The onslaught of our busy January continues... Therefore, I'm just snatching five minutes to update this blog with details of a new project which we supported last week.

"Our operators are standing by..."

Before Christmas, our Postgraduate Marketing team came up with the idea of running two Virtual Open Days for prospective students. This would involve them logging on to our website at specified times and then taking part in a selection of activities/virtual tours - and this is where we came in! We offered up some initial ideas of how we could support this, both in the lead up and on the days. To begin, we went about building a landing page for all attendees which gave answers to all of the basic questions we expected them to ask.

We then recommeded that we make use of our current live text chat service but take it to the next level by enlisting the expertise of our academics. This took a lot of organising - particularly from the PG team who had to ensure that each hour of the event was covered by a member of staff from each subject. Our job was to install the software and train over 30 staff in the space of a week! Thankfully, we have a great service which we currently use called ISL Pronto which has no limit on the amount of user accounts we can create!

Once everyone was suitibly happy with the software, it was time to help in promoting the event both on our Facebook pages, Twitter and via Google AdWords. This proved quite successful as over 150 people registered for the two afternoons it was running. Then the event began...

The PG team were excellent as the first port of call for all enquires, and the academics, support services and admissions teams were all ready to be transferred their relevant queries. Then people logged on! The first and second hours of the events were hectic, before a steady flow of enquires and finally a flurry of activity at the end. Even we were impressed by the knowledge and helpfulness of our staff, and the PG team are now preparing a detailed report on how it all went (with statistics provided by us) to help inform any similar events in the future.

Just spoke to one of your advisors, they were incredibly helpful. Great way to get information, just need to write my proposal!
— James Simpson (@JamesISimpson) January 16, 2013

Overall, these events were a great success and we've already got some very exciting ideas on how to ramp it up a gear when we run something similar again...!

PS. if you attended the events then please fill out our survey for a chance to win a £50 Amazon voucher.

Happy new year to all readers of this Blog - I hope that you all had a great Christmas break. We have some great news to start 2013 in that we've just advertised for two brand new roles within the team!

Both of these jobs are one year fixed term contracts and here are the details:

• Marketing, Admissions, Recruitment and Communications (MARC)
• Grade 6, £24,766 per annum
• 37 hours per week

Digital Marketing Officer 
We are looking for an experienced Digital Marketing Officer to develop the University’s web content and day-to-day management and analysis. The post holder will be expected to implement innovative consumer focused digital marketing projects in relation to corporate strategic objectives. They will also be experienced in the use of Social Media, CMS, Analytics tools, Design (e.g. Photoshop) and HTML email software.

Web Content Officer
We are looking for a Web Content Officer to be responsible for developing and maintaining the structure and copy of the University’s web pages. The role holder will be required to oversee the content for all University websites and to deliver writing for the web training to various departments.

So if you're interested in joining our award winning team then it would be great to hear from you. To apply and for more details just following the links above through to our website.

For an informal discussion about either of these roles, please contact me on 01582 743987 or email: paul.fryer@beds.ac.uk

I thought I'd take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas! Today is our last day before the holidays and we're working on tying up lots of loose ends and making sure we're fully planned on our priorities for when we get back.

We've got some really exciting projects coming up in the new year (January is going to be VERY busy) so watch this space for regular updates.

To spread a bit of Christmas cheer here's a clip from my favourite Christmas film 'Scrooged' with a very interesting take on Marketing!

Exciting news here at Bedfordshire towers. We've been shortlisted for not one, but two Digital Marketing awards!

The first of these is at the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards 2012. We've been shortlisted in the Education category for our 2012 Digital Marketing Clearing campaign, which was managed in partnership with agency Statistics into Decisions. The award winner will be announced at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 6 March 2013.

We've also just had some more good news (especially for a Monday morning) that we've been shortlisted in the CIPR LPS Awards 2012. This is also for our Digital Clearing campaign and is in the Digital Excellence category. The awards ceremony for this will be held in Bristol on 7 February 2013 (admittedly a bit further to travel!)

I was really pleased with all the work and achievements of my team during Clearing and this is testament to the fact that we're ahead of the game and are really at the forefront of Digital Marketing. I'm sure we can keep up the momentum and continue to provide an excellent service and hopefully take home some awards!

Now I have two excuses to dust off the dinner suit...

(Also, a shout out to the Postgraduate Marketing Team and their shortlisted entry at the CIPR awards for their brilliant Postgraduate Life e-zine - we're all looking to a well deserved night out at the ceremony).

December is here so it's now fine to start decorating your house, office or children - well, that's my opinion anyway. SOME have started the Christmas celebrations much earlier... (you know who you are... ;))

The bespoke design off trophy -
actual size!

