#UoMGraduation — things we tried, things we learned.
Back in March, Tom and I travelled to sunny Brighton for the CASE Social Media and Community Conference. In the midst of a fantastic two days of social strategising, note taking, amazing fish and chips and abortive sea swimming (we bought costumes and everything…but we wimped out…regrets) I took the opportunity to raise a question that has preoccupied me since I entered the heady world of HE comms — could we do more with graduation?
From an alumni relations perspective graduation should be a boon — young alumni on campus without any pesky academic distractions, warmly disposed towards the institution, thinking about their future, reflecting on their time as students — these are the golden tickets of relationship building.
And yes, we do invest in graduation here at Manchester — we gather new contact details, hand out mugs, put on a photo booth and in previous years our brilliant comms and marketing team have led on a whole host of awesome social and offline initiatives — but could we in alumni relations do more? And, from my perspective as a SoMe practitioner, can we use social better to reach these future ambassadors, volunteers and donors?
What followed was a great discussion amongst peers which generated some good ideas but also reinforced my suspicion that we are all in the same development and alumni relations boat (and what a boat that would be) of feeling like we could and should be doing more to reach our graduating students. I resolved then that this would be the year we at Manchester pushed the envelope and that I would share some of what we did and what we learned with the HE comms community — hence this article. Feel free to share and respond with your own experiences and reflections, I’d really love to hear what else is going on out there. I’m hoping to write a follow up in the next few months once we’ve had a chance to look at the social stats and other indicators so will be happy to incorporate reflections you share on your practice or any good things you’ve seen elsewhere.
The strategy
Back in Manchester ☔ Tom and I started throwing ideas into a Trello board. Strategy was dictated by a divisional priority to develop the young alumni user base on our alumni-student mentoring platform. Our method was somewhat constrained by some of the restrictions we have around gathering new email data — in short we needed alumni to update their details with us using the existing student data platform so that later in the summer, once we’d processed imported their updates, they would be able to access the alumni platform. Hence, two campaign objectives:*
🎓 To get graduands to update their details on the student records system
🎓 To ensure high engagement levels from graduands on appropriate channels (for this campaign Facebook and Instagram, and to a lesser extent Snapchat and Twitter) so that they could be targeted with paid content promoting the mentoring platform later in the summer.
How to do that? Why, by creating highly engaging content and surprise and delight opportunities for students to engage with us on social, of course!
The ideas
Digging deep into The Trello Board of Good Ideas and drawing heavily on a brainstorm with some of our student graduation helpers (a brilliant bunch with a lot of GREAT ideas and absolutely no hesitation in telling 30-something Tom and I when our ideas were…I believe you say…skeng) we settled on some ideas we were happy would add the engaging-content-plus-surprise-and-delight-elements we needed to our campaign staples (scheduled emails, congratulations social graphics, Facebook event etc):
Treasure hunt
Free goodies! Placed at random locations around the graduation hall and posted on social for graduands to find and claim. We refined this a lot as we went on (more in the lessons learned below on that) but the intention was that we would work in conjunction with our corporate comms social media team on promoting a few of the hunts on Snapchat but the majority were promoted by Instagram and the graduation Facebook event. We chose a mixture of prizes from the usual t-shirts and tote bags to the more…eclectic. I don’t think Tom and I will ever see eye-to-eye about my request to purchase a 2ft cardboard Judge Rinder cut out (he is an alum, and I got my way on that front) or a gram of graphene (did not get my way on that one: The Great Missed Opportunity of 2017), as well as some higher value items like Radiohead and the Chemical Brothers on vinyl (Ed O’Brien and both of the Chems are Manchester graduates, fact fans).
Every morning we posted the items up for grabs with a “location release” time and then when the time came posted where we would be either on our Instagram timeline or stories (or both) — we also made use of Instagram live to stream the items waiting for their new owners, or to take the items on little journeys and ask for suggestions about where to drop them. Once we had a winner we took their photo and posted it and also took the opportunity to record a mini video with them telling us their favourite thing about Manchester with the intention of using it for something later on (we’ve not decided yet what…and that will become a bit of a theme!).
