EduTV Ep.4 How to Drive Open Day Attendance

Video Transcript

Alice

Welcome to the Garden! Today, I’m here with Mike. Mike, my question to you is how do I get my prospective students to turn up to my event?

Michael

I mean universities are investing a huge amount of money in events and I think, the kind of dedication of time in the travel can sometimes be concerning for students. So, really thinking about how can we extend the reach in kind of the audience that are able to kind of-

Alice

Extend the accessibility.

Michael

Extend the accessibility, exactly! So, by recording events, recording the content that occurs and those highlights and giving the key message across either through video or through audio.

Podcasting is a really easy way to maximise the return on investment a university can extract from an event and it also removes any kind of concerns or any challenges associated with the prospective student making the travel to arrive at the event itself.

So obviously you can use reminders like SMS, making phone calls and kind of event reminders through target audiences or custom audiences in social media or always think about how can we record this event turn into kind of a digital event through things like Instagram Live to broadcast, extend the reach and get a higher return on investment from your event.

Alice

And one thing that I would recommend universities and TAFEs do is differentiate yourselves from what everyone else is doing. Everyone has open days, everyone has info sessions. Think about using meet-ups or hosting a panel,

Just even changing the title of your event can really have like a dramatic increase on the number of people who will be wanting to attend and the amount of people who are willing to share that across their social networks as well.

Michael

I think one of the key things as well is understanding what’s of interest to the students that you are trying to connect with and using tools like Instagram and others we can see influencers that are followed massively by your target students cohort and inviting them along to speaking in events is a great way to kid of attract them.

So what we often see is that universities will bring in people, one their professors or whoever might look up to but the reality is the event is about the students not about anyone else, and so thinking about what’s going to attract them to the event is a pretty good place to start and something that’s often overlooked.

Alice

Yeah! You want to be highlighting obviously, your career opportunities, post University but you also want to know more about your experience on campus.