Background

Lockdowns due to the COVID pandemic have challenged the way lots of things are done.

For Universities one of those challenges has been how to engage prospective students during Open Day, when those prospective students can’t visit a campus and have shorter attention spans when online.

Tension

How can you demonstrate how Western is different and helps you succeed, when prospective students can’t even visit a campus?

Approach

We worked with Western to reimagine the best way to experience Open Day virtually, and delivered the technology to bring it to life.

By necessity, the content included a lot of information about the available courses, which was traditionally delivered lecture style over 45 mins for each course. However as the attention span of prospective students reduces online, this content was significantly cut-down into shorter, bite sized chunks to make it more attractive to the audience.

Course-specific chatrooms were set-up for 2 hours per course. This gave prospective students the ability to ask questions or to see the answers to other people’s questions, and it meant those Q&A sessions were busy and gave a sense of community and liveliness.

We utilised a mix of trusted platforms for content and live streaming to deliver a lean and efficient setup. The technology approach involved a mix of social, email, SMS, Facebook Livestream, Adobe Cloud, AWS and Zoom.