We were ably supported by our central communicaitons social media team with this and they ran a few of the hunts for us on snapchat and shared content via their Instagram which really extended the reach of the project — thanks guys!
Mobile selfie station
In previous years we’d had a photo booth which saw a decent amount of traffic but we were aware that asking people to take time out of their hectic day to visit probably hampered the amount of reach this gave us and so we decided to take the photo booth to the people! Our student volunteers toured campus with chalk board signs, cutouts of famous alumni and all manner of wild and wonderful props, inviting graduands and their visitors to take selfies and use the #UoMGraduation hashtag.
Disposable Cameras
We would leave disposable cameras all over campus! We would label them up and ask the graduating students to hand them back at the end of the day! They would take photos of themselves taking photos! They would talk about how PENG the Division of Development and Alumni Relations are and how much they wanted to volunteer and perhaps one day donate! It would be amazing! What could possibly go wrong?!
Care station
Graduation is HARD WORK. What better way to win the hearts of our new alumni by smoothing the way for them, even in just a tiny way — and maybe seizing the opportunity to explain how playing an active role in the alumni community can help smooth their transition into the world of work as well?
Originally we liked the idea of little graduation day care packages left around campus for graduands to find, with water, energising treats, plasters and ear plugs (for those moments when parents’ questioning just gets a bit much) but we decided to hold onto that idea for another time — instead we set up a desk near the robing rooms with all manner of useful things — fans, hair clips, nail files and more besides.
“Best of” galleries
Did you know that millennials are expected to take over 25,000 selfies in their lifetime? Well, I’m pretty sure that the Manchester class of 2017 took at least half of their lifetime’s share during the two weeks of graduation.
On average we saw around 200 robed-up photos tagged to The University of Manchester’s location on Instagram every day of graduation and it’s a reasonable assumption that a significant number more didn’t post location or tag us in. That’s a lot of photos of people having one of the most important days of their lives. Can anyone else smell engagement?
So — with permission — we took those photos and posted them into FB galleries from our page and shared them with the graduation FB event and invited people to tag themselves. Oh, and then we edited up a little video of the many, many, many hat toss boomerangs #2017yearoftheboomerang
Facebook event
Just a quick word about the Facebook event: it was more or less the home of graduation on Facebook for us — pretty much everything we created — from the very practical links to information pages to the silly stuff went in there. We didn’t promote the event but rather used a build it and they will come model and, by and large, they did — thanks to all our engaging content of course, hem hem.
Top 10 Tips for Graduation
We were lucky enough to work with our student comms team’s intern Laurent, who developed a few projects for us, using his knowledge as a soon-to-be graduate of what his peers would respond well to. Before graduation he created this fantastic social shorthand with his Top Ten Tips for graduation, which we shared across all channels and was a great driver of registrations into the Facebook event.
Graduation playlist
Another fantastic Laurent idea — a Spotify playlist, consisting of suggestions from students and alumni of the tunes that sum up their graduation summer. We’d previously experimented with this when we were promoting the #purplewave and found that we lost engaged users when we asked them to go off-platform and interact with Spotify directly, plus there is an element of risk in leaving the playlist open to anyone to add to, so this time we simply took suggestions in comments and replies and added them ourselves. The resulting playlist was played in the robing rooms, so the graduating students got to hear them as they were getting ready for their ceremonies.
What we learned
Plan, plan, plan
Back to our old friend Trello — Tom was RIGOROUS about planning out all our campaign actions for every day. I may have rolled my eyes slightly. I was wrong. We had a *lot* to get through and multiple channels to do it on — having a prescriptive plan to be sure we were hitting those objectives freed us up to be responsive to our audience and properly evaluate to what was working and what wasn’t as well as enabling us to be spontaneous when opportunities presented themselves. So when Tom insisted we maintain the same rigour in recording exactly what we did each day I recognised the value — it meant that when it comes to crunching the numbers we will be properly armed to know, on a micro level, what worked and what didn’t.
Similarly, we gathered all our assets in advance — we knew we would be short on time for the period of graduation and having everything to hand in the Trello board was a huge bonus — graphics, preferred images, videos, stories, videos, gifs, key messages, links, the lot.
