Havering College
We need to ‘get sociable’ to communicate more effectively with potential students.
Havering College wanted to embrace a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy, which would improve student recruitment and talk directly to students through social media channels.
Havering College of Further and Higher Education is a large educational establishment based in North East London. It has traditionally used local media opportunities to recruit potential students, but with the credit crunch and budgets being squeezed a radical rethink to this strategy was required.
Face was tasked with looking at other options, which would offer a low-cost solution with sustainable messaging over the complete recruitment cycle. The obvious answer was to develop a CRM strategy, which could be triggered by traditional media interaction at the start of the process.
We developed a poster campaign, which enabled multiple connections to Havering via SMS text messaging, a dedicated campaign micro-site, an alternative WAP mobile phone site, and traditional telephone. We created further interest by using Microsoft Tags, which enabled smart phone users to access the WAP site using barcode technology – we anticipate that this will be popular with tech-savvy students/early adopters.
We also recruited a number of student ambassadors whose role was to interface with potential students through Facebook, This was achieved by developing a Havering Fan-site, complete with a dedicated url. The students commit to an agreed amount of time to promote the college and are paid accordingly. Simple guidelines were issued which had to be adhered to and the site is constantly monitored.
A link from the Facebook site enables potential students to log their interest on the main college website, this enables the college to communicate using other digital tools, such as SMS texts and email, which could be generic or course specific.
