The University of Sydney
International Student Recruitment with The University of Sydney
Just as it was for institutions the world over, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was a game-changer for student recruitment teams.
As borders closed, the University of Sydney (USYD) faced arguably its toughest recruitment challenge ever, and turned to The Ambassador Platform for help.
50,877 messages from prospective students in 118 countries
in just 15 months!
The Challenge
Following the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, the compulsory transition to online applied not just to classrooms but also to all recruitment and outreach activities. The University of Sydney’s Sydney Future Students team was quick to introduce TAP and has been able to widen the scope and reach of its recruitment activities to students from all around the world at various stages of their application journey - even when the world was locked down.
Since the country had completely closed its borders, Australian universities were facing a strenuous challenge to recruit and engage with international students. Without international travel, students and parents were unable to fly over to visit the campus or even join domestic recruitment and outreach events that would traditionally host representatives from universities.
"We started exploring TAP in 2019 as part of our Southeast Asia strategy and as we moved to operationalise our plan the global pandemic hit – having a peer-to-peer platform allowed us to expand our personal approach with prospective students even though borders were closed.
The team at Sydney Future Students is delighted with the positive feedback we have had from prospective students and from our virtual student peers (VSPs) about the TAP platform and the process of enabling prospective students to speak with our current students. Our VSPs are super engaged and love creating content and helping prospective students to navigate their way through their decision-making.
TAP has been an asset to our team, helped us achieve goals within our strategy and enabled us to be in front of our prospects at times that suit them and to answer the questions they want to ask"
Tim Field
Director, International
The University of Sydney
Direct conversations
Our Chat feature allowed for authentic conversations between prospective students and ambassadors. These conversations helped ensure prospects could find answers to their questions and make confident decisions about their future.
Generate and collect content
Easy to commission content from your student ambassadors. Collect it in the Admin Dashboard and pick out the best pieces for use elsewhere. And, by keeping each stage of the process separate, you reduce risk. There's no need to hand over social media passwords to students.
Safeguarding by design
Our ‘safeguarding by design’ approach to building our platform, with in-built checks and alerts, offered a safe space for conversation and reflected USYD’s focus for safeguarding.
Over the past year, USYD onboarded over 50 student ambassadors and 7 staff who were able to help more than 2020 prospects who had come through their website. The platform enabled prospective students to connect with a variety of current students and staff seamlessly through their mobile devices or computers.
USYD’s student ambassadors were selected from over 30 different nationalities and from all study levels – bachelors, masters and even PhDs. This enabled USYD to cater to a wide range of prospective students and personalise their encounters depending on which degree or study level they were applying for.
A lot of conversations were held in the prospects’ mother tongue, which encouraged and enabled international students to actively submit enquiries about USYD. This not only added a personal touch to every engagement but also allowed students to ask questions and even build relationships with soon-to-be-peers; a feat that was unattainable in traditional events with strict schedules, long lines and short time slots for every encounter.
