How to run a live chat event for international prospective students

Working in the international student recruitment space and managing the influx of messages from applicants at key stages of the recruitment funnel can be challenging - how do you make sure that no question goes unanswered, and that prospective students feel fully supported even at the busiest times of the year?

Manchester Metropolitan University tackled this question head-on by hosting an online event to support international students in their decision-making process.

Using The Ambassador Platform’s Community Group Chats feature, the International Recruitment Team were able to connect their international offer holders with staff ambassadors in a live forum. 

The opportunity to chat with an ambassador was framed as a live event to add urgency to the messaging and ensure maximum engagement. It also allowed the staff ambassadors monitoring the chat the ability to focus their attention on this important subsection of applicants at a key point in the recruitment funnel. 

Given the target audience and anticipated level of administrative enquiries coming through, the team at Manchester Metropolitan University decided to have a couple of staff ambassadors monitoring the Group Chats on the day. Student ambassadors were also available via our 1-2-1 Chat feature.

Promotion

MMU promoted the opportunity to speak to a staff ambassador 4 days before the event via an email campaign. Here is a template of the email used to encourage prospects to take part, in case you're thinking of doing something similar:

The messaging was kept simple to highlight the call to action to join the conversation on 25th January from 12pm-2pm GMT. The button redirected the international prospects to the Private Group Chat to sign up for an account ahead of the event date. 

Impact

In the lead-up to the event, 191 prospective students clicked on the email link and signed up for an account on The Ambassador Platform. On the day, the International Team dealt with enquiries from 154 prospects in the Group Chat, and over 730 messages were sent. Most of the engagement came from prospects in Nigeria (33%), India (23%), and Niger (10%).

• 35.3% of all new users visiting the university’s Feed on the day of the event signed up to start a chat with an ambassador. Prospects were also able to browse all of the existing user-generated Content and FAQs featured on the Feed.
• 365 users who did not sign up to chat with an ambassador still gained a great deal of value and insight into life at Manchester Met from interacting with all the videos and photos uploaded by the university’s student ambassadors. 

If you want to find out more about Community Group Chat and how you could use it to nurture your student and prospect community, we're just an email away: support@theambassadorplatform.com 😊

If you're not currently using the platform why not get in touch to find out more, we'd love to hear from you!