as clear as possible; not an easy task and always worth sense checking and running through the filters of i) a potential applicant; and ii) a numb-nut trying to sell to the potential applicant.

What are the entry requirements?

People usually want to know why our requirements are so low - when our WP mission is explained, this usually plays out well enough, thank you very much.

Where is Bedfordshire exactly?

We all know. I always assumed others would. A few do, though many have no idea. Luton and Bedford may be the centres of our universe, but for many, they're an unknown mystery (don’t worry Aylesbury and MK; you’re on the map and referred to as and when). Once location is established and proximity to London confirmed, the atmosphere is usually lightened and some valuable time has been taken up which otherwise would have been spent talking about something you know very little about. Like fashion.

Do you do Forensic Psychology, Fashion Management, Aviation Engineering, History, Politics …..etc.

We’re always asked for courses we don’t deliver. If I can't cross seell, I pass these enquirers to either Bath Spa or Birmingham City (i.e. the stands nearest us, in the hope that hangers in the enquirer’s group will buy my supplicating look and talk to me and so discover where Bedfordshire is). Sometimes works; sometimes people move away from me at great speed.

Can I have a pen?

We’ve had pens in the past. And stress light bulbs, memory sticks, selfie sticks, tote bags and lanyards. This year we had nothing, so instead, I played “watch people pinch things from Birmingham City”. This was easier and more manageable than writing 'on the spot haikus' which may have been achievable on a slow day and might have been more of a talking point. Not having freebies meant we couldn’t generate as much frivolous traffic as in previous years, although we didn't have the budget this time and the time spent not talking about stress light bulbs probably led to a better level of engagement.

(at UCAS convention) Is Cambridge Uni here?

One particular charmer asked if Cambridge were at the UCAS fair, then looked at me as if I needed to crawl back under whichever filthy stone I’d emerged from and not bother them with any further engagement. I happily misdirected them and left them to enjoy the rest of their snobby existence.

Do you do a course in stripping? Only my mate wants to open a strip club…..

At the other end of the scale, this from Luton. Cheek goes down better than snobbery. If I’d have had the presence of mind I might have recommended a business course, but I moved things on when asked this in a focus group.

GIF from search on 'paint stripping'.
The least indecent one I could find.
Doesn't really work in the context of the blog. Sorry.

How do you pronounce ‘Bournemouth’?
I break words down. You call it ‘Bournemouth’; I’d call it “Born mouth”.

My grandparents lived in Dorset; I was able to confirm that however it's pronounced, you'd be better of in Beds.

Other points of note:

• 16 and 17 is a weird age. Some of these kids looked older than me; others looked like wee bairns.
• Tribes are alive and well. Hearteningly and although millenials and GenZed-ers and wannabes are all hooked onto portable devices, one size by no means fits all. A few draconian schools still insist their kids wear the school ties (“they won’t come to us” I was advised by a wise colleague, who proved to be almost, if not entirely spot on). There are still weirdos and introverts and thesps and cross dressers and jocks and nerds and alternatives and all sorts of wonderful
• That said, some of these new fashions are BONKERS. Especially in the eyebrow area.

Pre smoking ban PROPER eyebrows. Rad, innit?

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The day has finally arrived

Finally the day we've all been waiting for has finally arrived. A Level results are out, and Clearing has officially begun! Good luck to anyone and everyone that is getting their results today, our team are on hand and ready to answer any questions that you may have, and hopefully welcome you to the University of Bedfordshire this September!

Whenever I tell people I work at the University they always assume that I get a nice, relaxing break over the summer holidays - it's a common misconception as it's actually one of our busiest periods.

There's a lot of preparation that goes into Clearing, arranging the artwork that you've (hopefully) seen both online and out of home over the last couple of months. It's very exciting to see all of our work come together, and hear those phones ringing today. I was also very excited when I went to the cinema last week and saw our cinema advert!

Our 2018 Postgraduate Prospectus has also been printed this month, so be sure to pick one up at one of our reception desks. We work on the prospectus for several months, so it's always really exciting when we see the final product! But as we finish with one prospectus, we start with another! Can you believe we're already talking about our 2019 Undergraduate Prospectus? Next month I'll be compiling the list of courses, and starting to create a flat plan for the prospectus, as well as starting to write copy for the publication.

I'm also currently working on our Open Day plans. Now that I have taken up the role as Marketing Officer, I am responsible for ensuring the Open Day plans are implemented across all channels, which means liaising with various departments, and working with our external designers to produce our Open Day collateral.

I've also been working on various emails that will be sent to our enquirers over the next couple of months, and working with various departments within the University to find out what's been happening and what's in store! Told you I've been busy! Better get back to it!

