Another week in the Marketing Department

I can't believe it's Friday already (not that I'm complaining of course!). With the bank holiday on Monday this week has flown by!

On Tuesday and Wednesday the University hosted the US festival - a dance festival involving several universities within the UK. The two day event featured workshops from various practitioners within the dance industry as well as performances from the university students involved. On Wednesday I got to visit our Bedford campus to film some of the workshops and performances. It was a great afternoon and I was lucky enough to sit in on some amazing performances. I'll be editing the content next week so look out for when it goes live on the more than a degree site.

Today I'm also going to visit the Art & Design graduate show, Frame. Frame is an exhibition showcasing some of the work by our final year students and I'm quite excited to see what they've produced! The show will be running in the Alexon building until the 15 June so, if you haven't already, why not check it out?

Over the last couple of weeks I've also spent some time focusing on our Postgraduate offering. At the end of this month, we'll be hosting a Postgraduate Open Day so I've been working on some information emails for our second and final year students to let them know about the event. I've also been working with our CRM team and the library team to get some digital signage put up on the plasma screens and LRC screens to further promote the event to our current students. 

And continuing with the PG theme, I've also been working on the PG prospectus for 2017. I've been liaising with various faculties and departments around the University to ensure that all of my sections are correct and up-to-date as well as proof reading copy and selecting images for the prospectus. I'm pretty sure I've said this before but it's coming along very nicely and I can't wait for you all to see it!

Who knew I could juggle?!

It’s been quite a while since I blogged! As the team is expanding, we are sharing the blogging, so I don’t get to bore you quite so much! Hurray! The team have all been really busy over the last couple of weeks, this is our busiest time of the year as we gear up for Clearing, start to evaluate the academic cycle and start to look ahead to next year’s cycle too. We're juggling a lot of work between such a small team, but we always manage to do what we gotta do!

How I think I look juggling all of
my work

Next stop…my desk!

Well, I’ve been out and about a lot since I last blogged. I’ve been assisting the Recruitment team with UCAS events. I attended one day of the event in London last month and I also attended one day at the Leicester event last week. It’s really nice going out and talking to prospective students and not only showcasing what Bedfordshire has to offer but also offering advice and guidance to people who have some big decisions to make about their future and careers. I’m not sure I would want to go back to that age! We had a lot of people come over for a chat, and got some really nice comments that we had provided them with some useful information, which is lovely.

I also attended a CASE conference in London on Tuesday. For those not familiar with CASE, they offer support to people working in the Education sector through the likes of forums and conferences, where people who work in Education can network and share best practice. This particular event looked at student communication. There were a couple of really interesting presentations on the use of social media, and using students in communication, through blogs (which we already do might I add).  It was great to see how other institutions run similar activities, but managed in a completing different way. Food for thought!

Take a look at our blogger page here.

Open days

Not again, I hear you cry! I feel like I always mention open days in every blog, so I won’t bore you too much with the details, but we had our latest (and last) undergraduate open day on 25 April for this academic cycle. And we’re currently working on our last PG open day campaign for this cycle on 21 May. So lots of emails, media, and social media activity taking place.

Reports

Which leads me nicely on to another thing I always mention…REPORTS and EVALUATIONS! I’m still working on my annual evaluation reports for our UG and PG open day campaigns, which are progressing slowly but surely. We’re at the end of this year’s open day cycle now, so I can now get on with analysing the full cycle of open day campaigns. They’re providing some good insight and showing some great successes in terms of the activity we have put together which is really nice to see. I look forward to sharing them with the wider MARC team.

Conversion communications

We’ve also now started sending two monthly e-zines to undergraduates, so I’ve been out filming videos and creating some new content for these. They went out yesterday, so it’s now on to this month’s editions - we’re in May! Woah! But fear not, I have my content planned for each edition up until the end of August, so all is under control.

Publications

Work is well underway on our 2016 UCMK prospectus now; we’re due to get the second proof from the designer on Tuesday and it’s looking nice. The PG prospectus is moving a little more slowly, but we’re starting to get there, so in the next few weeks we’ll be fully consumed by all things PG! I'm also working on the new student guide for this September. There’s lots of work going on behind the scenes around our ‘Welcome’ for new students, so I can slowly start to work on this publication and feed in new information once decisions are finalised. Working to a tight deadline of 6 weeks! Crikey!

You guessed it- how I look right now
in reality

I’ve also been working on some adhoc bits such as a flyer for our UCMK campus and a pull up banner for an event that’s being held in the Computing department next month. Oh, and a fair few meetings.

Hmm, I think that’s enough for now. Roll on the bank holiday...I’m going to Newmarket races so let’s hope the sun comes back out.
   

Speak soon,

K

Open day success

Open Days

Signage at our open day

I mentioned in my last blog that I was working on the UG open day. Well, the open day took place on Wednesday (24 September) and it was a huge success for sign ups. We had 315 students sign up for Bedford, with 191 people attending and 512 students sign up for Luton, with 204 people attending. We were all monitoring the sign up numbers on a daily basis and getting excited about the amount of signups we had generated. Although there is still work to do around the dropout rates (which we are working on), it was great to see that the activity in the open day plan generated some really good numbers. Recruitment also did a lot of work getting busloads of schools onto our campuses, so as you can image, we were busy, busy, busy!  I’m looking forward to doing the evaluation for this campaign and seeing where the signups correlated with the marketing activity.

Our next UG open days are in October and November, so next week I will be putting plans together for these events. However, due to the close proximity of the events, these will have a shorter lead time.

Our PG open day plans are also underway now, with Google adwords, emails to students and social media activity already taken place. And we have lots of activity happening around our campuses in the coming weeks, as the students return. It would be great to see the same success for the PG open day, as we seen for the UG open day.

UG16 prospectus

Work has also started on the UG16 prospectus. I have booked photography for the end of October, and put the production schedule together. In the coming weeks I will produce a flatplan and work with quality on the courses lists. We also have two days of agency pitches next week, where design agencies come in to pitch to us and show us their ideas for our prospectuses and campaigns. There are 10 of us sitting on the panel, and following these pitches we will collectively decide who we feel is the best agency.

Training

Myself and my colleague, Clare, also attended a print workshop this week with Belmont Press, in Northampton. It was a really informative day; we learnt about different forms of printing, paper stock and took a look around the facilities to see the machines in action.

Lot’s going on as usual.

Speak soon,

K