Do Influencers #AD's actually work?

Personally, I find it really difficult to write about things I don't have an opinion on. This week I think people expected me to talk about the clearing campaign photography we've had done, but honestly... I don't have anything groundbreaking to say about it. Yes it was busy and slightly chaotic, but the experience was great and the photos are looking amazing, and exactly what we'll need to pull off our new idea. So what more is there to say? Job done. I will treat you to a couple of BTS shots though, just so you feel included in the mayhem...

What I wanted to talk about instead is something that us 'marketeers' hear about a lot... and that's digital influencers. Basically, asking people who have a lot of followers in the digital space to promote your products/services to their audiences. While we've been choosing the inventory for our clearing campaign, social influencers has been a topic of conversation, and today I wanted to look into it in a bit more detail. 

1) Is it actually effective?

If you look at the stats, yes it works. A lot of media agencies will tell you it's the only truly effective way to market to students or Gen Z nowadays. In fact, Activate by Bloglovin's research has found that 67% of marketers think influencer marketing campaigns helped them reach a more targeted audience, which leads to better overall results. And why wouldn't it? To the younger audience it's essentially like being recommended a product or service from a friend, and what could be more convincing than that? 

2) When DOES it work?

Let me preface this with... I watch a lot of YouTube. And I've seen my fair share of influencer ads. From personal experience (and I imagine it to be the same amongst some), sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. The best brand work I've seen through digital creators has definitely always been the longer campaigns. If I see a creator post one #ad for a brand and then never speak about them again, I'm not believing a word they're saying. But when influencers and brands have lasting relationships it has more value to the audience. Plus it's got to be a partnership that makes sense. (I cannot emphasise this enough). 

For example: Liza Koshy works out everyday, and posts Instagram stories/Snapchats about it regularly. Liza Koshy also happens to have 15 million subscribers and 15.6 million Instagram followers. So Nike approached her. Makes sense, right? A match made in heaven. And then this happened. 20 MILLION VIEWS?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? I actually enjoyed sitting through what was essentially 8 minutes of advertising! As well as that, she created her own pair of shoes with Nike, plus they got her to host a whole bunch of panel events with athletes - both of which built value and trust with her audience. But credit where credit due, the advert only worked because it was still 100% Liza. Full of puns, double entendre, physical comedy, and most importantly... complete transparency. 

3) When does it NOT work?

When influencers promote something that you wouldn't associate them with. Or when it's forced, sounds rehearsed, or when the creator hasn't been organic. Just today I saw a vlogger promoting the DVD release of Maze Runner: The Death Cure on his channel and on Instagram. But I never saw him go and see the film in the first place, plus I've been watching him for a year and I've never even seen him set foot in a movie theatre, so why am I going to trust him to recommend me this? So fake! Yeah I watch YouTube, but I'm not dumb. (Wait, was that an oxymoron?). 

Wrong partnerships are the curse of the digital space. It would be like us asking a creator who attends another university to make a sponsored video about us. Who on earth is going to believe that? Getting your target audience to listen doesn't work if you don't have the right thing to say. 

So there you have it. A little insight into how I think marketing with digital influencers works and how it doesn't. Something for us definitely to think about, as it seems that's where a lot of marketing is headed in the future. If you have any thoughts then let me know, YouTube is easily one of my favourite topics of conversation! 

Until next time. Over and out. 

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.

Improving our intranet

As I write this, I can tell that this blog post is probably going to be a two-parter (you lucky things), therefore this post will be more about scene setting and our aims and ambitions for now.

So I’ll start with the context part. Once upon a time someone coined the term the ‘digital workplace’ (basically all of the tools and technology provided by a workplace to enable its employees to do their jobs) and ever since ICT teams and Internal communicators alike have been grappling with how they can improve collaboration, employee engagement, communication, finding and sharing of information, business applications and agile working (being able to work from anywhere at any time).

This is supposed to represent the digital workplace, hopefully you get the picture.

An intranet is one of the key components of a digital workplace and here at the University of Bedfordshire a project to review of our intranet in.beds is in full-swing (and long overdue!). It is also particularly timely as improving the ‘staff experience’ is a key priority on our new strategic plan which launches in the summer.

