Bournville College.Helping transform student engagement.

Case study - Bournville College.Unified Communications & Collaboration.

At BT, we believe that technology will shape the future of education. It enriches the student experience, opens new income streams and enhances the exploration of knowledge and understanding within what is now, a highly competitive and truly global market.

Unique workshop experienceSo to demonstrate exactly how BT can help colleges and universities to get ahead in today’s world-wide academic economy, we’ve developed a highly focused and engaging workshop experience where customers are taken through a ‘student journey’ at our fictional Duskin College or University. This is supported by our ‘Connected Campus’ and ‘Connected College’ capability summaries which explain how our solutions address the challenges faced by further and higher education and how everything connects together.

This is a major initiative to work closely with Education, where we demonstrate a thorough understanding of the Education sector’s challenges – and show how IT services can underpin significant transformational change.

Says Ben Fairburn, BT’s Business Development Director for Education in IT Services: “Using the concept of a student journey that starts at the recruitment stage and runs right through to graduation, we demonstrate how BT can improve both

the student experience and the operational efficiency of the institution. It’s about ‘thought leadership’ linked to the art of the possible and customers are queuing up to come and workshop ideas with us!”

When Bournville College attended a workshop in our Customer Experience Centre (CEC), they didn’t realise that within 48 hours of leaving they’d be implementing a new way to recruit students.

Case Study - Bournville College.

Interactive and compellingThe sessions are interactive and blend presentations and demonstrations with live examples of videos, graphics, design templates and solutions that work across a connected campus environment.

Says Mark Lewis, Student Services Manager at Bournville College: “When we visited IT Services in Oxford, we were keen to understand how their solutions could improve the way we work. During the workshop it was clear that BT really understands our sector.”

Real ideas and solutions“They showed us how technology can be used to improve life on and off campus - demonstrating how this works with real ideas and solutions” continues Mark. “As an example - we’d already sent out a traditional post card mailer to around 4,000 prospective students inviting them to our open day. During the workshop it became clear that there was a better way to drive recruitment – one that would both improve results and help students to understand more about the college, before even setting foot on our campus.”

How we helpedBT and partner Kulu Valley worked with Bournville to create a new recruitment video and college portal. Current Bournville student apprentices helped with the filming and editing – and links to the video were emailed to around 4,000 prospective students.

Once on the portal, students were then able to find out more about the college; and all this was up and running just 2 days after the visit to Oxford.

Continues Mark: “This has transformed the way we look at student communications and relationships. Being able to measure the success of recruitment activity is a major step forward. We could see how many students opened the email, how many clicked through to the landing page, and we could see that 40% of prospective students watched the video.

We also captured the type of device and browser used by viewers, which will help us to develop future student technology plans.”

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ResultsThis year’s target for student enrolment has been exceeded and Mark sees this as a first step in their plan to develop a marketing strategy to drive greater student engagement.

Concludes Mark: “We know that students don’t like reading emails, so we’ll be making our communications more

compelling. This will help us create better relationships with students earlier in their journey with us.

The Connected College showcase was amazing. It’s given us so many practical ideas that will really help us improve the lives of everyone at the college and we’ll be working with IT Services to implement a wider programme of innovations as the year progresses.”

During the workshop it was clear that BT really understands our sector.

This has transformed the way we look at student communications and relationships.

Mark Lewis Student Services Manager, Bournville College