One responsibility that usually rests with my team is the design of the yearly University Christmas card. This is then signed off by the Vice Chancellor before thousands of copies are printed and sent to all of our many stakeholders, partners and friends. We also build an eCard version of it for staff to send out. We've had some great designs over the past years and we were determined that 2012 wouldn't be any different.

Therefore, we came up with the idea of a healthy in-team compeition - the  Christmas Card Design Off 2012. This involved Mick, Hannah, myself and our other best friend (namely Photoshop...) The winner would then be decided by a democratic 'first past the post' system (i.e. the rest of the MARC office voted for their favourite and whoever got the most votes won).

Despite a bit of cheating on my part (loose deadlines and submitting two designs instead of one) the votes were cast and the winner was Hannah with this brilliant design:

Hannah's winning design showing our Putteridge Bury campus in the snow and some subtle
footprints leading up to it (which are actually the University of Bedfordshire logo)

Hannah was rewarded with the above trophy (which in no way is second hand...)

So, if you've worked with us over the last year or more you'll be getting a lovely printed copy of Hannah's design through the post in the next few weeks. I won't showcase the losing entries here yet - who knows, we might try re-submitting them next year?!

We're always looking at ways of making our site easier to navigate and from looking at our statistics it's clear we get a lot of traffic from our red bar navigation. Therefore, we thought it was time for a reappraisal of this to help our users navigate quickly and effectively.

After lots of trials we settled on completely rebuilding our drop downs. These drop downs enable users to take a shortcut to the page or sub-page they are looking for, while also giving us a chance to link to key documents and events which we feel need highlighting.
 
From a design perspective, we felt a drop-down menu allows a ‘busy’ layout to be tidied up (and our site is over 11,000 pages!), with all of the sub-categories hidden away awaiting a mouse-over. Firstly, we needed to think about the action that users need to take to activate drop-down menus and decided that they would only show when clicked. The advantage of this is that the menu remains in place whether the cursor remains in the area or not. This therefore removes one potential source of frustration.

The 'mega-menu' on our new
International landing page

The next stage was to focus on the content and this was the most time consuming part of the process (which it should be!) We ran an audit of our most searched for/visited pages and cross referenced this with our key messages to ensure that we are guiding our users both where they want to go and to what we want them to see. This gave us our large range of links in related groups. We then authored a number of headings to group them together and put them into relevant column layouts.

The important thing here was to not offer too many options, save extra clicks where we could, and make sure we did plenty of testing (both with users and with different browsers). From this we also decided that our 'mega menu' would span the entire width of the page allowing it to be much more tidy and easy to read.

Our final big consideration was how this would work on a mobile device. As our site is responsive (and after lots of testing) we decided to avoid clutter and to focus on keeping it simple. We felt it would be easier if these long menus did not display at all on the smaller devices (i.e. smartphones) as too much content on smaller screen sizes regulated our main content.

So there we have it! The 'mega-menu' is now live and we'll be continuing to monitor the stats very closely to see if they've had the desired effect before developing them yet further...

It's Hannah here - it's been a little while since I contributed to our team blog, partly because Paul has much more interesting things to say, and partly because I have been out and about all over the campuses trying to coordinate the filming of a new University film!

I guess those of you in the know will be experiencing a sharp intake of breath at the mere thought of seamlessly organising four faculties, 19 different academic departments, a Students' Union and more than five locations - but actually this time around it is all going pretty well (famous last words...) I have a lot of 'virtual' contact with students via social media, which is one of the best bits of my job, and it's been good to get out of the office and to talk to some of our students face to face!

Under construction: the new PG Centre

I first worked on this project in 2010, just after I joined the Uni, and I suppose this time I know more people, have more friends in different offices and, most importantly, we have even more to show off. The new accommodation has opened, the PG Centre is almost finished (see photo from the tour I managed to wangle my way on to) and we have a number of new facilities that should make for a great visual spectacle (fingers crossed!).

What's more, we're working with a company who really seem to understand what Bedfordshire is all about and be enthusiastic about promoting what's on offer here. After a number of promising meetings with some very good production teams, we opted for Spectrecom for a number of reasons - including an additional angle on filming which we're really looking forward to seeing in the first edit! (More on that in future blogs...)

Video is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal (the last version of the film had over 25,000 views in less than a year) but I think it can sometimes be difficult to approach it in an analytical 'marketingy' way. For this update project, we are focusing on the role the film will play in our wider conversion strategy, in terms of social engagement, online PR and mobile marketing, and the metrics by which we will judge its success as a project.

In other news, I have also been writing our submission for the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards, which gave me a chance to really interrogate the part social and video had to play in our clearing campaign, and produced some interesting findings to inform our campaigns going forward. So, we'll keep you updated and hopefully all our hard work will be rewarded with a night of celebrations on 6 March next year...watch this space!