As part of our digital workplace offering, we’re also looking at developing other tools and encouraging the use of Office 365 and Yammer (for which I have somehow volunteered to run a fringe event about at our annual staff conference – gulp!) among others, but I will come to talk about this more in a future post.

Why is an intranet important?

Personally, I don’t believe that having an outstanding intranet is the answer to great employee engagement- there are so many factors involved here. However, I do think that it plays an important role in helping staff to do their jobs more effectively and adds to a positive staff experience (if done well!). 

What makes a great intranet?

Ideally a good intranet should include:

• An engaging and dynamic homepage
• Interesting, useful and engaging content
• An opportunity for collaboration and sharing
• A useful and intelligent search functionality
• A quick way to find important things which make it easier to get things done
• A more personalised user experience

A journey to improvement

We want to make our intranet a useful tool for our colleagues and aspire to the best practice components listed above, whilst also being realistic at the same time- it can’t all happen at once. It is something that will require continuous improvement and we will constantly need to manage a cyclical process of review, development and measurement. 

I’m pleased to say that we’re on the first steps to understanding what our colleagues need and how we can support that. We recently ran an online survey (with the help of our fabulous Market Research Manager Andrew Kingston) to identify how colleagues use in.beds and their likes and frustrations among other things. Using this, plus analysing our intranet usage stats and conducting focus groups (to come in the next few weeks), we should have a pretty good idea of where the gaps are and where we can make an improvement.

Unlike some big corporate companies out there, we don’t have masses of money to spend revamping in.beds, but with the help of our talented digital marketing team, we can go a long way to contributing to a better digital workplace for our staff.

In my next post, I will reveal what our research found and what exciting plans we have for the intranet going forward.

Making your marketing strategy work in a Digital Marketing age

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager

It's an exciting time to be a marketer. But equally, it's also a challenging one. Our customers' preferences are ever changing, and at a fast pace. And, with a digital first attitude our prospective students are 'always online' and are 'constantly connected', often will the expectation that we are too!

Modern day marketing -
always online.

Our potential students, or 'Millennials' as they are otherwise known, have grown up in an electronics-filled and increasingly online and socially-networked world. It's therefore become a pivotal moment in marketing, where the offline versus online debate falls to the way side, and the focus is firmly being placed on digital marketing just being the new norm for marketing, and our previously 'tech-savvy online users' are simply now just known as our potential customers. In other words, digital marketing is no longer an experimental innovation for us, it's a daily marketing necessity and a fundamental means through which to talk to, and reach, what we hope to be the newest crop of Bedfordshire students.

For us, failure to jump on the digital band wagon, would leave us out of touch with our millennial audience and lagging behind our neighbouring competitors. But simply placing ads isn't enough. The need to create communities, content (of the relevant sort) and rich media has never been greater.

With that said, we're going to be incredibly busy over the next few months as we start to implement the start of this year's Clearing campaign which will be predominately digitally led. Our photoshoots are about to take place in the coming weeks, where we'll be gathering a range of image-led and video content to support our digital drive over this important recruitment period.

Digital vs mobile first

Operationally, we've experienced a significant shift towards digital in recent years, which opens up a vast selection of tools and channels at our disposal. We're constantly seeing new digital platforms, websites and social media options springing up. Thankfully, we have a Media Planning and Buying agency to support us with that; helping us track down the latest innovations, trends and digital products so we can make sure we're promoting in the right spaces and are talking to the right people, whilst ensuring we're getting the best return (more on this in a future post). We're also working closely with our Digital Consultant on a regular basis who works alongside us to monitor the quality of our web traffic, and keeps an ever watchful eye on where online conversations are taking place so we can continuously refine our audience targeting and make sure our advert placements and content strategies are working hard and yielding the desired results.

Making good data decisions:
Analyse to optimise 

Ultimately, the one thing that we can not forget is that data is king. The amount of data which we can collate, monitor and observe on a daily basis provides a wealth of insight into our markets (existing or new) potential customers, and campaign performance as we track their journey. As Kylie mentioned in the previous blog post, the analytics we work with can tell us a lot about our customers, and how our promotions have performed, so we can make regular adjustments to ensure we're getting the desired results, whilst constantly learning, and adapting to ensure we're keeping ahead of the curve and are providing relevant information to inform decision making.

