Holidays are coming

It’s hard to believe I’ve already been part of the University’s MARC for seven weeks – time really has flown by. Christmas seemed so far off when I started at the beginning of November and now, suddenly, it’s right around the corner and I’m panic shopping. Again..!
 

National Christmas Jumper Day 2013!

The team has certainly embraced Christmas; from my desk I can see a lot of tinsel and tiny trees. We have celebrated National Christmas Jumper Day, handed out Secret Santa gifts and shared a Christmas meal at the casino over the road. It’s not just been fun and games though! We’ve been working really hard to make sure that everything is complete for this year and well prepared for next.

Alexon House

The last few weeks have seen lots of exciting developments at the University: The Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education, a lecture by Jack Straw and the opening of a mock crime scene lab in Luton, to name but a few. Something I’ve been particularly excited about is the opening of the new Art and Design building. Having grown up in Luton I’ve come to love lots of the old industrial buildings dotted around the town centre, and the Alexon building is one that holds a lot of history within its walls. It’s been given a whole new lease of life and a brand new purpose; I can’t wait to visit and to get inspired by the all the creativity going on inside.

I’ve been really busy filming, editing, proofing, writing and working my way through a very long to-do list. There hasn’t been a moment to stop and I’m definitely looking forward to a rest! You’ll find me being a big kid for a few days over the Christmas break, with a trip to Disneyland Paris planned between Christmas and New Year. My ultimate goal is to bump into Donald Duck by the end of 2013; I’ll post a picture in my next blog post if I’m successful!

Talking of the end of the year, this will be my final blog post of 2013 so, all that's left to say is I hope everyone has a really fantastic Christmas and loads of fun seeing in the New Year!


Clare

Tis the festive season

By Michelle Ramsumair, Marketing Administrator

It's almost Christmas!!! Time has definitely flown by and it's that festive time of the year again. We decorated our office yesterday so feeling much more in the spirit. If you haven't got a tree up or decorated your office then what are you waiting for?

Last week was a taste of sweet and sour as our Director of 17 years left sadly. She has seen our department through many changes and it has grown into a great department to be a part of. Although it is sad we also wish her every success where she is moving to. We had a nice leaving and Christmas do at G Casino Friday, which did consist of some gambling but more drinking I think! We also got our secret santa, someone knows me well!

So campaigns have been keeping me busy, but I have to say I am enjoying them. They involve a lot of co-ordination and attention from the initial draft plan (even before then) to the evaluation after. We are very fortunate to have a great team who word hard and endlessly on these. It is always fun when the companies you build relationships with treat you just show their appreciation. I was lucky enough to be invited by Heart FM to attend the Luton Best Awards as their guest. It was a great evening in at Warren Weir, Luton Hoo with amazing people. I really enjoy meeting interesting people whether at events or when meeting a company to see what they offer and how they may be able to assist with our campaigns.

At the moment I am also studying a CIM Professional Certificate in Marketing. It's definitely tough getting back into studying, but I have a huge amount of respect for anyone who chooses to study whilst looking after their family and working full time. I certainly can't complain, I have it rather easy!! Had my first exam last week and it was scary to say the least. There is so much to learn, but with fun colleagues and tutors working in marketing in various sectors we are never stuck for discussions, and we are all super supportive of one another. Couldn't have asked for a better group.If you are working in marketing or looking to go into it, I would highly recommend becoming a CIM member and looking into what courses and training they have to offer. For new starters in marketing it is a step onto the ladder, for those already working in this area it helps you progress further. There are also other professional bodies to look at if you want to go into other areas of marketing. Why not take a look and see all the options available to you. New Year's resolution perhaps...?

Tomorrow I fly off to Israel for a week, so I am trying to tie up everything to hand over. Definitely excited as it is somewhere different and many people have said how much I will love it out there. Will have photos to show when I return. I better get on with some work so have a great week shopping and decorating everyone!

