Storytelling the Admissions Process

Challenge

I handle digital marketing for a university in Pakistan. This semester we were planning our  marketing campaign when the pandemic hit and forced us to shut down our campus. Initially, we  had made several plans of holding open houses and asking students to visit our campus to see  our facilities. We even decided to make a nice welcome oﬃce to provide information to any  student or parent coming to visit. These plans were put on hold and we had to design our entire  admissions campaign online. In general we struggled to attract students to our newer programs  and felt that by opening up the campus and showing the facilities we had we could attract better  candidates and grow our brand. In short we wanted our prospective students to experience our  culture and campus, which could have helped them make a decision to apply to our programs.

Selection

When we decided to take our entire admissions campaign online, we had to ﬁgure out a way to  still allow our prospective students to experience our campus and culture. We pondered what  would be the best way we could do that, so we chose to take the Storytelling approach.  Storytelling allows brands to connect with the emotions of the audience and show characters that  the audience can relate to. As the Storytelling Tool video from Week 2 of the course says that  storytelling doesn’t solve a problem but creates a cause “A cause is something that ignites  people, and unites people.”

Application

We realised that the best storytellers for this situation would be the Alumni. If prospective  students saw Alumni established in good companies, and they tell the story of their experience on  our campus, then that could attract those students to apply. Because it is their story that would  be the most honest account of the campus experience rather than the marketing team trying to  tell why the University would be a good ﬁt for them. That is the reason we created a webinar and  had some of our well established alumni talk about their experience at the University through their  stories. We promoted the webinar with the names, titles and companies ﬁve of our Alumni are  working in, we then set up a sign up sheet that allowed us to collect data for these prospective  students. During the webinar, the alumni talked about their stories and their experience at the  University and how the University helped them excel in their respective ﬁelds. The moderator  himself was an alumni so it became a very personal and casual conversation. This was also live  streamed on our oﬃcial Facebook page, where our representatives were ready to reply to any  query immediately. Through this conversation; facilities, faculty, scholarships and other beneﬁts of  the University were highlighted by the stories of the Alumni.

Insight

This turned out to be a successful activity that created a lot of engagement and generated queries  regarding our admissions process. As we had live streamed the activity on our Facebook page,  we were able to have a reach of 16,500 people and generated about 100 admission applications  right after the activity. Our team was available to instantly answer any query a viewer had and  directed them to the proper channels for further processing. On the days leading up to the event  we had about 200 people sign up and whose data we collected. This taught us that prospective  students want genuine stories and this was as real as it could get. It was live and unedited and  they were personal stories of success and stories that these prospective students could one day  be telling as well. Due to the success of this, we plan to hold similar activities for the remainder of  our admissions campaign. This turned out to be a better approach than just posting video  interviews or testimonials as they might not have the realness that this did.

Approach

I felt that the approach we used worked and that in our case storytelling, and the way we did it  was a great approach that was unique for us and it was a great way of showcasing real examples.  Perhaps our next step would be to take this storytelling process to the next step and connecting  prospective students with our alumni and current students to have a more intimate one on one  conversation so that the stories told can have a more authentic touch to it and help build a strong  brand image and loyalty. We are already looking into diﬀerent tools that can help us easily do that  so that our Alumni and students don’t feel burdened with an added responsibility but can easily  do this.