The ability to track all of our digital output provides valuable insight which informs our future working. We're looking forward to getting some dashboards set up ahead of our next campaign, enabling us to see in real-time how our work is performing and how we can optimise further.

An understanding of data, and the need to formulate digital and social content plans is key as part of our ongoing strategy. And, with an ever increasing competitive market place, and with more Russell Groups competing in Clearing each year, it's becoming crowded with more online marketing noise than ever before, and so the need for us to hold our own, digitally, becomes paramount.

Keep an eye on this blog for more updates on the Clearing campaign, coming soon. Interested to see what other universities are doing? Then why not take a look at Market Research Manager, Andy's Clearing blog to keep on top of the latest competitor innovations and observations.

Adding another string to our bow

I mentioned in my last blog that the [traditional] marketing team have been dipping our toe into the digital world a little more; briefing Google search and display activity as well as promoted social media.

Well, this week we’ve taken it a little bit further and had some digital training on actually implementing the activity. On Monday (at 9am!!) we had a 1.5 hour training session on setting up Google search and display ads in Google Analytics. It was a really good session and Sarah and I have since had a go at setting up our own ads. We’ve started off with a smaller campaign while we get to grips with everything – and it may have taken us way longer than the average digital marketer to set up two ads each – but we did it. We definitely felt a self of accomplishment afterwards and in our daily report we’ve already seen small numbers coming through to the website from our ads, which we got a little too excited about perhaps.

It’s really good, as marketers, to be able to add to our skillset and not only understand digital aspects of marketing, but be able to actually implement and amend them ourselves too. Next week we’ll be setting up the remainder of the campaign and having further training sessions on monitoring and tweaking on-going campaigns and setting up promoted social media posts.

I think as a team we’re really excited about being able to do more digital marketing, and help our currently small digital marketing team – there’s no I in team!

Another day, another photography shoot

I also directed another photography shoot last week, this time for our 2017 prospectus front covers. We took pictures of different groups of students in different locations/settings around our Luton campus. 

It was a busy day, but we got some great pictures. We’re now working with our design agency to choose the best photos for each version of our prospectus.

Some of our lovely students taking
part in our photography shoot

Multi-channel, Multi-tasking Marketers - The Digital Frontier

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

We 'do' digital

In true 'the Fast show' style: This week I have mostly... been in training sessions and agency meetings. Sounds fun right? Well, with current changes taking place within the department, and being part of a team who are always keen to expand our repertoire and skills set, we've taken it upon ourselves to shadow other colleagues and enhance our knowledge, particularly in the digital arena. The need to be fully integrated, and shift the weighting of our campaigns towards a stronger digital focus, means that it's becoming more and more important for us marketers to have a firm understanding of the many digital platforms available to support us in campaign planning and implementation. And so, to help us on our merry way, we've been working closely with the digital team this week, to grasp a firmer understanding of Google advertising and analytics, as well as getting some handy hints, tips and techniques to engage with our audiences through social media. It's all very exciting, and so we look forward to sharing some learnings and insight as we get more involved in upcoming campaigns, on the digital front.

Taking PRide in our work -
 to gain regional recognition

In between all of the meetings, training sessions and Marketing tasks, I've still somehow managed to squeeze in two more award entries - there's just so many exciting things going on at the moment and so it's hard to resist. This week, we've submitted two entries to the CIPRide Awards for the Thames and Chiltern region, in the categories of best Integrated Campaign (for our 2014 Clearing campaign), and best Low Budget Campaign (for the September 2014 Open day campaign, where we almost doubled the footfall compared to the previous year). The short-list is out in mid-July. It's always great to showcase the effectiveness of the work undertaken within Marketing, and it's great for the team to be able to see the results of their hard work; especially after Kylie wrote an 87 page report on Open Day insight. So it's always nice when we're able to use the wealth of data, insight and analysis to further bolster the reputation and credibility of the team through bench-marking against our fellow industry peers.