But be spontaneous
Like I say above, knowing that we had covered our bases with our strategic messaging throughout the day freed us up to respond to opportunities as and when they presented themselves. My favourites included a sequence of gifs for Instagram based around the television hit of the summer (note: totally not our idea — thanks Leah and Olivia! — and one that neither of us thought would be a hit with our Russell group-educated graduands…how wrong we were)
But the KING of the “not sure if there’s a strategic reason to do this but let’s see if it works” was Tom’s graduation bingo. It got strong engagement on Twitter and Facebook, worked better after graduation than before and is definitely something we will look at developing more next year…just need to retrofit it with a strategy…😂
If at first you don’t succeed
On the morning of day two of the treasure hunt I stood in the rain (💜 you, Manchester) for 30 minutes waiting for someone to pick up a bag with some Brian Sox and a bobble hat in. On the next hunt SOMEONE’S MUM stole the socks right from under my nose and scooted off before I had a chance to stop her and I began to question my conviction that this would work. So we made a sign. A big, ridiculous sign that Tom insisted was charming and I maintain was just crap. And the next day they started coming. And the day after that they were coming because they’d seen us on Instagram. And the day after that they were waiting for us. By the end of the fortnight a woman ran up to me, breathless, having run across campus for the chance of winning a 2ft cut out of Judge Robert Rinder.
We’ll be examining the stats on this over the next few weeks but it’s pretty clear that this was an idea that needed time to gain traction.
The temptation with social media is to watch for things to fly or drown, but sometimes you need to let things float before they can really take off.
What you first think isn’t working…sometimes is
We have a big campus and there aren’t that many of us, so expecting graduands to take time out of their special day to track us down and return our disposible camers was…not my smartest move. The first two cameras disappeared into the ether (which I’d anticipated and rationalised with “well so long as they’re talking about it on social…” reader, they did not) and so we despondently gave them to our student volunteer helpers and told them just to do with them what they thought best. And they loved them! And the graduands loved them (although some of them simply couldn’t fathom why they couldn’t see the photos immediately 🤦)!
Day one of week two I took the first half of them to be developed (expensive — if anyone knows how to get bargain photo development I’d love to hear it) and we realised we were sitting on a veritable gold mine of images that felt authentic, un-corporate and just REAL. We posted the digital images (presented to me on a CD-R ) on Facebook where they got great engagement and now we’re coming up with ideas for what we can do with the physical objects…grand plans…watch this space…
Sometimes it’s the simple things that work the best
Those images we took* from Instagram and posted to Facebook? Simple idea, long winded to execute but not exactly revolutionary, right? Well those photos albums got us the highest engagement we’ve ever got for a photo album on any channel. Our graduating students loves seeing them, loved tagging themselves and sharing them on to their peers who then engaged with our content — and a large proportion of those will be fellow graduates: exactly the people we need to target when we start serving paid social promoting our alumni-student mentoring platform. So, much as it may be tempting to deride the “selfie generation”, if you can harness that energy it can be extremely valuable.
*With full permission — trust me, I know, because I was the schmuck who asked for permission on each of them and then had to keep track of which ones we were authorised to use — *not* my most favourite element of this campaign.
NOW is the time to have fun
Working on a campaign which had engagement with a younger audience as a key deliverable was a LOT of fun and it really encouraged us to try out new things. The sense of spontaneity I talk about above wasn’t just limited to the graduation-focussed content or channels: it relaxed the playing field as a whole and encouraged me to have a bit more fun on Twitter and with our audience of long-since graduated alumni. And it worked — we got some really strong engagement on posts that were unrelated to graduation across the period.
And the lesson? Graduation is fun and we had a great time embracing that fun on social and serving our objectives. We’ll follow up soon with another piece that looks at the stats from the period (just as soon as we’ve looked at them…ahem) and what we can take from them but for me personally (and professionally) a major major legacy is an increased confidence for light heartedness on social — something that I am hoping will lead to more fun stuff and more engagement on social long after the last cap is tossed.
*also worth noting at this point that the social team from our corporate comms and marketing team were a member of staff down over the summer which meant they were restricted in how much extra activity they could take on. But they still did LOADS of awesome graphics and helped us out a bunch because they are THE BEST.
