Digital Engagement Programme highlights
Join us for a look back at 2023 and some of the highlights delivered by Digital Engagement over the previous 12 months and a look ahead to priorities for 2024.
Hello
In your role as we'd like to share an update on the Digital Engagement programme.
Welcome to your annual summary of the Digital Engagement programme which will provide a prospective student journey that is inclusive, personal, and welcoming for students, and empowering for our staff.
Leading a programme of digital transformation requires us all to reimagine and be open to change. Digital is inevitable. It is also complex, and the scale of change presents both significant challenges and opportunities.
Here you will see highlights of the past 12 months to the end of December 2023. As we look ahead to the ambitions and challenges of 2024, I am confident that we will continue to discover, innovate, and collaborate to deliver a world-class prospective experience to attract the brightest, best, and most brilliant students.
This content is presented to you on Adobe Experience Manager, the platform that is powering our online personalised prospectus.
Helen Pennack
Chief Marketing & Communications Officer and Digital Engagement Sponsor
Hear from the programme's Product Director, James Tomkinson
A welcome and summary from James Tomkinson, Product Director for Digital Engagement.
What does success look like for Digital Engagement?
Within the Digital Engagement programme we are making fundamental changes to how the University of Nottingham engage with students, staff and partners, because our future depends on it.
Our graduates are tomorrow’s health crusaders, wealth creators and law reformers. They are our virologists, environmentalists and world leaders. They are our breakout artists, inventors, and tech entrepreneurs.
To continue to attract the brightest, best and most brilliant to our university, we must create irresistible customer journeys and exceptional user experiences before, during and after their time with us.
Established in 2021, the programme has successfully integrated Adobe Experience Manager and Microsoft Dynamics 365 technology, as the foundations to deliver our ambitions.
Below you will see a snapshot of products and experiences the programme have delivered or are working on.
Creating convenient and personalised experiences
Whether it's on our website, email communications, offering help and support, or powering a chat bot enquiry, Digital Engagement provides the tools and ability to deliver contextual, automated, seamless, and irresistibly convenient experiences to connect with our audiences at every touchpoint.
Explore the features and products that are being developed to deliver a great experience to our prospects.
The solutions are powered by two platforms:
- Adobe Experience Cloud – a collection of applications and services that gives us the advertising, real-time data, intelligence, and marketing tools to deliver personalised student experiences across all channels from a single platform.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 – our first client relationship management (CRM) tool for prospective students. It will enable us to understand our students better and provide a more streamlined, personal service.
The benefits we are tracking and realising
- Grow fee income from particular markets to meet our desired student recruitment targets (currently international)
- Greater perceived value of the university against competitors
- Improved performance of our marketing and recruitment operations
- Improved efficiency across Enquiries, Digital and Marketing, and offer holder day processes
- Reduced IT legacy costsReduction of technical debt Reduced compliance risk
Harnessing the power of data
The following performance data is brought to you by Adobe Analytics. In 2023, the Digital Engagement programme delivered:
- Find your Nottingham which captured 6,191 new leads for conversion via the questoinnaire
- Undergraduate conversion campaign emails (offer to accept) delivered a better than industry benchmark (for open rate and click rate) with the following results:
- over 14,000 offer holders reached
- 81.57% average open rate (industry average is 35.4%)
- 9.76% average click rate (industry average is 8.3%)
- Published 640 course pages (2023 and 2024)
- Published 250 supporting pieces of content ranging from creation to migration
- Collaborated withover 300 stakeholders
- Published 8000 multimedia assets in the DAM
Harnessing the power of our people
The Digital Engagement programme is not about products but about people’s experiences and skills. Achieving our purpose requires close collaboration with our many partners and stakeholders.
Learn from Debs Storey or Lisa Gilligan-Lee in the Digital & Marketing team about how they are working and have learnt new skills in asset management to help their role as a video editor.
Meet the Digital Engagement team, and come and say hello to us on D Floor, Yang Fujia when you are on Jubilee Campus.
July 2022
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
DAM is an online tool used to store, organise, protect and distribute the University’s digital assets. It provides an enhanced search functionality and insight to how assets are used. It went live in July 2022, with continuous improvement and support throughout 2023 to develop the product with our library of multimedia assets.
FEBRUARY 2023
Find Your Nottingham (FYN)
FYN is the online undergraduate prospectus hosted in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) which allows users find more relevant and personalised content. It was launched Feb 2023.
JULY 2023
Authenticated Hub
AHub is further enhancement of Find Your Nottingham which provides its users with a personalised experience by surfacing the most relevant information. It enables UoN to have access to more data and behavioural insights for development of digital marketing capabilities.
JULY 2023
Clearing and Confirmation
Launched in July 2023, Clearing and confirmation refers to several enhancements that were made to the Find Your Nottingham to direct applicant to Clearing courses.
OCTOBER 2023
Brand Portal DAM
Brand Portal (the global image and video asset repository) started in October 2023. It is a simpler interface within DAM that replaces the image bank which allows easy access to assets for the wider university and third parties.
NOVEMBER 2023
Campaigns
Campaigns enables targeted, personalised communications sent to student based on the archetype groups following their interests and other characteristics. This years’ conversion campaign, that went live in November 2023, is hosted in Adobe Campaign Classic.
November 2023
Enquiry Management
started in November 2023. focuses on enabling teams to manage and respond to incoming enquiries more efficiently using Microsoft Dynamics 365 while providing a single view of the customer.
Leading a programme of digital transformation requires us all to reimagine and be open to change. Digital is inevitable. It is also complex, and the scale of change presents both significant challenges and opportunities.
Helen Pennack
Chief Marketing Officer and Digital Engagement Sponsor
AEM DAM has is a powerful product for the video team. We can now speed up the creation process by sourcing footage for our projects on the DAM. This means we spend less time tracking the footage down and can turn briefs around faster than before, especially those that don’t need additional filming – such as digital adverts/GIFs. Larger projects where multiple clips or videos are needed aren't so daunting as we can utilise the metadata, search and AI power of DAM.
Debs Storey
Video Production Manager
AEM DAM has enabled External Relations to have a central repository of truth, where assets are categorised, searchable and easily located, meeting university brand guidelines - unlike on external hard drives used prior to DAM. The development of metadata and a taxonomy has heighten our asset usability on digital platforms and allows us to govern our assets for accuracy, relevancy and consistency.
Lisa Gilligan-Lee
Image & Photography Manager
Components and personalisation
Throught the digital engagement programme, we now have a library of digital components. This means we can deliver content on a range of platforms. A total of 30 components have been built, with a number of them being displayed throughout this report.
Below is an example of a live feed component, pulling our most recent images from the flagship Instagram feed. This approach increases the opportunity for our audiences to navigate easily between different platforms and explore more of the unviersity.