Delighted to see @uniofbeds have been shortlisted for Best Student Recruitment campaign at the @heistawards - yay! pic.twitter.com/DRxYcuht5U

— Sarah Hampton (@Sarah_Hampton) May 15, 2015

Making a PR splash - with
our Clearing flash mob

In order news, I was absolutely over the moon to see that we had been short-listed for Best Student Recruitment Campaign at this year's Heist awards. The award entry, which was wonderfully written by Krystle Hall (Campaign Officer), showcases the very best from the 2014 Clearing campaign; from our community events and recruitment roadshow, to a range of wide spanning activity which made up a fully integrated, multi-channel approach - it's all in there. And don't forget the University's very own flash mob which took place in the Mall Luton. It's quite a large short-list, but we're going to keep everything crossed that we scoop the big win at these coveted awards. The ceremony dinner is on the 9th July, so stay tuned or keep an eye on twitter @uniofbeds to watch the evening's events unfold.

Finally, as we come to the end of the week, it becomes time to bid farewell to some more MARC colleagues. Lauren Hague (Digital Marketing Officer) and Mick Hart (Publications Officer) are leaving the University this week; Lauren is leaving us to pursue new challenges in the digital marketing arena, whilst Mick is retiring after serving almost 19 years as part of the team. We wish them all the best for their future endeavours, and look forward to sending them off in the traditional MARC way. It's going to be a quiet office, come Monday!

Spreading festive cheer; Xmas parties and planning

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

We've got our list, we're checking it twice, and we're going to find out who's.... leaving on time to make the Staff Christmas party next week.

Full speed ahead as
the Jan UCAS deadline
approaches

For many offices and departments, as the festive season approaches it's a time to start winding down; a real chance to kick back, relax and enjoy the masses of mince pies and festive cheer as the holiday season approaches. But that's not quite the case for the Marketing team over in the Atrium, as December is often one of our busiest months, second only to August when it's Clearing. It's a real crunch time as we make the most of the last few weeks available to communicate with our enquirers and promote the many benefits of joining the University of Bedfordshire before the UCAS deadline in January. So, whilst term may have officially ended and the cold winter weather sets in, things are truly heating up over in Marketing HQ as we go full speed ahead to action our core enquirer activity.

Today is the day of our open evening! There is still time to book: http://t.co/yXOmx1LvST pic.twitter.com/UbeWXTxF5M
— uniofbeds (@uniofbeds) December 10, 2014

The last week has seen the Marketing and Digital Marketing teams working hard to promote a festive open evening. This event wasn't originally planned into the recruitment schedule, but was a quick response to some unforeseen events taking place in the town which resulted in our November event having to be postponed at the last minute. Not to be deterred, the team set out to rework all of the campaign visuals, and devise new marketing plans to push out the new event details, with the help of our CRM team as they communicated the new event details out and encouraged sign ups. The event was a real success overall, and we're pleased that we were able to successfully retain some of the enquirers who had originally signed up to attend the event in November.

New 'Apply Now' artwork

All change, all change!
Now that all open days are officially over for the year, it's time for a quick change of all the campaign artwork again, as we move from plugging our on campus visits, to driving applications directly to UCAS for 2015 entry. We're also busily working away on our conversion newsletters, 13 applicant newsletters to be precise. These are the very first communications that our applicants will receive from us, and so we're aiming to get them off to print just before Christmas, so they're ready to be mailed out almost as soon as we get back.

For those who know me well, you'll know I love a good report and a bit of Marketing data. And so in the last few weeks we've been exploring how we can better track the impact of our work. After a number of meetings and after bouncing a few emails back and forth between the marketing and digital teams, we've finally got a new tracking url system agreed and in place, thanks to Paul in the digital team. It's much easier to recall and recognise than the previous tracking we used, and should provide us with much more insight into engagement with our materials. So watch out for this url popping up in the new year across our marketing materials.

Although it's an incredibly busy time, we always somehow manage to find some time to have some fun along the way. And what better way to get into the festive spirit than by donning our best festive favourites for Christmas Jumper Day.

