For the foreseeable future University Open Days are a no go. Thousands of prospective students gathering on campus to view facilities and attend subject talks is a social distancing nightmare. As a result, you’re having to come up with exciting, cutting-edge ways to deliver your University Open Days virtually. And you’re having to do it quickly, so you’re not left behind.
With the right software running your virtual Open Days prospective students are able to take virtual tours of the campus. Plus, they can chat with Tutors as well as speak to existing and other prospective students.
It can work really well. And it does. So well, in fact, that many are already adopting this technology on a wider scale to give prospective international students a good insight into their institution.
The reality of making your Open Days virtual
But it’s not all plain sailing and running Open Days virtually does present you with one critical problem – tracking attendance.
You can carry on using your event booking system to allow prospective students to book onto events as normal. The confirmation and reminder communications you send out will contain the link to the virtual Open Day landing site.
However, typically the first thing people do on arrival is check-in. This is often carried out by scanning a QR code or having your student ambassador check off their details. This then provides the all-important actual attendance figures which you can use to analyse conversion rates and organise alternative dates for those that were not able to attend.
So, when you’re running virtual event how do you do make sure you’re tracking your prospective students to offer them the best possible experience?
Delivering a solution that compliments the user experience
One option is to have a registration page on arrival at the virtual event landing page. But this is asking the person to provide their details again. Not ideal. Plus, you’ll then need a data feed to send the information to your original booking system.
There’s a solution to this and it’s quite simple. Several leading UK Universities are already using it.
Achiever CRM for Universities tracks all communications you send to your prospective students. This includes monitoring interaction with email communications. As a result, you can see what emails a contact has read and what links they’ve clicked within those emails. If someone clicks your link to the virtual Open Day page the system automatically updates their record to indicate that they have attended.
Using this information, you can set up a simple query to monitor everyone that has booked to attend a virtual open day.
What’s more you can further refine your query using a date parameter so that only those who click the link to launch the Open Day on or after a specific date (sometimes elements of the virtual Open Day are left active for people to view at their leisure) are registered as attended.
For existing Achiever CRM for Universities customers setting up this new way of working took just minutes with no new development required.
“… you’ve formulated a simple but brilliant solution. I’m really pleased, thank you for improvising it so quickly.” – University of Loughborough
This is just one of the many advantages that Achiever CRM for Universities is able to give you by managing the different aspects of the student journey in a single system.
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