Prospectus, and panels and pitches; oh my!

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager


Whilst a large element of my role can be desk bound - crunching numbers, planning campaigns, writing evaluations, and putting my organisation hat on to drive initiatives forward, one of the bits of my role that I happen to love the most are the chances to be 'creative'. So it's no surprise to read that this week was Prospectus pitch week. Hurrah!  

Searching for the perfect agency
to partner with.

We've been running a tender to appoint a creative agency to work alongside us on the latest publications for 2019 (2019 already, you say!). So after getting through all the paperwork, questionnaires, budgets and admin, we're at the bit I love best - the creative presentations. It's great to meet different agencies, breathe new life into our work, and ensure we're future proofing our designs, our brand and our proposition to drive recruitment for the coming years (so no pressure then?).

It's always a crammed packed day of back-to-back presentations - but it definitely gets the creative juices flowing across the team. Colleagues from the Recruitment team, and International office joined us, to ensure we had key stakeholder views taken into account, and it made for a fun day for everyone (or at least I hope). We're still deliberating over which agency to work with, and so after we've totaled all the scores I'm sure we'll be able to share with you who we've selected, and some exclusive sneak peaks as to how the visuals could be developing for our future recruitment campaigns. Stay tuned!

Can you ever be too organised?

As the chair of the panel, it's my job to lead the day, keep us on time, and to drive the questioning to ensure we get all of the information we need from each of the agencies to make a good, informed decision. (This is where my organisational hat comes into play again). After all, it's not just a pretty design and nice prospectus cover that we're looking for. A key part of producing the prospectus is all about the processes and structures in place (boring! I hear you say). Ok, so perhaps not the most exciting part of the pitches, but for me, whose produced more than 20 Bedfordshire prospectuses I know a thing or two about the logistical nightmare that can be the prospectus, and if you don't have the right people, processes and infrastructure in place to deliver your publication the whole thing can be absolute torture to deliver. Don't get me wrong, creative is definitely important, but my key driver is making sure we have a company who can deliver on the creative - there's nothing worse than having high hopes for your publication, and half way in, finding out the end result is far from your grasp.

The team (left to right: Sara,
Beverley, Kylie and Sarah).

In other news, we've sadly said farewell to Kylie, our Marketing Officer this week. She's left the team this week for pastures new - and is relocating back up north to Newcastle University. We're all really sad to see her go, after three years as part of the team. For those of you who have worked with Kylie, I'm sure you'll agree she's been an instrumental colleague in running our open day campaigns. We wish her all the best, and am sure we'll still see her round on the university circuit in the not too distant future.

But to cheer us all up, and stop us feeling all sorry for ourselves as our marketing team of three has dwindled to a team of just two, we were absolutely delighted to find out just now, that we've been short-listed for not one, but two, Heist awards - for Best Undergraduate Student Recruitment Initiative, and Best Marketing Team of the Year! Now Heist had been keeping us on our toes, and fully in suspense as to when the big reveal would be, and it certainly didn't disappoint. It's been some much needed excitement in the office as we can reflect on our achievements, and celebrate our successes - small we may be, but mighty and effective we are! Usually, we've just entered submissions for our work, but this year I decided this was the year to celebrate us as a team - and boy am I surprised to see we've been short-listed. To have been short-listed for team of the year is a massive coup, and a particular career high for me on a personal note. For our regular readers, you'll often see me banging on about awards, and how much we love them - but it's a big boost for the team, and a lovely end to the week!

Absolutely thrilled to see we've been shortlisted for 2 @heistawards. The @uniofbeds team are celebrating in the office as we speak 😜😬

— Sarah De Guzman (@Sarah_Hampton) May 19, 2017

Shaping the future of HE Marketing

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

The Future of HE Marketing Conference 2014

This week saw the culmination of a months hard work and preparation as Paul Fryer (Digital Marketing Manager) and I made our way to London for this year's Inside Government 'The Future of HE Marketing" Conference 2014. Paul and I were invited to speak at the event, focusing on "Enhancing Postgraduate Recruitment Through Developing A Digital Presence." Well, we were more than happy to oblige, after all, PG is one of my favourite subjects!