Rockin' around the Christmas tree (left to right):
Krystle, Clare, Sarah, Beverley and Kylie.

As the year comes to a close, we wish you a very Merry Christmas from everyone here within the Marketing team. Stayed tuned to read more about our key initiatives in the new year.

Offline To Online; The Big Debate

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

It's good to talk:
Postgraduate Marketing Forums

As usual, it's been another busy few weeks in the central Marketing team. I've been getting out and about; this time attending one of my favourite training sessions: the Postgraduate Marketing Forum. Run by Postgraduate Studentships, these forums are great for two reasons. 1: It's like group therapy, where we get to share problems in the sector and get some great reassurance that we're actually ahead of the game when it comes to many marketing initiatives. 2: It's great to talk to other Postgraduate Marketers from universities across the UK, and hear what they are up to and what they are planning.

One of the many slides: discussing the many
media platforms

This particular forum was entitled "From offline to online... and keeping them there". It was a great nod to the shift towards digital marketing, but had a strong emphasis on not leaving traditional media (print) behind - sounds like a recipe for integrated marketing if you ask me! The slides provided an overview of the national picture, which showed a decline in Postgraduate recruitment nationally. However we're pleased to share that for our September intake of PGT students we had a 30% increase compared with the previous year - so it's great to see that we're bucking the national trend ;-). Overall it was an engaging and informative session. The forum highlighted what we're already doing really well, and threw up some ideas which we may dabble with, and test, over the coming months to see what impact this has, if any, on our marketing and recruitment strategies.

Back in the office, and it's been all go on the publications front. Not only have we signed off the Mini Undergraduate guide for print, but as of today the main Undergraduate 2015 Prospectus has been approved for print (hurrah!). It'll be making its way over to our printers for tomorrow morning, and then we move swiftly into the print production stage of our schedule. That means there's one more round of proofing standing in the way of the finished product. It'll be ready for the 7 March (ready to be included in the Heist mailing to schools and careers advisers nationally) so we'll keep you posted as to when it's ready for your perusal.

Moving online: Postgraduate Virtual Event

This week has also seen us take part in our third Postgraduate Virtual Open Event - a culmination of 6 weeks of hard campaign work from our Marketing Assistant Clare, as she actioned a lot of marketing activity to drive up enquiries for this event. This year a lot of work was done from our digital counterparts (thank you!) to refresh video content and the way in which we capture data for the event so that we can continue with our conversion efforts post event. Now that the event is over we'll be pulling together all of our stats for an event wash up report, and will be able to make some further recommendations as to how we can improve these events in the future.

There's still no progress in writing awards entries, and we're coming up to the CIPR deadline. And Heist are not far behind; they're already touting their deadline dates. So, now that the main UG publications have been completed, here's hoping we can turn some attention to report writing and demonstrating our success!

Full of pride after going for Gold

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

It wouldn't be a typical week at work if we didn't have some form of urgent job to do. And this week was certainly no different, with the urgent task taking the form of a January start campaign. Here in the Marketing team we do love a good challenge and so we set about planning and preparing for this marketing push. Our freelancer Pippa was devising the activity itself, and so we have been busying ourselves with arranging and scheduling a photoshoot that will form the creative for the campaign. Easy you say? Think again.

Marketing meets Freshers
Left to right: Michelle, Forrest, Pippa, Bayleigh, Max,
Anita, and Me!

Since the ITV2 show, Freshers, had just finished showing on TV, we decided to link our campaign with the story of the freshers' that we had been avidly watching for the last three weeks on our screens, as they settle into student life at Bedfordshire. A few phone calls and emails later and we had a photographer booked, and all four freshers confirmed. Now all we had to do was source the locations, devise a shot list and brief the digital team on filming requirements.

Each of the freshers did an excellent job and gave up a lot of their time to take part in our photoshoot. It was a packed day, with back-to-back photography sessions, but boy were we impressed with the end result... I must confess that we absolutely loved meeting Forrest, and even managed to get a sneaky picture with the freshers before the end of the day - all for the purposes of blog writing and informing our audience, of course (see above).

You'll see our January campaign taking shape over the next few weeks, so as it goes live we'll share the creatives with you - and do let us know what you think!