Picture perfect

Sarah Hampton - Marketing Manager

The very first Prospects
Postgraduate Awards

The month of November has indeed been a busy one, and not just on the work front. The Marketing team has been busy jet-setting around the UK as we attend many an award ceremony. In earlier posts you'll see we went to nearby St Albans for the CIPR PRide awards where we were incredibly excited to scoop two Gold Awards.

This time we headed off to Manchester, along with the Digital Marketing Team to attend the very first Prospects Postgraduate Awards. As our last event of the year, we were out to have a fabulous time!

Feeling festive and enjoying
the xmas market

On arrival we couldn't help but pay a quick visit to the Christmas Market which was a stone's throw from the Awards Venue, the Radisson Blu Hotel. We spent a good half an hour sampling different cheeses and working out whether it was ok to have pesto and coconut in a cheese - obviously not in the same cheese! After taking in and savouring the sights, sounds and smells of the market, we made our way to the venue ready to take us our seats. Being an avid awards goer this year, we like to think we can tell whether we're in for a lucky night. We were all sat on the judges table, so surely a good sign, right?

Our digital team celebrating
on stage - well done!

We were over the moon as the Digital team picked up first place for Best Website. A truly fantastic achievement, and very well deserved after all of their hard work! Unfortunately, we didn't manage to win this time round in the category of Best Postgraduate Prospectus. It was the biggy of the evening, with more than 11 universities all going for the coveted prize and so the competition was definitely steep. But we were very pleased to have made the short-list, and even managed to get a certificate for being a finalist.

Back in the office it's been an incredibly busy period as we get cracking with the 2015 Undergraduate Prospectus. We've been busy writing and refreshing all text, auditing all courses, and arranging new photography to best showcase our new facilities. It was Clare's first big photoshoot with us here at Bedfordshire, and so the team accompanied her to show her around the campuses and facilities and demonstrate the kind of shots we look for when putting a prospectus together. We were able to see the brand-new sports halls over at our Bedford campus, and although I've been with Bedfordshire for more than six years now, it was my first visit to the Alexander Sports Centre - oh the joys of following a sat nav and ending in sheer panic as it says "you have reached your destination" and you're in the middle of a residential area.

Brand-new Art & Design teaching space

I did enjoy going over to see the new Alexon building in the centre of Luton town, which is the new home for our Art and Design students. It was great to see such a professional looking creative space, and made for some excellent pictures which will feature in the new prospectus. We were able to showcase our Fashion students at work, as well as Interior Design students happily working away and commenting on different furniture designs, as part of their projects.

Aside from the prospectus, we're quite excited to be launching our new CRM system: Belong at Beds. We've been busy generating and uploading content, after many a training session, and are almost ready to go live. So keep checking back here to see how the live launch goes.

Week One Whirlwind!

Hello there. I am Clare, Marketing Assistant and newest member of the University of Bedfordshire MARC department.

I’m Lutonian through and through and have lived in the town all my life (excluding a three year adventure courtesy of the University of Warwick). I have previously worked in arts marketing for Luton Culture, the charity that runs the town's libraries, museums and theatres.

This blog post marks the middle of my second week at the University of Bedfordshire and I can’t quite believe how quickly the days have gone by! Among introductory meetings, cups of hot chocolate and even a pizza lunch thrown in for good measure, I’ve found a bit of time to settle in to my new surroundings and got to know campus a little better.

Highly recommended: every new starter
should have a Sarah Hampton induction
schedule.

I arrived to a lovely warm welcome and a meticulously planned – and really appreciated! – induction schedule which has allowed me to get to know teams and their roles via a series of mini meetings. Meeting people one-to-one has been absolutely priceless for somebody who is, admittedly, pretty useless at matching faces to names and names to job titles! A week and a half later and I finally feel like I’ve got a grasp of who’s who and what’s what, although I’m sure there'll be tons of questions to ask now I’ve started to do some real work!

It seems like I've joined the team at a really interesting time; last week I sat in on the meeting with Z3, the people who will be putting together the 2015 prospectus, heard about various campaign plans, and had some training for the new CRM system and Matrix – plenty of excitement for a first week and a half!

