Another week closer to Clearing

With A-level results a week today it's been an interesting week in the office! Clearing is the no. one topic of conversation and everyone is prepping last minute bits and pieces to ensure everything is in place. I hope by now you've all seen some of our new artwork, either online or around campus. We're all really pleased with the finished result and hope you like it!

This week I had a tour of the new library and I must say it looks fantastic! It's a great space and it certainly helped to get my steps up for the day walking down the nine floors (yes I have a fitbit and yes I did take the lift up - I'm not that crazy!). I'm currently arranging some student videos for the PG e-zine, PG Life, so I'm going to see if I can film in the new library and show it off a bit - watch this space!

I've also been working on the more than a degree site and finding out about some more initiatives at the University including the psychology film club and various trips run by the Business School. It's great to still be finding out about various activities that our students can get involved in, and it just shows what a wide variety of co- and extra-curricular activities we have on offer. 

Over the next few days I'm also going to be working on our Postgraduate online profiles - making sure our profiles on external websites are as up-to-date as possible. It'll be great to be able to add the information about the new library to the various websites as well as the latest NSS results.

I'm also looking ahead to next month when the new set of freshers will start their university journey! I'm hoping to be able to do some photography and videography at some of the events which we will be able to use on social media and in our e-zines throughout the year. I love going out and meeting our students - it also helps me build a nice list of contacts to call upon when we're planning our marketing photo-shoots!

Culture - a Luton thing?

Funny things have happened on campus over the last few weeks. Stands, pagodas, stalls, marquees, student ambassadors and freshers’ angels have sprouted where before, there was a distinct lack of stands, pagodas, stalls, marquees, student ambassadors or freshers’ angels. The last week of September and first week of October saw the beginning of the new academic year and soaring campus energy levels which have since been ever so slightly jaded by a downturn in the weather and an upturn in beach parties and other luridly themed student nights.

A warm welcome should continue to be extended, not only to the University of Bedfordshire, but also to Luton. Or Bedford. Or Milton Keynes, or Aylesbury, Barnfield, Arthur Mellows, Majan or wherever else University students are. Wherever you’re studying, welcome.

Those arriving at Luton – our biggest campus – may be wondering what they’ve let themselves in for. Yes, we have state of the art buildings, but Luton – the town - often makes the news for the wrong reasons and has been the butt of many stand ups sitcoms, adverts and novelty hit parade smashes. Like this. Or this. The town has been an easy target over the years, but its folk always bounce back.

Luton's Bear Jazz and Blues club

From a student’s point of view, part of Luton’s appeal may be that it’s on London’s doorstep with fast trains linking town to capital in less than half an hour. That’s less than half an hour assuming there are no weekend engineering works or staff shortages and assuming, too, that travel is undertaken in a southerly direction. It would take a deluded or strange fellow to suggest Luton is London’s equal, but outside the Uni, the town boasts a vibrant jazz club, art centre, as well as a range of clubs, museums, galleries, sport and – according to a few  – “by far the greatest (football) team the world has ever seen”. Gems may be hard to uncover, but for precisely this reason, they’re more rewarding when you do find them.

Here are a few choice facts about Luton you may or may not be familiar with and which you might want to bandy about if and when the need arises:

•  The aforementioned Luton Town was the first club in the South of England to turn fully professional in 1891;
•  Peripatetic Polish literary giant Joseph Conrad lived, for a while, just outside Luton (in a building which still stands and is visible from the southern side of the airport runway);
• Luton Hoo is hugely popular as a film location and has been used in films and programmes including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Call the Midwife, War Horse, Gosford Park and A Shot in the Dark (the last of which features cinema’s greatest Billiards scene ever);
• When it was completed in the early 1970s, The Mall was – very briefly – the largest covered shopping centre in Europe;

  

  The Mall in the 1970s looking like The Mall in 2015

• Music and musical acts associated with Luton include flute wielding folk rockers Jethro Tull, goth punk pioneers UK Decay and best-forgotten potato-like 80s soul pop sensation Paul Young;
• Luton has had more than one castle built within the town's limits in the Middle Ages, with the silver line on the pavement running into the main entrance of the Campus Centre showing where the moat of one of these castles ran;
• The M1 was officially “inaugurated” in Luton in 1953;
• Luton's town hall was built in the 1930s after the original structure was burned down in the Peace Day Riots of 1919.