In other news, we attended the Thames and Chiltern CIPR PRide awards on Friday (1 Nov) at Sopwell House in St Albans as we were up for Best External Publication for our 2013 Postgraduate Prospectus. We were joined by the Digital Marketing team who were short-listed for Best use of Digital, and Best use of Social Media.

Celebrating our award success on centre stage
Left to right: Lauren, me, Andy, Elisabeth and Paul

Our Digital Marketing team won awards in both of their categories: with a Silver for our Corporate film in the Best use of Digital category, and won an impressive Gold accolade for Best use of Social Media in our Clearing campaign - a massive congratulations! And we were amazed and absolutely thrilled to also win not just one, but two Gold awards, even though we only entered one category! In addition to bagging a Gold award for our Postgraduate Prospectus, we were awarded an additional Gold award from the judges for Best use of Research, Planning, Measurement and Evaluation, for the Postgraduate Prospectus (which made me very pleased to see that all of that number crunching and analysis hasn't gone un-noticed). However, Lauren and I were still in celebration mode after winning Gold earlier in the evening and actually missed this announcement. So, after a short nudge from Paul, our Digital Marketing Manager, and we swiftly made our way in a rather dazed state to receive the award. Indeed a fabulous evening! Read our award-winning entry here.

Read a #PRideTC award winning case study from @uniofbeds who picked up gold for their use of measurement & evaluation http://t.co/eXJHePgdq5
— CIPR (@CIPR_UK) November 4, 2013

Supporting our Business academics
over at Bedford

In and amongst all of the above, I managed to squeeze in some time to join our Business academics over at the Bedford campus. I was invited to sit on an assessment panel for our final year students who were tasked with presenting a business case for a charity event to raise money - it was great to hear about their project management, as well as their innovative ideas for the actual event itself, and generating awareness for their cause, but most importantly (for me anyway) their marketing and how they were ensuring ROI.

Finally, I'm pleased to share with you that we have now been joined by our new Marketing Assistant, Clare O'Brien, and so we've been busy setting up inductions and introducing Clare to the wider MARC team, kicking off with an obligatory welcome lunch at none other than Pizza Express. Clare's joined us at a great time, as we're just about to get going with the 2015 Undergraduate Prospectus. What better way to find out about the University, than by researching, writing and arranging photoshoots all around campus?

One month in and busy with exciting Graduation, Clearing and other campaigns

By Scott Buist – Marketing Assistant

Well what can I say? It’s been a busy four weeks since I started working within the University’s marketing team and I’ve settled in well. I feel I understand the dynamics of the team now and have a much better understanding of the University and how it operates.

As a team we have all been very busy with various different projects which we are running. Namely our subject guides which are now almost finished. We’re working closely with our in house designer to make sure they’ve got the most up-to-date and exciting information in them, ready to send to our Undergraduate students later in September. The main difference this year is that they’re going to be digital versions only, so watch this space for when they go live on our website. As mentioned in the previous blog posts, our 2014 prospectus has been put to bed and is with the printers – we’re really excited to see the printed thing after all of this time. Plans are now well underway for our 2015 publications; plan early as they say!

I am currently working on our award-winning e-zine: PG Life, which we send to our Postgraduate enquirers and subscribers each month, and so far it’s going well. I’ve been out and about on campus this week interviewing some of our students which you’ll be able to see in the next issue. We are working to a tight deadline but I am sure we will succeed. Sign up via: www.beds.ac.uk/pgstudy if you’re not already subscribed. And, if you have any University news and stories to share with us, let us know – we’re always on the hunt for exciting content to share with our prospective students.

Normally it would be Sarah and Lauren who produce the e-zine, but for the next month or so it’s all down to me! I wanted to say a huge congratulations to Lauren who having completed a degree in digital media; her move over to our digital team seems like a natural career path for her and I am sure she will love it and, it’s only a stone’s throw away from us at the moment, so I am sure we will be able to benefit from her expertise.

With Clearing about to kick off this week (15 August to be precise), I am sure that the next few weeks will keep us all as busy, if not more so than we have already been.