A constant state of change

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Back to the day job
after a wonderful few
weeks!

This weeks post is focused on change. No matter how much we all try to resist sometimes, its the one thing that's always remains constant. And for us fellow Marketers, embracing change, and being responsive to change is all in the job. The sector and marketing environment is constantly adapting and changing, and therefore so must we!

Slightly off topic, but a change nonetheless, is me! After three long weeks, I'm back in the office and back to the day job after taking a few weeks off to get married. So, if you start to see Sarah De Guzman popping up every now and then in your inbox don't be alarmed, it's just me!

Getting back into the daily grind always takes some time, especially when there's literally hundreds of emails to catch up on. And so that's exactly how my first few days have been spent. It's amazing how quickly you can switch your mind off as you go into holiday mode, and then all the information, meetings and work updates come flooding back upon your return, as though that holiday was a thing of the past. I wish the same could be said for the jet lag!

Pretty much what my desk
looks like at the moment!

Well, it's now week two, post holiday, and the emails have been read, the calendar has been updated, and it's pretty much back to normality for me. Clearing is still underway, just about - we expect this to slowly tail off in the next week or so, as we firmly focus our attentions to the 2016 cycle, which has quietly been ticking along in the background since April this year.

Change in tactic
Ok so back to the focus of my blog post - change. The main focus of the marketing team has been in supporting the Recruitment team in the promotion of the September open day and lots of changes have been made to this years plan; from the media inventory selected to the times of communications. We've implemented a much more aggressive Digital Marketing campaign this time round, pulled back some communications based on intelligence learnt from previous plans, and we're very pleased with the results. If you happened to be on campus (Luton and Bedford) on that day you'll have seen that it was very busy indeed, and had a great vibe on campus, and that's always great to see. Take a look at our open day picture gallery - kindly taken by Sara, Marketing Assistant. And a big shout out to the recruitment team who really pulled it out of the bag with the number of schools in attendance. The day was a resounding success. That's one event down and on to the next, as we're already busily preparing a promotional push for our October events.

Krystle, far left, is setting off for
new adventures

Team change
This week will be offering up a bit of a mixed bag for the Marketing team. Krystle, our Campaign Officer is sadly leaving us on Wednesday, after being part of the Marketing team for about 18 months now. We're really sad to see her go, and to see our mighty marketing team reduced to just three colleagues now. In the relatively short time that Krystle has been with us, she's made a significant difference to the way in which campaigns are planned, implemented and evaluated, and she will be very much missed by us all. We'll be sending Krystle off and wishing her well over lunch on Wednesday. And, to pick up our mood, the remaining Marketing team will be heading off to Homerton College in Cambridge on Thursday, for this year's coveted CIPRide awards. We're up for two awards: Best Integrated Campaign for our 2014 Clearing campaign, and Best Low Budget Campaign for our September 2014 open day promotions. So a good evening out shall definitely pick up our moods, and provide a much needed evening out to re group, celebrate our achievements and look ahead to the future.

Keep everything crossed for us, and follow @CIPR_Awards to watch the evenings events unfold!

So change can mean many different things to many people. And boy are we experiencing a lot of it at the moment. From changing the way we do things and implemented planned changes to be more effective, all the way through to adapting to unforeseen changes, and changes in team resource and dynamics, we remain a positive marketing force to be reckoned with - it may just take us that bit longer to reply to your email, so please bear with us!

Stress?

It’s not all about Clearing…..

…. Although it’s felt that way over the last few weeks.

On July 2 I mused on what Clearing means for universities and how – as many commentators have pointed out – it has changed from a blind panic for underachieving A level students to something quite different. At this point, it would be wise for me and my career prospects to reference our very own Vice Chancellor Bill Rammell’s views on the matter. Which are, of course, spot on.

These days, people use Clearing not so much as a race for places as simply an extra few weeks to make a key life decision. Fair enough. It’s also increasingly an opportunity for those who have surpassed BTEC and A level expectations and predictions and who are looking afresh at “if” and “where” to study at uni. Yet having said all that, as this year’s first day showed there’s still a significant number of those who didn’t receive the grades they thought they were going to receive or were predicted.

State of the art - c'mon!

This year, the first day of Clearing was as insane as ever. Web, phones and footfall rattled the furniture, fixtures, fittings of the usually savannah-like atmosphere of our state of the art Postgraduate and Continuing Professional Development Centre, where the turbo-charged, chocolate-powered extended Admissions team and academics worked their socks off. Things were quieter over the first weekend, but steady again the following week. And then - and now - the long tail, with slow, steady traffic coming in, sending university managers, admissions, recruitment and market research teams twitching and refreshing spread sheets as if there's no tomorrow.

