A silk purse from a sow’s ear

In the last month or so, I’ve attended a couple of conferences. I was pleased, on both occasions, to deputise for other colleagues in MARC, and hope I didn't cause too much collateral damage, what with my reticence, cynicism, monkey boots and too many layers of clothing.

The conferences I attended:

• The Future of Student Recruitment, by the IDP Connect folk (the new name for the WhatUni and CUG), in the wonderful garden area at the Barbican
• UCAS’ Teachers and Advisors Fair, in the rather grand and gilded surroundings of The Principal Hotel in Manchester.

Go me, RIGHT?

Kingo in conference

Well sort of. Yes. And no. I was a shoe in for Marketing in the first instance and for Recruitment in the second. Both disciplines are, in honesty, beyond me. Yes, I’m one of the old hands in MAR, but I’d struggle to get sell a fully plumbed in water cooler in a desert. My expertise, such as it is, is in Market Research. Which despite and almost because of its bad press, requires scruples and a level- or at worst a pretence - of even-handedness.

I had to represent this. Our blurb for the UCAS conference. I mainly achieved it through staring into the middle distance.

The UCAS event had some interesting and (for me) relevant sessions. It was also really enlightening to hear about teachers and advisors’ perspectives. And guess what? They’re not happy about unconditional offers. Can’t blame them. If you aren’t ‘up on’ the thorny issue, where have you been? Here’s a Bob-piece on our response to the practice and how we’re dipping our toes in the filthy pond of despair.

The UCAS event was a two day affair. Sadly, our allowance for meals didn’t stretch to the £60 asking price for the UCAS dinner, so I slummed it for dinner round the student quarter around Oxford Road. Two conversations struck me. Nothing to do with HE, but the first (point 1 below) definitely from a party connected, presumably to either Manchester or Manchester Metropolitan University:

1.  A table of people were wondering what kind of monster would eat crumpets without butter or spread. Can see their point. They were referring to a mutual colleague who indulged in such fantastic behaviour. A monster. “Off his head half the time,” one of the group observed;
2. In a different establishment, in a room dedicated, rather perplexingly, to Jack Daniels, a group of three people discussed the likelihood of being sent to prison for a driving violation if the offender already has six points on their licence. Wasn’t a discussion I wanted to get into.

I’m going to try and bring some more meaningful feedback to the MAR team. Some of it will almost certainly appear in my intranet feedback page. Shout if you’re interested, in the meantime.

So anyway, I'm off to see The Sleaford Mods at the 100 Club in London this evening. I often post a clip of music at the music at the end of my pieces, but The Sleaford Mods are big on swearing, and not so big on tunes. Instead, here's a beautiful piece of British 60s jazz, by the Rendell Carr Quintet. Check out that Coltrane-esque soprano. These guys were on top of their game. I missed out on a recent repressing of their much sought for albums and feel sad about it. 

Conferences and awaydays

Last week was Staff Conference week. This week, our departmental awayday.

First, our staff conference. Thankfully, unlike every other conference, delegates aren't bombed with lanyards, bags, gimmicks and other rubbish made from materials destined for landfill. No doubt we're helping the planet. Unofficially, I suspect budgets don't extend to such trinkets. Nor should they. I have a cupboard at home, full of promotional guff. I want the space back, though I'm terrified it'll choke guillemots and poison oceans.

Guillemots? Here's our honorary Doc John Hegley, of this parish, to explain:

Anyway. Here are some random nuggets from the day:

• The free lunch packs went down a storm. For some reason, I didn't get one;
• I was, however, happy recipient of two bags of Minstrels and a packet of Twiglets thanks to the excellent efforts of colleagues;
• I also enjoyed, though was slightly perplexed by the debate about "Marmite flavour" Twiglets;
• As if there is any other flavour. I know there was some tampering with a Worcester Sauce variant, but that, surely, was just a try out....

Groucho - they're messing the flavours up again

The sessions - those I attended - were fine. Special mention to John Pitts' gang culture talk, which was excellent. And for Ibraham, last week's blogger and VCO intern, who facilitated some good debate after showing a video TED talk, featuring an American chap with a headset, extolling the virtues of chaos over comfort when it comes to self deveopment.

