“Over the years Web2present has helped Uppsala University carry out about 30 large scale webinars to help facilitate the application process for its Master programs”
Situation and challenge:
Uppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the oldest university in Sweden, founded in 1477. It ranks among the best universities in Northern Europe and in international rankings.
The university has nine faculties distributed over three “disciplinary domains”. It has about 45,000 students and 2,500 doctoral students. It has a teaching staff of roughly 1,800 (part-time and full-time) out of a total of 6,800 employees. Out of its turnover of SEK 6,3 billion (approx. USD 900 million) in 2013, 30% was spent on education on basic and advanced level, while 66% was spent on research and research programs.
Uppsala University receives a very high number of applications for its different master programs. A part of the challenge of converting applicants to enrolment is to provide top class support and service to qualified applicants, such as information about visa application procedures, finding a place to stay and prepare applicants for what they can expect as students at Uppsala University. With a large number of applications from all over the world this can present some logistical difficulties.
9 conversion webinars have been carried out per year, at 3 different points in the admissions funnel taking place at 3 different times to cover different time zones. In level 1 Uppsala invited all interested students to encourage them to initiate the application process. Level 2 focused on students that had started the application process to encourage them to complete it and level 3 focused on accepted applicants. The webinars were produced and hosted by Web2present with presentations done by Uppsala University.
Approach and results:
Carolina Vargas, a member of the Web2present marketing team, was in charge to ensure we could meet the expectations and requirements of Uppsala University.
“We established what Uppsala wanted to achieve with the webinars and together with the client we finalized the text for the registration pages. The purpose of the customized registration pages was to capture the data of the applicants who actually signed up for the webinars. They contained a text description of what information would be shared with the applicants in the webinar, a logo of Uppsala University, a nice image gallery, pictures/names of the speakers and some fields for the applicants to fill out. The link and password for the webinar were created and added to the confirmation email and automatic email reminders were set up”.
Before the webinars, dry-runs were conducted with the Uppsala speakers to ensure that everything worked from a technical perspective such as headsets and webcams. Over the years each of the roughly 30 webinars have gotten about 400 registrations each and in excess of 200 live attendees each making these webinars a big success.
Facts about each conversion webinar:
Uppsala University Testimonial:
“We strive to provide excellent and personal support to all applicants but with our slim organisation, traveling across the world to meet them all is not an option. Webinars where attendants also can ask questions is in my opinion a really cost effective way of achieving the same thing. Judging by the feedback from attendants, they found it highly useful so we’re doing three more now for admitted applicants.”
Joachim Ekström, Communication strategist at Uppsala University.