How to get prospective students to tell your “story” during visit day

Each year, our admissions team hosts our largest student visit event during Presidents’ Day weekend. The event, called More to Explore, is held over two days across Arizona State University’s four Phoenix metropolitan campuses: Sunday at the Downtown Phoenix campus and Monday at the Polytechnic, Tempe and West campuses. It is a conference-style, choose-your-own-schedule event. In total, the event has more than 300 sessions and activities for prospective freshman, transfer and graduate students, ranging in admission status from prospect to admitted.

This year 3,600 prospective students and family members attended the event.

The Idea

More to Explore was the perfect event to exclusively use student-generated content on ASU Admissions’ Snapchat account to highlight the day’s activities. Here is why:

1. Hashtag participation on Twitter and Instagram had begun to wane during the event the past year, pointing to a shift in social media use among our audience and the need to engage differently. We had debuted our Snapchat account at More to Explore in 2016 so it was important to use it effectively a year later.
2. Snapchat added the Memories feature this year, which allows you to upload photos and screenshots from your camera roll to your story, and made it possible to share student snaps to our account.
3. This event has so many activities happening at once on multiple campuses that we did not have the staff bandwidth to effectively cover the event on social media by ourselves.

Since this was the first time we would be soliciting students to send us snaps during an event, we decided to incentivize them with ASU merchandise donated by the campus bookstore and highlighted this as an opportunity to “snap for swag.”

Throughout the week preceding the event, we teased the opportunity to send us snaps for swag in our reminder emails, Snapchat account, Guidebook app and private admitted student network, called devil2devil. During the event’s welcome presentation on each campus, we promoted participation and displayed example snaps as inspiration.

Since students were encouraged to use Snapchat, we created a branded Snapchat geofilter for the day of the event on all campuses. Students were not required to use the geofilter in their snaps to our account (since a couple of our campuses are too large to geofence entirely), but many of them did use the filter. We also were able to get analytics from the geofilter.

The Story

During the days of the event, we took a screenshot of each snap received, kept a record in a notebook of username and snap description, and curated the best snaps into the account’s story. Some posts were edited before sharing with text or emoji for context (such as campus location) or to help the flow of the story.

When a student’s snap was used, they received a message from us to pick up a piece of swag from the event information table at their campus. Our swag consisted of ASU binders, hats, T-shirts, tumblers and pennants. Students got to choose the item they wanted, but had to to be present to receive the item.

A Slack channel was also used among Admission staff across each campus during the event. The social media team was able to quickly relay each selected username to the staff at each information table to make sure only the students whose snaps had been used in the story received swag. This was vital because there was some confusion from students who thought just sending a snap to the Admission’s account was enough to earn swag.

The Results

By the end of the event, we had taken screenshots of 253 snaps. A few dozen snaps were not able to be screenshot because they were sent as videos or with viewing times that were too short to save (less than three seconds). In total, 70 snaps were used to tell our story between the two days: 26 the first day, and 44 the second day. The viewer retention rate was 92 percent on day one and 72 percent on day two. The big difference in retention rate is likely because the second day had twice as many snaps and twice as long.

The stories were downloaded and saved as videos that live on our Facebook page.

The Snapchat geofilter was also very popular. In 48 hours, our filter was swiped 6,800 times, used 1,300 times and viewed 35,700 times. The cost of the filter breaks down to about $0.32 per use or $0.01 per view.

Many students sent more than one snap, some even communicating with our account about how to improve their chances of getting a snap selected.

The students who received swag were very excited when they showed up at their respective event info table. The staff who worked each table said it was the highlight of their day.

Tips for You

1. It was extremely helpful to keep a written record of each username and a brief description of each snap. This helped in the curation of the story, which included sharing snaps out of order from when they were received and using them hours after they were sent. Without a written record, it would have been impossible to send a chat to the correct students about how to pick up their swag.
2. Be sure to devote a staff person to this activity during your event. Snaps were sent nonstop throughout the event. It really did take the undivided attention of one person all day long to keep focused on the task of saving and curating the best snaps into the story. Plus swag was at stake, so accuracy was key.
3. Since this was a two-day event, we downloaded the story from day one and then deleted it at the beginning of day two so the second story would start from the beginning of that day. There was only a minor difference in total views (about 100) between the two days since the first story was available for about 20 hours instead of 24.

A year ago, when we launched our account, Snapchat didn’t have the functionality to do a campaign like this. Now, we plan to incorporate student content on our account regularly. We can encourage engagement from our prospective students from anywhere in the world in a snap.

Follow along at @FutureSunDevils on Snapchat.