I'm not sure about TEDs. Condensing intelligence into rhetorical models and arguments is a useful skill, but I like to take my time and see all sides. As I say, Ibraham was excellent. But nothing in the video I saw convinced me. I left with two thoughts; first, that the debate had been great. Second, I'm sure I've been here before, sitting with a comp coffee, in my workplace, being told to embrace jeopardy. I'm not sure I've got time for all that any more.

Me and Jeopardy? Sure. We go back...

Yesterday, we had our MARC awayday. Or MAR awayday. We lost the 'C'. Name change tbc and pending and all that. This awayday was hands on and operational. In some ways, it's a shame the Uni's strategists and TEDs don't get along to these events, though they'd probably get in the way, hogg the biscuits and, err, change the dynamic.

UCAS analysis was aired, though there seemed more value in reflecting, catching breath and pondering the reduction in the size of the team. There are about 30 of us in MARC, from around 60 four or five years ago. The awayday gave us 30 time to reflect, get real and talk about such stuff and not be given a kind of stock response about silos or smarter working.

Departmental awaydays seem more real and visceral somehow. And to the point. By nature, it's bottom up rather than top down. There's no talk about comfort zones or jeopardy; no blue sky thinking or horizon scanning. The flip charts have pictures rather than bullets. They're less jargony and more impactful. Even if impactful isn't really a word.

Then we had a barby, educational activity and bingo. Not exactly work stuff, but an invaluable time to reconnect with each other as humans. With Clearing just round the corner, this 'getting on' and understanding how people might work and react is important.

Anyway, these are my views. Of course, conferences and awaydays are neither the same thing, nor polar opposites. They shouldn't be compared, one versus the other. But then this is my blog. I've leave with an analogy; awaydays feel more like punk rock or free jazz; expressive, bumpy noise, with some heart and creativity, compared to many conferences I've been to, which feel more akin to orchestras  playing nursery rhymes in a great big echo chamber.

Spinning straw into gold at Youth Marketing Strategy LDN 2018

Insta selfies, bunny ear filters and stalls manned by twenty somethings with a skin fade wearing Augmented Reality headsets. Yes that is what I walked into last week when I headed down to Brick Lane in London’s East End to present at Voxburners Youth Marketing Strategy (YMS) LDN 2018

Two days of discussions from organisations on how to engage young people with brands and products. From Snap Chat to Love Island, Google, to well Bedfordshire, there was a range of insight shared from brands across the event.

So, I was asked to speak on day one alongside four other universities as part of the higher education strand. It was great for Bedfordshire to be asked to share or story of how we engaged young people into converting their offer with us during clearing into an accept. To be honest the story is a pretty good one and one worth sharing. So here is a quick synopsis.

As part of our clearing operation we needed to up our game with conversion. Each year we generate thousands of calls to clearing hotline and make thousands of offers, but we often fall down when it comes to converting those offer holders into actually accepting. During Clearing 2017 we pioneered something new. Now it’s not often we get to say we pioneered something, especially one with such impact, so stay with me, it gets good.

We bought the licence for an app called Bonjoro, it’s a tool that lets you film short personalised videos to an individual and send them via email. We asked our academics to record some to offer holders and send as a follow up to the call they had received where the offer had been made. It sounds simple right?


The most labour intensive part was actually uploading all the email addresses, which isn’t too bad as I initially thought the worst bit would be getting buy in from the academic to take part. You see quite often academics and marketing don’t mix, unless it is a poster created using clip art and Publisher. With this proposition though they seem to love it, possibly something to do with the personal nature of it and they got to talk, and academics love to talk.

But here is the good bit, over clearing we sent 672 Bonjoro videos via email to offer holders. Of those 534 recipients opened their emails; that is a 74% open rate! Pretty good conversion right there.

Of those who opened the videos 316 were watched; that is a 47% watch rate. Of those who watched 288 accepted their offer with us.

The cost for a 12 month license was under 5k however, the 288 undergraduate offers that we accepted after receiving a Bonjoro would, after completing a three-year undergraduate degree, have generated £2.5m revenue for the University. No other conversion tool has spun straw into gold the same way as this during clearing. The moral, it is a tool we will be using again.


It wasn’t just Bedfordshire talking personalisation though, it seemed to be a major theme in many of the brands presenting, and was certainly coming through in all the research presented as something young people want more and more of.


