How does London’s global university facilitate meaningful connections with prospective students worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic? Can virtual initiatives bridge the location gap and what’s next as the world opens up?

There’s no doubt that the pandemic has changed the way in which universities engage with their global audiences. During this showcase, UCL’s Alumni Relations team will demonstrate their innovative virtual event series. Responding to an institutional challenge, UCL looked to their alumni community for support - facilitating connections between alumni and prospective student offer holders, inspiring the next generation.

Through this case study, UCL will disclose how and why they developed a worldwide virtual event series - exploring the student recruitment journey, looking at where alumni can influence and discussing what’s next in their plans.

The UK and the EU are now living in the post-Brexit world. And for UK universities seeking to recruit and enrol international students from across Europe, this new status quo brings fresh challenges. With EU students no longer granted the same home fee status as their UK counterparts, UK admissions teams must rediscover the EU anew as a potential recruitment market. What’s more, the UK faces renewed competition from international destinations such as Germany and the Netherlands. Join Matt Criddle, Universities Partnerships Manager for BridgeU, as he explores some of the challenges and opportunities arising for post-Brexit international higher ed. Learn more about how EU students’ UK preferences have changed in the most recent application cycle. And hear from BridgeU’s expert customer success team on how and why universities must now take a hyper-localised approach to international school outreach.

Let’s talk Students! They’re at the heart of every university and are central to every marketing strategy, but how well do we really know the students of today?
At Unicom, we pulled together over 250,000 data points, from over 20 hours of focus groups, on a national scale to find out exactly who the students of today are. This means we know the students of today better than anyone else. In our personalisation session we will introduce you to the UK’s student personas, give you data-led insights into students’ attitudes and beliefs, and provide you with a clear roadmap to make your marketing bigger, better and more personalised than ever before.

The key takeaways you’ll get from this session are:

• An introduction to the 5 key students of today: Studious Sophie, All Rounder Amy, Pragmatic Pam, Easy Going Eric and Reluctant Ryan.
• Data-led insight into the attitudes, beliefs, and university decision making processes for each persona and what this means for your marketing activity.
• A practical guide into how you can identify and understand your university’s personas and develop a roadmap towards marketing personalisation. 

Alumni relations and fundraising are universal. It may take different forms and it will be constantly evolving, but they are common to all cultures.

Culture is real. Navigating your way through different cultures is complex and challenging. Yet, cultural literacy is a must-have not a nice-to-have. You will be a better person – as an individual, as a member of your community and as a professional, if you develop your cultural literacy.

This session will focus on cultural competence with the emphasis on cultural intelligence and understanding bias, looking at these through the lens of advancement. Flo and Maarten will address questions such as: how to be an active, attentive and authentic listener; starting with curiosity and humility, understand and be comfortable with your own culture; use it as the platform to understand others. The session will be a presentation liberally interspersed with a mix of video and real-life examples from the speakers and an invitation to all participants to share theirs.

Marketing in large, devolved universities has always been a challenge. Reaching diverse audiences through multiple departments and marketing teams can too often mean siloed working, duplication of effort and confusing messages. Taking in-person offer holder events off the table and adding Covid to the mix could only make matters worse, right? Well, what if it had the opposite effect? This is a tale of how a pandemic allowed a team to bring departments and resources together, usher in a spirit of cross-college collaboration, accelerate the development of our first uni-wide Offer Holder Hub and take Offer Holder Days online, delivering over 200 online sessions. Find out what we learned about influencing, pivoting, problem-solving and fudging it to get a happy ending for our future students.

You’ve got a problem. No, really. It’s costing your institution hundreds - possibly thousands of ideal-fit students every year. That problem is the Insight Gap - the chasm between what it's really like to be part of your institution and what a prospective student perceives it to be from your website and communications channels. None of them can authentically replicate the feeling, sense of identity, or inclusiveness that makes your institution unique. Told you it was a problem. In this session, you’ll appreciate why the experience of being part of your institution makes you stand out, understand why the Insight Gap is potentially a problem (even if you’ve only just heard of it), and hear how some leading UK institutions are embedding experience into their strategies, with the help of their student ambassadors.

Taking stock in Lockdown the University of Glasgow put their current students at the centre of their recruitment campaigns. Promoting user-generated content and peer to peer opportunities resulted in focussed and relevant campaigns that offered support and advice at specific touchpoints on the student journey.  Find out how we have grown our digital ambassadors- both current students and Alumni to almost 200 and generated over 90 student blogs and vlogs to support recruitment marketing activity and help prospective students make an informed decision on their choice of University.

Join Mark Garratt, Angelina Bingley and your UMF peers for an open discussion on hybrid working and what it means for us and our teams. How do you keep your teams connected and creative in the new hybrid work model? How do you navigate new professional and social norms? How do you ensure inclusive experiences with some staff at home and others in the office? What are the challenges for you for post-lockdown ways of working? What do we need as leaders to thrive in this new environment?
 
If like us you have more questions than answers come along to share your thoughts and ideas for making the return to the workplace as positive as possible. Facilitated by Jim Tudor, Future Index, who will share his top tips on how to foster creativity and collaboration in this new norm, this is a chance to discuss and answer the question how on earth do we make it work?

Time. Budget. People. Whatever the resource, many of us are trying to cope with less since COVID. And one of the best ways to cope at this challenging time is by doing just that. COPE. COPE stands for Creative Once, Publish Everywhere. It is a strategic approach that helps you gain maximum mileage out of every piece of content, repurposing it across multiple channels for multiple audiences. As a result, your resources will stretch much further, at a time when they are likely to be depleted. This session will explore the principles, practices, and processes required for the successful implementation of COPE, and how it might hold the answers to several content challenges in this post-pandemic age. Where there is COPE, there is hope.         

The University of St. Andrews wanted an innovative and effective tactic to get alumni to update their online profiles with new contact details. St. Andrews partnered with StageClip to turn two old VHS recordings from the 1990s into short, Tik-Tok style, fully personalised digital clips of individual graduations that could be shared on social media. Nearly 20% of alumni reached updated their contact information, and the campaign sparked engagement in unexpected ways for their alumni relations and development teams. In this session, StageClip will present the process, results, surprises, and next steps for this new outreach opportunity.