I'll be at the Luton Campus open day this weekend and I'm really looking forward to experiencing the university with all the buzz and excitement of an open day. Being as new as I am, I reckon it'll be a massive help for me as well as all the prospective students hoping to get an idea of what the University of Bedfordshire is all about.

Time has really flown by and I've had a great time so far. It'll be Christmas before we know it!

Full of pride after going for Gold

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

It wouldn't be a typical week at work if we didn't have some form of urgent job to do. And this week was certainly no different, with the urgent task taking the form of a January start campaign. Here in the Marketing team we do love a good challenge and so we set about planning and preparing for this marketing push. Our freelancer Pippa was devising the activity itself, and so we have been busying ourselves with arranging and scheduling a photoshoot that will form the creative for the campaign. Easy you say? Think again.

Marketing meets Freshers
Left to right: Michelle, Forrest, Pippa, Bayleigh, Max,
Anita, and Me!

Since the ITV2 show, Freshers, had just finished showing on TV, we decided to link our campaign with the story of the freshers' that we had been avidly watching for the last three weeks on our screens, as they settle into student life at Bedfordshire. A few phone calls and emails later and we had a photographer booked, and all four freshers confirmed. Now all we had to do was source the locations, devise a shot list and brief the digital team on filming requirements.

Each of the freshers did an excellent job and gave up a lot of their time to take part in our photoshoot. It was a packed day, with back-to-back photography sessions, but boy were we impressed with the end result... I must confess that we absolutely loved meeting Forrest, and even managed to get a sneaky picture with the freshers before the end of the day - all for the purposes of blog writing and informing our audience, of course (see above).

You'll see our January campaign taking shape over the next few weeks, so as it goes live we'll share the creatives with you - and do let us know what you think!

In other news, we attended the Thames and Chiltern CIPR PRide awards on Friday (1 Nov) at Sopwell House in St Albans as we were up for Best External Publication for our 2013 Postgraduate Prospectus. We were joined by the Digital Marketing team who were short-listed for Best use of Digital, and Best use of Social Media.

Celebrating our award success on centre stage
Left to right: Lauren, me, Andy, Elisabeth and Paul

Our Digital Marketing team won awards in both of their categories: with a Silver for our Corporate film in the Best use of Digital category, and won an impressive Gold accolade for Best use of Social Media in our Clearing campaign - a massive congratulations! And we were amazed and absolutely thrilled to also win not just one, but two Gold awards, even though we only entered one category! In addition to bagging a Gold award for our Postgraduate Prospectus, we were awarded an additional Gold award from the judges for Best use of Research, Planning, Measurement and Evaluation, for the Postgraduate Prospectus (which made me very pleased to see that all of that number crunching and analysis hasn't gone un-noticed). However, Lauren and I were still in celebration mode after winning Gold earlier in the evening and actually missed this announcement. So, after a short nudge from Paul, our Digital Marketing Manager, and we swiftly made our way in a rather dazed state to receive the award. Indeed a fabulous evening! Read our award-winning entry here.

Read a #PRideTC award winning case study from @uniofbeds who picked up gold for their use of measurement & evaluation http://t.co/eXJHePgdq5
— CIPR (@CIPR_UK) November 4, 2013

Supporting our Business academics
over at Bedford

In and amongst all of the above, I managed to squeeze in some time to join our Business academics over at the Bedford campus. I was invited to sit on an assessment panel for our final year students who were tasked with presenting a business case for a charity event to raise money - it was great to hear about their project management, as well as their innovative ideas for the actual event itself, and generating awareness for their cause, but most importantly (for me anyway) their marketing and how they were ensuring ROI.

Finally, I'm pleased to share with you that we have now been joined by our new Marketing Assistant, Clare O'Brien, and so we've been busy setting up inductions and introducing Clare to the wider MARC team, kicking off with an obligatory welcome lunch at none other than Pizza Express. Clare's joined us at a great time, as we're just about to get going with the 2015 Undergraduate Prospectus. What better way to find out about the University, than by researching, writing and arranging photoshoots all around campus?