The rest of my day at the event consisted of learning more about how young people want to be engaged and a big part of this was around authenticity. One of the challenges I have brought back from the event is asking how do we tell the student story without endless amounts of case studies that risk being seen as edited and manipulated? How do we strip back our messaging to begin telling our student success in a raw authentic unedited form, while still being part of a brand? I’ll leave that one there to perhaps pick up on a future blog. 


While we ponder the above, the one thing we can definitely continue doing is personalising beyond sending an email and inserting name here. Let’s hope we have a new, exciting, creative tool to present at next years conference, and in the meantime, here are some of the Bonjoro's sent during Clearing 2017.

CASE Conference 2014

Last week I travelled to Edinburgh for the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Europe Annual Conference 2014, along with almost 1,000 delegates from countries across the continent.

I boarded a flight from Luton airport early on Tuesday morning and arrived just in time for midday registration and opening plenary. The two and a half days that followed were full of inspiring case studies, funny speeches, informative presentations and motivational advice. A couple of ideas particularly inspired me:

• Digital content marketing
  A brilliant session with Oxford Brookes’ Tim Gibson and Richard Sills sparked lots of ideas about how best to use digital content to content to engage audiences. Interestingly, the University magazine, Observe, is ‘going digital;’ the print version of the annual magazine is now available as a digital page-turner, and Observe will soon be supported by an online, interactive, content-driven social space where students will easily be able to share and comment on content
• Connecting with people can make us relevant
  Jason Simon from University of California (UC) got me thinking about how I could be talking about the University of Bedfordshire in the marketing material I produce. UC ran a great campaign focussed on connecting themselves to peoples’ every day, local lives: ‘Whether you know it or not UC has probably played a part in your day/life.’ This opened up opportunities for them to draw in research (ie. our researcher has created a tool kit to help social workers help you), specific courses (ie. our nurses are helping the people of Luton in the L&D hospital right now) etc. Making the most of our good news by making them into stories that really connect with people.

There were a few fun evenings of entertainment involved too! It was great to attend the Welcome Reception at the National Museum of Scotland at the end of day one:

Great space for the @CASE_Europe Welcome Reception tonight. Day one is complete. GO TEAM #ceac14 #Edinburgh pic.twitter.com/4YwVC5MyH0
— Sam Sciberras (@SamSciberras7) August 26, 2014

Of course, taking three days out of the office has left me with a hefty to-do list this week, but it's well worth it; I've returned to my desk full of ideas that I hope to put into action over the coming weeks and months.

It's all in the Heist...

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

On the first day back after my week away in sunny Greece I came back to the most exciting news: The Marketing team have only gone and got themselves short-listed for a coveted Heist Award!

#heist2014 nominations released. See the full list. http://t.co/QEjCNqRSnx #goodluck #lovehe @havaspeople
— Heist Awards (@heistawards) May 12, 2014

The who's who of Marketing:
The Annual Heist Awards 

I must admit it was a rather last minute entry, and so a big thanks go to Andy Kingston our Market Research Manager, and Michelle Ramsumair our Marketing Administrator for helping me put the entry together in record timing. Usually it would take approximately one month to have an entry worthy of entering, and that's only if your stats stack up! For this particular deadline, we had the almost impossible task of putting together an entry in less than a week. So, to say that we were excited at the news was a complete and utter understatement. For us, and for many other Marketing professionals, the Heist awards is our version of the Oscars - the pinnacle of a HE Marketers career, and benchmark of best practice amongst the sector. A little over the top you may think, but to even make it to the short-list is an achievement in itself, so we're going to enjoy every moment in the run up to the big awards dinner. It may even warrant a new dress for the occasion :-)

Pretty pleased to hear that the @uniofbeds Marketing Team has been short-listed for Best UG Prospectus at this years' @heistawards #Excited
— Sarah Hampton (@Sarah_Hampton) May 12, 2014

Our short-listed entry for:
Best Undergraduate Prospectus

Up until this point I've only ever written award submissions for our Postgraduate work, and so this is the first (and hopefully not the last!) piece of Undergraduate work to be short-listed since I've been in the post of Marketing Manager. I was joking with other colleagues in the department to say that I find quite a lot of my time is spent compiling and writing awards these days as opposed to getting on with our actual Marketing work, but laughs aside, we are always looking to benchmark our work against industry and demonstrate best practice, as not only is it a great pat on the back, but helps raise the profile of our work, and always helps our cause when liaising with academics and the wider university in being able to prove that we really do know what we're talking about! We're up for the title of Best Undergraduate Prospectus (for our 2014 publication), against 12 other universities, including the likes of Manchester Metropolitan, Edge Hill, Loughborough and the University of Leicester. You can read the full list here.