Nouvelle Vague; Mkt Research in Paris 1963

For universities, Clearing can last a few weeks, after which it's ‘business as usual’. For students involved in Clearing, the whirlwind will have started much earlier, will carry on much longer and carry far more emotional intensity. Kudos and Quailty Street should certainly be heaped upon University colleagues working through the process, although for applicants, once an offer is accepted, there are only a few weeks to prepare accommodation, travel, budget, reading lists, Freshers’ wristbands, Facebook status, Luton Town season tickets, napkin, cruet and cutlery etc etc. Not to mention those groovy Tarantino, Smiths, Pixies, Star Wars, Nirvana, Bob Marley, Bob Hope, Tiswas and French New Wave film posters. And blu-tac. Oh, and the rag-rugs, incense holders, kaftans, spider plants and Super Noodles.

Transport is arranged

Then there’s the whirl of arriving, working out which clubs or societies to look at (or avoid), who to ‘buddy up’ with, how to approach the induction and enrolment processes, how to find the library, which of the multitude of coffee outlets to patronise etc., etc., etc. All of which feels like five years mashed into as many weeks. It’s exciting, for sure although there will be a few puffy eyed souls we all need to keep an eye out for, who may have hit one beach party too many and might need a hand with working out where they are or who may need a shoulder to cry on.

At the time of writing - we still have a few places left through Clearing. Best be quick - like other institutions, we're at the tail end and have already welcomed frazzled colleagues back from the Postgraduate and Continuing Professional Development Centre (it's state of the art y'know), who’ll be picking themselves up for the main cycle recruitment and the beginning of another round of encouragement and cajoling.

Want to share best practice? We’re on the CASE!

So I recently attended the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) European Annual Conference 2015 in Manchester. For those who may not be familiar with CASE, it’s an organisation that helps people within the education sector to share knowledge, best practice, and training. Each year they hold an annual conference, and this year I got the opportunity to attend.

An informative three days of networking and sharing knowledge!

It was a three day conference in Manchester (starting off with a 6am train the day after Bank Holiday Monday!), and it was three days packed full of presentations, case studies and interactive sessions. There’s something for everyone; people working in communications; alumni; marketing; management (strategy) and fundraising. And there were even people from the Netherlands and Australia in attendance. So lots of networking, note taking and learning!

I tried to mix up the presentations that I attended. I attended mainly marketing focused sessions, but I also went to some communications ones too.

A couple of things I’ve taken away from the conference:

• The contribution of location to the HE service scope
  
        A really good session which was run by Portsmouth Business School looked at the research they had done into how UK universities talk about themselves and how the majority of universities use location as a main focus. They also spoke about other factors such as physical, social and sociological dimensions that universities use when communicating to their audiences, and there was a group discussion about whether an emotional or cognitive response is more important. The conclusion was it doesn’t seem to make a difference in ‘who’ a university is or where they are in the UK; all universities want to ‘tick all boxes.’ As we’ve recently embarked on a verbal branding project, which we are now rolling out across the University, this was a particularly interesting session for me to take part in.

• Working with your research community
  
        Another great session run by the University of Huddersfield in which they presented the ways they worked with their research community to produce valuable content to show the gravitas of the university and its achievements. This was really interesting as the University of Bedfordshire have had a real focus on this, and it was good to see how another university has tackled this. They discussed the research literature they produce, including how items are distributed and to which audience and also discussed how they encourage academics to use social media to showcase their work and also link in with the universities core strategy around research. Food for thought…

The overarching themes that stood out in the sessions which I attended were the value of authenticity, producing more dynamic content and being more interactive are key to reaching the student audiences in 2016 and beyond!  

Events like these are invaluable for networking, meeting peers and sharing knowledge with people in the same industry. Market research is a big part of Marketing, and events like these go that little bit further in terms of discussing what’s happening within other institutions and learning from each other.

I hope I get the opportunity to go again next year.

Speak soon,

K

The other side of the table

So, if anyone reading this studied Advertising and Marketing Communications (or a similar subject), like me, at university you’ll know the feeling of pretending to work in an agency, creating a solution to a brief and then preparing and presenting your solution to your “client” (/university lecturers). Well, a few weeks ago I got to sit on the other side of the table and listen to various agencies pitch their ideas to us as part of our tender process for the 2017 prospectuses. It was a really interesting and great experience for me to be part of this and to see the different dynamics of the agencies and the various approaches to our brief. Over the course of the day we definitely saw some really great ideas and by the end of the day my creativity levels were on over-drive! And, as scary as it is to think that we’re already thinking about the 2017 prospectuses, I’m really excited to start the process. Although I have worked on the 2016 PG prospectus, this will be the first time I have worked on a project like this from tender to print!