So, for all those who run Luton down; no, we don’t have Bedford’s history, Milton Keynes; shopping, St Albans’ money or those cosy, quaint English Chiltern village greens and whatnot. That said, they’re all pretty close, and for the curious and those looking for opportunity and a chance to carve a niche, make a mark and all that good stuff, Luton really isn’t such a bad prospect.

Panels, planning and Postgraduate Awards - all in a weeks work

By Sarah Hampton - Marketing Manager

Well firstly I do apologise for the late blog posting - it's been very busy within the Marketing team lately and since our last posting there's been lots going on that we can share with you. So do bear with me whilst I rattle through and bring you up to speed...

After all of our efforts over the past few months, our Clearing campaign for this year has finally come to a close. Freshers' Week is now just a stones throw away and so we're excited to see our campus get filled up with this years' new cohort of students as we start to see them settle in to their new surroundings and breathe new life into our campuses, after the last few months of summer seeming like a ghost town. But, as one job finishes another begins, and so it will be no surprise to hear that we're already straight into our 2014 marketing campaigns.

Failing to plan is
planning to fail!

I've been busying myself with meeting colleagues from our Digital Marketing, Telemarketing, Market Research, and Recruitment teams to discuss our plans and activity for the next academic year, as well as changes we'd like to make, and looking at ways that we can, as a team, implement some new and exciting ideas (more on these in future posts). It's all in the early stages at the moment and still quite hush hush, so I'll be able to share more with you as ideas progress.

Getting ahead of the game
with our Sports webpage

Some information that I can share with you is the success of our recent Postgraduate Sport campaign which ran between June and September. Working with our Sport departments based at our Bedford campus, we devised a marketing plan which involved trialling some promoted tweets for the very first time, direct marketing, as well as course features on Prospects and Masters Compare.

I hope to have the report on this activity finalised shortly, but some interim highlights include a 42% uplift to our PGT Sport applicants (post campaign), and a 65% uplift in applications compared with the previous year. A job well done if we do say so ourselves!

Role reversal with many candidates
posing some interesting questions to
the panel 

I'm always quite amazed at how much we're able to plough through, considering the amount of time I've actually spent at my desk in the last week or two. For the last week in particular I feel as though I could give the X Factor a run for their money as I don my interview attire and sit on panel after panel to meet new candidates as we interview for some vacancies within the wider MARC team. First up was a two-day stint to support the Recruitment team in their search for a new Recruitment Assistant. Candidates delivered excellent and insightful presentations into our many Postgraduate audiences and how we can better target them. With Postgraduate marketing being quite close to my heart I really enjoyed hearing what everyone had to say and what challenges they felt we faced. Over the last two days I've been on another panel, this time we've been recruiting to a role within my own team - Marketing Assistant. I found it fascinating to hear what questions we were asked at the end of the interviews, which definitely kept us all on our toes. From: "Why do we work here and what do you enjoy about your job", to "How will you manage my performance and development" to some out there questions such as "Tell us about the strategy for the next year".

Roll on Monday! It's prospectus
pitches time

Coming up next week are the 2015 prospectus pitches which we've been waiting for, for a long time (don't believe me? Scroll back through the blog posts to recall our excitement!). Well the time has finally arrived, so we'll be heading on over to our Putteridge Bury campus next week to form yet another panel, and meet with a number of agencies. I always enjoy seeing how our 2015 publications begin to take shape. Read more about this in next weeks post! We'll give you all the exclusive details right here.

The Postgraduate Awards will be the first event in the UK to celebrate and showcase marketing excellence in postgraduate recruitment.
— postgradawards (@postgradawards) April 2, 2013

Although we've been incredibly busy I've still managed to squeeze in some time to submit another awards entry; this time for Prospects' very first Postgraduate Awards. We've entered for Best Postgraduate Prospectus, alongside some entries from the Digital team, so keep everything crossed for us, and we'll keep you posted on whether we're lucky enough to have another awards dinner on the cards. After the hectic week that we've had I definitely think we deserve a treat or two!