On my travels to the
University of Birmingham

In other news, I took a trip over to the University of Birmingham last week to attend the '2015 Postgraduate Market Changes Conference', run in conjunction with FindAMasters, Heera and UKCGE. I must admit I didn't have high expectations at first, purely based on previous one day training sessions I've attended over the last few months, but as soon as the sessions started I was very impressed with the quality of the sessions and speakers, and how willing people were to share their PG initiatives. I was frantically scribbling throughout the whole day and came back feeling very inspired.

Feeling like a student after
spending a day in the
Learning Centre

Sessions which stood out to me in particular included the talk from Future Index on 'Making Postgraduate Education Marketing Brilliant' - which focused on current and future trends, and some exemplary case studies of Universities not just in the UK, who have some interesting initiatives set up for PG Marketing. The networking sessions with other Universities were great also. I was able to pick the brain of a key competitor, unknown to them, which proved very insightful. I'm hoping to find a quiet hour or two this week to revisit my notes, and to see whether I can progress a few ideas in time to make it into our 2015 Postgraduate Annual Plan.

Stay tuned and I'll keep you informed once I've organised my thoughts.

In the middle of the action

By Michelle Ramsumair, Marketing Administrator

In Marketing it's always a learning curve, whether you are learning new skills or discovering what you enjoy doing. I am definitely learning that I enjoy being away from the desk, interacting with people, rather than on a PC. Nothing wrong with desk work, but it's just not me.

Last week I joined Paul Fryer and Sarah Hampton at the Inside Government 'The Future of HE Marketing" Conference 2014 in London. I enjoyed being able to give some support and be a friendly face in a sea of the unfamiliar. There were many people scribbling away and nodding throughout which is always a good sign your audience are engaged, and shows how insightful their presentation was.

Straight after, there was no time to break but I was onward bound to Newcastle to join Josie from Student
Recruitment. Always wanted to go there so volunteered to assist at the UCAS convention at the Newcastle Metro Radio Arena. En-route I had Disney's Frozen to keep me company (highly recommended by the way).

The event took place the next day, and once we finally found the entrance, set up our stand and doors opened, it was game on to speak to as many potential students as possible, providing them with the information they wanted about the course, application process and how they can find out more. It's like a one stop shop where potential students can visit stands from universities from across the country to collect information to help them start thinking about where to study. I love to talk so perfect opportunity and as a graduate of the University of Bedfordshire, I have a lot to promote! Usually it's a great excuse for students to pick up as many freebies. Then they soon realise that they've only reached halfway round the stands and already have a pile of prospectuses which they can barely balance.

One day was down another to go, but we had to travel to Middlesborough ready to do the same the next day. Didn't get a chance to see the Angel of the North unfortunately, but determined to one day!

Thankfully then came the bank holiday weekend. Sleep and catching up on TV shows were on my agenda, and the only things on there. I booked a second holiday to Israel for later this year. This then looked rather small compared to my mum and sister's impulse holiday purchase to Dubai and Thailand in two weeks time. At least I still have something to look forward to!

And we're live! - Getting to grips with CRM

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

LIVE: Our new CRM personalised web portal:
Belong at Bedfordshire

Hi everyone. It's been a short while since my last post. But now that I'm back from my staycation, I'm already ploughing through hundreds of emails and getting my calendar filled up with meetings to progress some exciting initiatives. First on my list was to progress the launch of our new CRM system, Belong at Beds. This has been a long project in the making, headed up by our CRM Manager Amanda, and Digital Marketing Manager, Paul. Since I took up the Marketing Manager role last June, I've been getting my teeth into it also; understanding what it is, what it can do, and what we need to do to get it up and running. After a few initial delays in development, we're finally ready to go live, which we're all very excited about. Training complete, data at the ready, content schedule devised. We're going for a soft launch whilst we settle into working with a live system and live data, but that's not to say we're scrimping on the content. So what are you waiting for? Take a look for yourself.