As part of my role I produce the monthly PG e-zine, PG Life. This month I met with Prof. Karen Randell, head of Media Arts and Production, to film a video about the PG courses available and the facilities that we have. I hadn’t been to the TV studio here at Beds so I was really excited to go over and see what it was all about! I was really impressed with the facilities available and it was great to hear from Karen about the various opportunities available to our students. 

I’ve also been working on the Students’ Guide to University and the Parents’ Guide to University applicants as well as producing some bookmarks and postcards for our open day events coming up (don’t forget to book your place). I really enjoy working with our designers; sending them a brief and seeing it come together! As well as producing promotional materials for the open days I've also been writing content for our CRM site, Facebook and Twitter accounts and creating e-newsletters. 

I almost forgot to mention Clearing! The office has been a bit quieter the last couple of weeks as the admissions team have gone over to the PG centre with a specialised Clearing team to help students with any Clearing queries they may have. The Recruitment team are also out and about at various events promoting Beds. I keep seeing our stand when I go into town on my lunch break (must.stop.spending...) and it looks like there's so much going on, so if you see it make sure you get involved!

What's in a building? Or something OTHER than Clearing

Right, so most universities and a host of other organisations will talk about "state of the art facilites". Hands up - we do, here at the University of Bedfordshire. "State of the art" is almost certainly the cliche of all cliches when it comes to describing estates and facilities, but looking round our (and others') campuses these days, there is some justification for feeling proud of our shiny buildings.

I first set foot on the then University of Luton’s campus as a member of staff in February 2002. I couldn’t believe it. I had thought that the terrible, terrible building in which I was being asked to work had been part of the tests during the interview, The hilariously named “Fairview” House – which still looms uncomfortably in the memories of many colleagues on the payroll – looked for all the world like a low cost location should anyone have wanted to remake The Shining or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Luton. Sick building disease? Oh yes; even the pot plants threw themselves off the windowsills.

The old SU in Luton. It was horrid.

It was one of a number of weird, awful buildings on the estate. Former colleagues and alumni will shudder recalling:

•  the decrepit Student Union, whose most popular method of entry involved ducking down and squeezing through a missing railing;
• a much fabled, long since disappeared and possibly totally fictitious toilet, specially installed for HRM The Queen when she visited the University of Luton;
•  the eye poppingly daft Ambulance Station, which survived a £10s conversion to briefly become the Uni’s Post Room;
• various portacabins, containers, cupboards and other undesirable places, used for a whole host of daft reasons;
• the old Student Centre, whose undercroft was a favoured place for rats to overeat, get themselves stuck, then die.
  

Sub 2; one of the new Beds SU venues in Luton

Since then, the University of Bedfordshire has emerged and come a long way. Those fond of the monstrous 60s and 70s buildings of old might sneer at what they may see as the clinical ‘airport terminal’ campus feel, or the trendy 'Manhattan loft' feel of the School of Art's new facility in an old textiles warehouse in Luton town centre, while muttering about an over-abundance of cafes and thematic décor.

This is how campuses look these days and students – whether viewed as ‘partners’, ‘customers’, ‘consumers’ etc. - make a hefty commitment to higher education and have a quite justified expectation for universities to match.

And so, we have: the new Gateway building in Bedford, PG Centre in Luton, modern Nursing faciltiies in Aylesbury and Luton, an expanding UCMK (Milton Keynes) campus. And that's even before our brand spanking new library which is due to open its state of the art facilities early next year....

What's my name again? Clearing, campaigns and creative pitches - all in a days work

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

What's my name? Where do I live? What do I do? What day is it? These are just some of the many questions you'll find us asking ourselves over the next few weeks. With the mad Clearing rush in full force, all of the days start to blur into one. The multi-tasking marketers strike again...

We're making it happen for many
students who we hope to join this Sept!

Clearing...
And so Clearing has finally begun for many students in search of that university place. But for us over in Marketing, Clearing has been high on our agenda for months now. Although results day was all but yesterday, planning for this infamous campaign first started way back in November, so it's great for us to finally see the campaign taking shape, and to hear the busy phone lines ringing, whilst we constantly refresh our dashboards to track our performance and make adjustments to our campaign targeting.

Whilst Clearing often ensues months of organised chaos, I always particularly enjoy the chance for us marketers to do what we do best - be creative! Each year in Clearing, we have the opportunity to trial new innovations and initiatives to grab the headlines, boost traction in the media, and beguile and inspire the minds of our audience. Following on from last year's Flash mob, we've had heaps of fun working with the press team to launch some Guerrilla marketing techniques in the run up to results day; this involved projecting our marketing messages and campaign creatives on to a series of buildings and landmarks. If you haven't already seen it, check it out below...

