A small but mighty team

I think this week’s post will be a quick one from me. You might think it’s the pressure getting to me this week, as we’ve just been nominated for an award for our blog in the UK Blog Awards 2016 (sorry for the not so subtle plug there). But in reality, it's maybe because things are ticking along - there's lot's going on as always; reports, plans, campaigns, conversion activity, meetings, print collateral, emails - OK I'll stop there! But there's not a lot of new things to report as quite often a lot of the work we do is ongoing. We're a small but mighty team!

So, what have I been up to since last time...

I’ve started to update our in-house style guide that I mentioned in my previous blog post. I’ve amended the format a little and added in some things that I think were missing from the previous version, using inconsistencies that I have come across when working on previous printed collateral. I’ll be sense checking it and then liaising with other teams in the department for their feedback – digital, comms, CRM, and the rest of the marketing team – anyone who writes or creates anything external facing for our audiences.

The UCAS convention season is fast approaching, so I’ve been liaising with the recruitment team to ensure we’re armed with collateral for all of the events that we attend around the UK, as well as planning the collateral we’ll need for the UCAS convention that we’re hosting at our Bedford campus on 20-22 June. This will be the third UCAS convention we’ve held on campus and each year the recruitment team are building on the success of the previous year’s event, with each year getting bigger and better. We welcome thousands of students and schools through our doors so it’s a key time for us!

I also helped out at yesterday’s open day – the first time I’ve been able to support the recruitment team during an event. I was working on the CATS registration desk at our Luton campus – scanning people in and giving them a rundown of the day’s events.

Some positive open day feedback

As well as the above, I've been working on different conversion activity – emails, print collateral and so on – this time of year is crucial for us, so we're working on pulling out all the stops. 

And finally, I’ve almost finished two more evaluation reports – the first time I’ve been a head on reports in a wee while.

Speak soon,

K

Who said print was dead

The second week in after the Christmas break and things are going rather smoothly (despite my silly picture on the right!) We usually have a busy period the last two months of the year and then we have a bit of a lull before pre-Clearing starts. So I’m enjoying having time to catch up on reports.

Publications

So, we’re working on a few publications at the moment. We’ve recently briefed back the second round of amends to the undergraduate 2017 prospectus. It’s been relatively easy this time around considering the changes we’ve had to make – absorbing the international aspects as we’re no longer producing a separate international publication, UCAS point changes, plus other factors.

We’ve also briefed back the first round of amends to the mini guide, so this is also going well. It’s such a small publication compared to the main prospectus so between the three of us in the team, this isn’t too big of a task.

The final publication I’m working on at the moment is our fees brochure. We’ve not produced a solus fees brochure for a couple of years, so I’ve been working with our freelance designer to create this in line with our 2016 suite of publications. I’ve just briefed back the final amends on this and we’re two weeks ahead of schedule, which I love!

Once we sign off the undergraduate prospectus, it won’t be long before we’ll be starting work on the postgraduate 2017 prospectus.

I know a lot of people think that marketing is moving towards a more digital focus, which is largely right to a certain degree, but there’s still very much a need for supporting printed collateral, and we always have at least one printed publication on the go at any one given time throughout the cycle.

To help with future projects I’m going to be working on an error log – where we will log all common errors that we come across time and time again when working on publications and campaigns, in the hope that by doing this we can eliminate them for future projects and therefore make our job a little bit easier. I’m also going to be working on updating our in-house style guide. Our style guide is a little bit outdated so it’ll be good for us to be working from new ones later this year. I’ll be liaising with the digital team and the communications team as well to ensure we take into account their needs, as we all use these guides as part of our daily role, whether its creating artwork or writing copy and news stories. 

Come in, we’re open

We’re also in the thick of the open day season with three UG open days taking place in February – Luton and Bedford, UCMK and Aylesbury, and we’ve also got our PG open day in February too. So we’ve been sending out emails, creating artwork, sending items to external media, and setting up more Google activity; all in a day’s work!

Some of our artwork for our forthcoming open days

And besides the above, like I mentioned earlier - I‘ve got a little down time to catch up on my evaluations before pre-Clearing kicks off!

Speak soon,

K