Paul and I taking centre
stage

Before we knew it, the day had arrived, and there we were armed with our nifty USB stick (always carry a back up!), ready to share our PG knowledge with approximately 100 delegates, most of whom were either Directors or Heads from other universities from across the UK. After overcoming some initial nerves and stage fright (bar Paul who was raring to go!), we successfully delivered our presentation to what we thought was a really engaged audience. There's nothing like a room of frantic pen scribblers to make you second guess whether you've over shared or not. Nonetheless, we were pleased to be sharing best practice and have our work recognised by our peers, after our recent success in generating a 30% increase to PGT applications for our September 2013 intake, especially given that the national picture suggests that universities are experiencing a 12% decrease year on year.

And the feedback from some of the delegates was great...

@Sarah_Hampton @deep_phat @InsideGovt fantastic presentation.. Thanks for sharing some of your secrets ;-) #ighemarket
— Joe Etchells (@JEtchells88) April 29, 2014

Back in the office, things have been equally exciting, as we push forward with our conversion activity and publications; both the PG 2015 and UCMK 2015 prospectuses. We're fast approaching the proofing stages, so it's always great to see how your work slowly comes together. Stay tuned over the coming weeks for some sneak peaks into how some of the visuals are progressing.

Heading on out to Koz
in search of sunshine

For the next week I leave you in the very capable hands of the Marketing team, as I take some very long awaited annual leave in search of a spot of sunshine. I'll be back soon with more updates on our new CRM system, and may even share some of our PG secrets from our presentation earlier this week.

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!

New year, new initiatives

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Happy New Year! Well, we're finally back after the Xmas break, and already there is loads to tell you. But before bringing you up to speed I thought I'd share some pre-Xmas updates with you.

The CST staff away day

Just before the Christmas break I was invited by the Department of Computer Science and Technology (CST) to deliver a presentation at their staff away day on how to improve recruitment to their undergraduate courses. So, with only two days to prepare, and having never delivered a presentation to such a large group, I set about harassing all the other Managers in the MARC department to dig deep for the latest market research, application figures, recruitment initiatives, and web developments. Before I knew it the day had arrived and I found myself standing on a stage in front of the entire department. After overcoming a few technical difficulties (and by that I mean there being no laptop!) and we were ready to go. The presentation went really well, and all of the staff were really engaged and interested to see what market intelligence we could share with them. From where their applicants come from and the schools they attend, to what their most popular/viewed course is online and what factors may influence their decision; it was all in there.

One of our newsletters:
Art & Design

Now that we're in 2014 our attention has turned to conversion: whereby we encourage our applicants to select us as either their Firm (1st place) or Insurance (second place) choice. So a lot of work is currently underway preparing a range of marketing materials to send out straight after the 15 January 2014 UCAS deadline. For the last few months we've been working on producing a series of departmental newsletters (see left) which provide the latest information, achievements and happenings from the applicants' area of interest. We've also got our bloggers up and running for most subjects (thanks to the Digital Team) which consists of current undergraduate students posting about their experience and what they get up to as a student.

Work is well underway on the 2015 Undergraduate Prospectus. We're now at 2nd proof stage and so the team is busy working away; proofing, sourcing outstanding information, chasing new course copy and selecting relevant new photography to keep us on track for our print deadline. It's all starting to take shape; so check back here in early February and when it's approved for print, and you can get an exclusive first look at the cover.

In other news, award season will soon be upon us, with the deadline for the CIPR Excellence awards only a mere 7 weeks away. So, hopefully we can get some of the above tied up fairly soon, so we can turn our attention to writing some award entries. After all, a good dinner and dress up will be a great way to celebrate all of our hard work after getting the prospectus off to print. Which is no easy task!

Here's hoping we can get some entries in!