Passion, pain and quantum physics!

At last I’ve got going on putting together the research brochure and web pages – research is an area of university life I feel passionate about.
Research is so important to universities and Bedfordshire did very well in the last research assessment exercise. We’re submitting our current research to the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) at the moment and I know folk here have been extremely busy on this. A new aspect that the REF takes into account is the impact of the research on ‘society’ eg how it advances medical care, improves life chances, influences government policy, protects the planet etc.
When I look around at our  ten Research Institutes here it’s not hard to see how our research improves lives- IDOP work is improving the lot of older patients suffering from diabetes;  IHR is changing attitudes to organ donation among ethnic minority groups;  IASR is working hard to understand the abuse and exploitation of children and young people, so that laws and government policies can be strengthened to tackle this serious problem; and colleagues in iBEST are working hard to understand the ravages that man is causing to the environment, especially our coral reefs.
I do hope I can do justice to Bedfordshire’s research- it touches us all!

Oh dear, I’m going on a bit, as usual, but I am someone with scientific training (biochemistry) and am a sucker for things scientific, especially anything new in the realms of quantum physics – inspired by the late, great, Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman – do read his autobiographies, they are hugely entertaining – and more recently by the ubiquitous Professor Brian Cox. (Photo courtesy of Paul Clarke). Amazing really, as I only just scraped a pass in my A level physics!
To keep the gender balance, one of my biggest scientific heroines is the brilliant Rosalind Franklin who never really got the credit she deserved for her work on DNA - that's starting to change and young women should be inspired by her, by Marie and Irena Curie, and indeed our own Bushra Ahmed, to reach great heights in scientific research.

Another of my passions, as you may remember, is rugby league – best forget my team’s performance in the season which has just ended – we now have the World Cup which started last weekend-sadly with losses for my national team, Wales (we stand little chance!), and Ireland and England, although Scotland came up with a superb, nail-biting win over the mighty Tongans on Tuesday. The Aussie and NZ teams are, as usual, strong but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Samoans might do well and cause an upset somewhere en route! Hope so!  Try and watch a match over the next few weeks-who knows, you might be converted!


 

Stepping out the office

by Michelle Ramsumair, Marketing Administrator

Starting work when it's dark enough outside to still sleep definitely tells me it's almost time for those delicious limited edition Costa hot beverages. The beautiful festival of lights is also approaching on the 03 November. For all those celebrating I wish you a very happy Diwali in advance. Next Halloween and Christmas!

Weeks are flying and it's almost time for my holiday, but more on that at a much later date. In the meantime the team are working hard in one of the busiest times of the year. We mostly remain in our office, but all our hard work can be be seen by those outside. Our second wave of the Winter Campaign is about to start so make sure to look out for us. We couldn't let you forget us after Clearing now could we?

As October open days pass we start preparing for 16 November open days at our Luton and Bedford campuses. It's always interesting and fun to meet nervous potential students and their encouraging parents. Reminds me of when my mum and I started looking at universities. I remained quiet and my mum would push me forward slightly saying 'You're the one applying not me, say something'. It's the best way to find out everything you want to know about where you will be spending some of the most important years of your life. Not to worry though, just remember everyone is in the same boat.

I recently attended a CASE Publications Forum in London. It's always great to escape the office for a day to network and see what more you can learn in the world of marketing. The importance of publications, working with agencies and story telling are the main areas we covered. I came away with many interesting points to feedback to the team, whether it was reassurance we are on the right track or learning something knew. It was definitely beneficial for all who attended.

Amongst the daily race we are running there has to be some fun right? So I've recently found a new hobby... snowboarding! Well I've done level 1 and level 2 this weekend. Not quite flying down mountains and doing tricks just yet but that's all in good time. All I can say is if your skiing or snowboarding next year...be careful on the slopes! I may be hurtling past you. So if you see someone screaming, zipping past you and they are still standing, that's not me. If you see someone screaming and rolling past you..bingo!

Wish me luck!