With fresh threats emerging from commercial providers of education and parliament debating the Higher Education and Research bill, universities are facing significant changes to the landscape within which they operate. Indeed, the first UCAS analysis for 2017 shows a diminishing number of university applications, from both the UK and the EU. Student recruitment is becoming more difficult, as the pool of applicants grows smaller.
In order to better target prospective students and retain existing ones, Michael Frantzis proffers that universities must find new approaches to understanding and segmenting their audiences. By adopting a holistic, data-driven approach, it is possible to define students not by age or location, but by what motivates them. This deeper understanding can be used to inform the design of digital services, tailoring communications to effectively service user needs, and developing meaningful personalisation to deliver engaging experiences.
In his IWMW17 plenary talk, Michael explored how this data-driven understanding can ultimately be used to improve both the recruitment of new students and the retention of existing ones.
Watch
The video of Michael Frantzis’s presentation is available on YouTube.
About: This post is one of a series of posts which have been published on the IWMW blog in order to provide access to video recordings of plenary talks and to allow comments to be made about the talks. Note video recordings are not available for all of the plenary talks.