Our nice and new shiny
shell scheme

We've also been supporting the Recruitment team as they gear up to lead a series of community events in a whole host of locations, including: Luton, Bedford, Milton Keynes and London. You can see left, a new shell scheme which I put together (design wise of course - I can not take any credit for assembling the actual thing, and so a big well done is due to recruitment for overcoming the ultimate flat pack challenge). These 'Pods' as well call them lead on our verbal brand themes, and this nice, new piece of kit enables the team to offer more engaging and interactive sessions with the local community - providing a real insight into what exciting subjects we offer. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how the team gets on.

Campaigns...
Whilst Clearing remains at the forefront of our minds for the next few weeks, we've already been looking ahead and turning our attention to our 2016 enquirer recruitment, which we officially started back in March. The photoshoots have taken place, the artwork is almost finalised, and the plan is moments away from being approved (I'll get round to it shortly, I'm sure!). But if working on two consecutive intakes and recruitment cycles isn't fun enough, let's throw a third one in there for good measure shall we? Yes, not only are we working on 2015 and 2016 recruitment, but we are well away and are already working on our 2017 marketing. And this comes in the form of our publications tender which took place this week, over at the Putteridge Bury campus.

And creative pitches
I always enjoy the publications tenders. Whilst the admin aspect can take a lot of time, it's really refreshing to meet the different agencies, and see how they respond to the challenges and brief that you set. This tender was particularly interesting, as 4 of the 5 agencies were entirely new to us. So we set out on a fact finding mission to grill each company in turn, to make sure we haven't just got a stand out creative, but the man power behind it to deliver it. Although a long day, the panel had lots of fun, and came away feeling inspired. Keep a look out in future posts for more on this - as we'll share more, once the agency has been appointed.

For now, it's the end of my blog post, and back to the day job and the ever growing list of things to do before my holiday (woo - 2 weeks to go!). So whilst I'm slowly getting excited, there still seems to be an awful lot to do before that holiday milestone even starts to begin to feel like it's within my reach - right, back to work - what year is it again?

We’re beaming with PRide

We're shortlisted for two PRide awards

So I’m excited to tell you we’ve been shortlisted for two PRide awards this year; one for best integrated campaign and one for best low budget campaign. The low budget campaign award entry is for our September open day campaign which I created and implemented so it’s really nice that my efforts have resulted in an award entry for the team. And of course my marketing colleagues, as well as other MARC teams, did help me implement the plans so I can’t take all of the credit. The team are really pleased and we have our fingers crossed that we can walk away with another award to add to the two PRide awards we won last year. The ‘do is on 1^st October, so we’ll be sure to let you know the outcome. I attended the awards ceremony last year, which was my first since working at the University, and it was a really fun night. Last year there was a welcome drink and canapés before the awards ceremony, but this year it’s a sit down 3 course meal followed by the awards ceremony, so I’m looking forward to attending again. It’s great to be shortlisted and it’s a nice night for the team to relax and revel in some of our successes, even if we don’t come away with an award.

Open day season is back

I can’t believe I’m saying this (or typing it!) but open days are back. Doesn’t time just fly when you’re…busy!

Our next open day is on 23 September; I have my plan at the ready and its full steam ahead. I’ve actually planned the full winter season of open days, so all activity up until December, which is a little scary!

So far I’ve created a web banner and I’m currently working with one of our freelance designers to create two external banners. The activity will start next week, so you’ll start to see our open day messaging appear on our homepage, social media and other platforms as we work our way through the plans.

Helping with recruitment collateral

I’ve also been helping out with recruitment support; I’ve created clearing posters, with more to follow in the next week, and I’m updating our school and college liaison guide. The guide has had a few big changes this year, so I’ve spent quite a lot of time on this, but it’s looking really nice and I’m ahead of schedule which I always like!

Evaluations

An old favourite and something I always mention- evaluations. I finished my first open day report for the 2015 cycle ‘enquirer’ events (which was used as a basis for the PRide awards entry, as it identified the success of the September open day in particular). I’m now working on a similar report for the 2015 cycle ‘applicant’ events. Let’s see if I can identify another award opportunity. 

Decisions....decisions...

And finally, outside of work its wedding season…

It’s just dawned on me that I have three weddings to attend in the next seven weeks- crikey!! The first is up North and I’m bridesmaid for an old friend so I’m super excited. The other two are local, and again I’m looking forward to celebrating those as well. I’ll try not to make my next blog about weddings.

Speak soon,

K