Sara

Mastering measurement

So the word on my mind this week is measurement. To be honest, this is probably not one of the most riveting topics that I could have chosen for a blog post, but I thought I would go against the grain and not focus on the other word preoccupying the department this week – Clearing. 

Never the less as it has been a priority on my to do list, so I thought I would try and share some of my thoughts on how I am trying to be more robust in measuring our internal communications, and specifically assessing the success of campaigns and knowing how we can improve for the future.

It often feels as though when it comes to measuring the impact of campaigns, things are more straight forward for my marketing and digital colleagues (especially as their outcomes are more tangible; resulting in enquirers, applicants and ultimately students). But actually I think it is just a bit more ingrained in their practice and this is something that internal comms or at least I could learn from.

Historically I think measurement is something that internal communications has grappled with. I recently had the privilege of helping to judge Institute of Internal

Communications awards and I was blown away by the standard of entries but it was clear that the measurement side of things was a little bit weaker. 

More often than not it’s really the outputs (i.e. the number of people that read an email, or a newsletter) that gets focussed on, as I suppose it’s just easier to demonstrate. But measuring and revealing the outcomes (i.e changes in behaviour) of our communications is something that we need to place more importance on rather than just showing reach. 

We recently launched our ‘Let’s make it happen’ campaign to encourage our staff to get on board with our new strategic plan, I mentioned it in my last blog post. When thinking about planning and evaluating a campaign, internal communications professionals are concerned with what we want people to know, what we want them to feel and what we want them to do differently as a result.

I’m now in the process of measuring how successful the communications have been in:

• engaging colleagues in the development of the plan, encouraging them to contribute to each stage of the development process
• raising awareness of the new plan
• encouraging shared ownership and accountability of the plan
• urging and encouraging action to help the University to implement the plan

Some of the tools in my arsenal to evaluate this include:

• Focus groups- to gather opinions and views on what has or hasn’t worked with our communications including assessing message recall and looking at what has changed as a result
• Pulse surveys - to quantify specific measures in relation to communications
• Walk abouts- casual research to find out what people thought of the communications
• Assessing analytics and feedback from our strategic plan intranet site, emails and our newsletters
• Evaluate feedback that we received from staff that attended consultation events and town hall style events

If our market research guru Andy is reading this, he is possibly currently grimacing at the fact that I’m going to be calling on his expertise shortly. 

I think in the end this blog turned out to be a bit of an internal comms lecture, but essentially this is what we are trying to do as part of our everyday practice, to develop SMART communications objectives that are both output and outcome focussed and linked to the overall objectives of the University.

Digital first clearing

How many blogs in the HE bloggershere will, over the next few weeks be about clearing? Answer – Probably a lot.

So why move away from what everyone is talking about, let’s add to that with this week’s blog, by me, on clearing.

In the digital team we are definitely getting clearing ready.

The website has been live for two months, and is constantly evolving as we climb further up the rankings in various league tables and awards. The site this this year also boasts a wonderfully enhanced section on our success stories. Here we highlight those alumni who used clearing as an option to choose a university, who perhaps without the clearing process may have taken a different path.

They all break down that stigma that going through clearing means you weren’t good enough to get the place you wanted. We know that this wasn’t really ever the case though, and now more than ever, as behaviours change applicants are shopping around and leaving it later to apply to university. Some of the brightest are looking for the best deal on a degree course. Clearing worked for the students we feature here though, and who’s laughing now hey? The system... no, the students, because most of them are earning more than me!

Another new addition to the clearing site this year is the way we capture data. Introducing Wistia, the video players with inbuilt data capture. Or as they refer to themselves, 'your friendly neighbourhood video platform', whatever that means. We still have our traditional call back form and click to call options to capture leads, but this year the full-length version of our epic clearing video can only be viewed once you have entered your email address. Clever huh?

A beautiful, jam packed site is wonderful, but we need to get users to the site to view all these wonderful messages.

Well the latest figures from Google show that clicks on ads for education grew by 37% last year.

There was a steady 7% growth on users searching for ‘clearing’ on mobile during the first few hours of A-level results day. With this in mind we will be running some very bespoke mobile adwords campaigns, geo-targeted and optimised minute by minute on the morning of the big day.

Now I can’t reveal my hand on this too much, but it has got us in the office all hot and bothered at the thought. So over all there is a lot going on to enhance our clearing messaging and experience for 2017.

I’m more excited about it all than Donald Trump is when ever he hears Kim Jong-un mentioned at a dinner party.

Check out www.beds.ac.uk/clearing more all the latest on our 2017 campaign.