Now that the March cohort of students have arrived, it means that our MSc Project Management Distance Learning Marketing plan has come to an end. Over the last few days I've been collating stats and assessing the performance of our digital communications to pull together into an end of campaign report. Here, we'll be able to look at what activity has worked particularly well for us, and what hasn't, all of which will help us plan for future campaigns and make recommendations for improvements. So far it's looking good in terms of traffic generated and reach. I've also got my hands on our student numbers for the courses, and it seems that we've met the original targets set at the start of the campaign. It's always great to see when a campaign has gone well and delivered on it's initial objectives (Well done team!). The report will soon be available on the Staff Intranet site in.beds, so if you're an internal member of staff reading this blog and want to know more, be sure to take a look, and do get in touch to discuss how the Marketing team can support your courses.

New UCMK, Milton Keynes Prospectus
ready June 2014

In other news, work is now well underway on the UCMK prospectus. Kylie, Marketing Officer, and Clare, Marketing Assistant, have been busily updating text, imagery, and auditing courses to feature in the 2015 publication. We're now ready to brief this in to our agency, and so look forward to seeing 1st proofs shortly. We can then turn our attention to the PG 2015 Prospectus. I've audited all of our Postgraduate provision to form a flatplan, and we're now ready to start reworking content over the next few weeks. We'll keep you posted on the progress of these publications, and make sure you keep checking back to get a first-look at the visuals.

Presentation preparation: Boosting our PG
Profile

In between all of the above, I've also been doing a fair bit of number crunching to look at our Postgraduate student numbers between 2011 and 2013. Paul Fryer, who heads up our Digital team, and myself have both been invited to present at the Inside Government Conference: The Future of Higher Education Marketing 2014 later this month on the success of our Postgraduate marketing. Our talk title is: Enhancing Postgraduate Student Recruitment Through Developing A Digital Presence. Wish us luck!

On the case

By Sarah Hampton - Marketing Manager

Arriving at the Case Conference

This week is my first week back in the office, and also my first official week as the new Marketing Manager, having been away at the Case Europe Annual Conference following on from the recent bank holiday. As my remit has now expanded to look after both Undergraduate and Postgraduate Marketing (In my former role as Marketing Officer my main domain was Postgraduate), I decided that I needed to refresh my knowledge, and what better way to reacquaint myself than by attending a three day conference dedicated to Higher Education!

Pen poised; fetching purple lanyard - that can only mean 1thing. I'm @mcr_central ready to begin the @caseconference @CASE_Europe #ceac2013
— Sarah Hampton (@Sarah_Hampton) August 27, 2013

Manchester Convention Centre

This years' Case Conference was held at the Manchester Convention Centre, and played host to more than 900 delegates from all areas of Marketing, Communications, Digital Marketing, Alumni Relations and Fundraising. It really provided a great networking opportunity, and in my usual sponge-like way, I was able to soak up lots of interesting information about what challenges other universities are facing, and how they are tackling them. It was also great to catch up with some companies that we've worked with closely over the last year including the Guardian, and Graduate Prospects.

Reputation, reputation, reputation!
One of the many sessions at Case.

The conference itself can be quite intensive, with back-to-back sessions lined up within each specialised area. For the duration of the three days I opted to follow the 'Marketing track' as closely as possible, attending sessions such as "We're all marketers now - engaging the organisation in the development of a marketing culture" and "Stand apart from the crowd - uncovering and proving your unique selling points" - both of which are quite topical and timely for us at Bedfordshire. I also attended a session run by the University of Reading, entitled "The 3 R's: Reputation, reputation, reputation" (see above image). Quite an insightful look into managing brands, and how not to - with a few humourous case studies thrown in there for good measure.

China Town, Manchester

To round up my experience in Manchester, I teamed up with our very own Alumni Relations Manager, Lucia Limb (who was also a delegate); and we did what any self respecting tourist would do: head on down to China town, and so that is exactly what we did! We were spoilt for choice as we took in the sights, sounds, and delicious smells; and promptly settled down for what was an incredible feast of food.

For some reading this blog, you'll be wondering why I'm not reporting back on the first evening in Manchester which was spent with my new found HE friends, well, in short it involved a fabulous rum bar, many cocktails, and a very slow start to the next day. But that's for another blog, another time. ;-)