Reacting to Covid-19
With RMIT University
The global coronavirus pandemic has dramatically changed the face of international student recruitment for universities everywhere. With travel restrictions in place, most international applicants or offer holders are stuck at home, while international recruitment officers are unable to go to key territories as they might do normally.
In short, international recruitment in the face of Covid-19 has become a whole lot tougher.
However, all is not lost. By shifting your focus to online support, relationships between international applicants and offer holders can still be built and nurtured in this unprecedented time, as one of our customers has shown.
533 students from 69 countries exchanged 8,104 messages
The challenge
RMIT University, in Australia, started using The Ambassador Platform midway through 2019, and quickly mastered the platform. You can see their international team’s regular TAP Feed here. When coronavirus became a pandemic, RMIT’s international team were the first of our customers to use our platform as a COVID-19-specific channel of communication.
Initially, they placed a single Enrolment Support Officer profile on a COVID-19 landing page, where both offer holders and agents were able to contact the team and enquire about whether individual applications and admissions were to be affected by the pandemic.
But, when COVID-19 became more prevalent, RMIT imposed a travel ban on their staff, as a matter of public safety. For RMIT’s international team, their regional experts who were usually found flying out to various regions to meet with students, the ban meant having to stay at home.
As a result of this, the International team decided to create a second account with TAP and host their own TAP Page.
They quickly got 19 members of their international team who, between them, support 27 different regions, signed up to the Ambassador App and, within days of creating their new account, had their TAP Feed live.
In no time at all, the messages started flooding in.
Results
Between going live on 3 March and 8 June, they have connected with 533 students, a mixture of prospects, applicants and offer holders, from 69 different countries, and have exchanged a total of 8,014 messages.
53% of the visitors on their TAP Feed have gone on to start a conversation with their regional experts, and these conversations have predominantly been about applications and admissions, as well as eligibility and availability of scholarships.
This specific TAP Feed continues to be a vital part of the support RMIT is offering its international applicants and offer holders as COVID-19 continues to disrupt life everywhere.
Before the pandemic set it, RMIT's Assistant Director of Global Sales and Conversion Mark Scherian told us how they'd found using TAP so far, and what they plan to do with it next:
“The ability to speak to current students who've gone through the same things they have, we felt was really important. TAP really gives us an opportunity to showcase those students, what country they're from, what their interests are, and what they're studying."
Mark Scherian
Assistant Director of Global Sales and Conversion
RMIT University
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you tell prospects what it's really like to be part of your institution, why not book a demo of The Ambassador Platform?
