Applicant communities - 8 steps to designing a compelling experience
For your 2022 applicants or offer holders, joining your online community will be one of the first meaningful interactions with your university. Whether hosted on CampusConnect or elsewhere, this community is an extension of your university brand and as such it should feel like a unique home for your new students.
It is of course a little more nuanced than simply setting up an online group and pushing applicants into a shared space. For maximum value in conversion, and a superb student experience, there are a few fundamentals that need to be in place.
Including real life examples from across our university partners, here we outline 8 key steps in designing your digital community experience for 2022 entrants:
1. Generate a real ‘buzz’ around your applicant community
Your applicants, offer holders and new entrants will naturally be excited about what lies ahead, so your new community should create a real sense of excitement. Your applicants should be personally invited to become a member of your exclusive university pre-enrolment community. The promotional campaign should relay to applicants that this is a unique opportunity for them to join and connect with relevant peers prior to starting out. A clear value proposition will motivate students to sign up, lots of visibility (and several reminders) will ensure no one misses the invite. Starting with a bang is important as it ensures that the community starts out with the highly engaged buzz you get when there are enough members joining in to kick off the conversation.
Examples: Liverpool John Moores have created a short promotional video which we think nicely captures the value of joining their community.
2. Create an engaging onboarding experience
Onboarding is an opportunity to set the community tone, culture and expectations for applicants. It’s important to drill down to the essentials; what do your applicants need to know before starting out?
Who are the community members?
Where do I find them?
How do I connect with people from my course/accommodation/region?
How do I interact with them?
What are the rules and etiquette for engaging?
What do I do if there’s a problem?
Clear communication here is important and using a range of mediums (welcome emails, Direct Messages (DMs), push notifications and links to relevant documentation) will ensure that new members understand how the community is structured, and how they can get the most from participation.
It’s worth having ambassadors check in with new members so that their initial experience is a very positive one, thus ensuring they come back again and again, strengthening the bond they have with one another and you, the admitting HEI.
Examples: Check out our community culture guidelines as an example.
3. Show applicants how to participate
This is often a missed step in building effective community engagement. Don’t be guilty of expecting members to simply work out what to do when they enter the community. Instead, it is a very helpful step to have your ambassadors/guides show applicants how to participate in the community. This can simply be encouragement given to new members to introduce themselves or ask a question.
The goal should be to move applicants along the participation curve. They will likely start out as passive member of the community (reading, lurking) but if your community is structured and set up well, applicants will become more engaged and actively engaged members. A simple ‘breaking the ice’ cue can unlock wider participation and build confidence. It’s worth remembering that community value is generated from the contribution of its members, so creating a safe, welcoming environment and encouraging participation are important steps.
4. Incentivise engagement
Aligned with active participation is reward, or incentivisation. Especially so when done publicly, it is a powerful way to acknowledge the positive contribution of community members, and this in turn will drive future engagement and value creation for members.
The reward element doesn’t actually have to be tangible, public recognition for members’ contribution can in fact have a much more positive impact. Providing additional access permissions, resources and even greater responsibility can provide further motivation for members to become much more active.
5. Identify your ‘power members’
There’s often an overliance on ambassadors in communities to generate engagement when in actual fact, we’ve found this isn’t always the case. Within CampusConnect university communities, over 90% of interactions involve only applicants. Within the community some applicants or offer holders emerge to take a very active lead in supporting others. They do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to supporting others. These members are extremely important and need to be recognised, their contribution to the community acknowledged and rewarded where possible. Cultivating a relationship with these ‘power members’ provides significant future value as can be retained into active members of the post-enrolment university community, ambassadors, peer promoters and future alumni.
6. Identify your ‘wobblers’’
On the other side of the engagement curve there will always be a significant proportion of the community who rank lower on engagement metrics. Some members are simply happy to passively consume content from the community without actively participating. This of course is perfectly reasonable, there’s undoubtedly value in this for them, and we are not looking to make members feel pushed into doing something they are not comfortable doing. However, there are a few key metrics that do signify that an applicant is at risk of withdrawing.
The main signifier is the applicant having little or no engagement within their programme of study community (or private 1-1 connections with those from that subject area). This is generally a red flag as applicants who have little engagement with their subject community don’t tend to progress through to enrolment. The reasons, of course, can be rich and varied, but visibility on this cohort is key and once you’ve identified them, prompting an ambassador to check in with them is a good course of action to take. In some cases it may simply be that they have missed a step in finding and joining their subject focused community group or peers.
7. Guide high value connections in niche groups
New applicants joining the community are initially keen to seek out fellow applicants who best match their context and share commonalities. Same programme of study is typically the most sought after connection request. However, there are other community intersections where we can bring applicants together. Look for opportunities to bring your students together around shared commonalities such as specific accommodation options, social interests, region/nationality of applicants. Mature students and LGBTQA+ are examples of communities that have also worked really well in guiding better connections and activating engagement. Groups and chats around interests like this tend to be more emergent than prescriptive and involve monitoring engagement and spotting opportunities for new niche group creation. The goal here is to create a diverse range of connections between cohorts of applicants which strengthens the bond they have with the community as a whole.
8. Introduce some ‘live events’ to bolster engagement
This pre-enrolment stage of the student journey can be quite a protracted, long period to keep your applicant community engaged. As members continue to form new connections there will be periods where engagement naturally drops. It’s often helpful to introduce some live synchronous events in the form of live Q & A’s or AMAs (Ask Me Anything) bringing in specially invited members such as staff or alumni. This can reignite group engagement and provide further topics for engagement/discussion among group members.
