Undergraduate student using a VR headset in the Monica Partridge Digital Hub

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.

Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Helen Pennack

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.

A welcome and summary from James Tomkinson, Product Director for Digital Engagement.

Play

What does success look like for Digital Engagement? 

Digital Engagement Product Timeline 2023

Within the Digital Engagement programme we are making fundamental changes to how the University of Nottingham engages 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 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 costs
  • Reduction 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.

Meet the Digital Engagement team, and come and say hello to us on D Floor, Yang Fujia when you are on Jubilee Campus.

The priorities for 2024

The launch of Authenticated Hub

Authenticated Hub allows students to create a unique profile where they can save and revisit content from our undergraduate prospectus, Find Your Nottingham. This includes saved courses and  articles, recently viewed content and questionnaire results. Authenticated Hub can be personalised even further through targeted content specific to the user. We’re aiming to have the first release live by the end of February 2024.

University wide access to Brand Portal

The university has invested in Brand Portal, an Adobe powered solution that will ensure all our digital assets are stored in a single, secure and more efficient system. We’re aiming to have this live by the end of February 2024, meaning staff can now access the most up-to-date and on brand assets (photography, video, illustration, copy). We’ll work to decommission Image Bank soon after.   

Working on a backlog of improvements to the Find Your Nottingham site

Following launch, we’re continuing to build upon the Find Your Nottingham site to improve the prospective student’s experience. This includes more sophisticated tagging of courses to surface more relevant results, enhancing the questionnaire’s performance so it can more quickly deliver recommendations, and working on accessibility to ensure all our products meet the latest industry standards.

Our teams in Digital and Marketing will also soon begin migrating the content from school and faculty webpages over to the new system. Designs and building will soon begin for the first school, Physics, where we plan to include a pilot of new academic staff profiles that draw data directly from Research Information System.

Delivery of Enquiry Management and Help and Support

Enquiry Management refers to the introduction of Dynamics 365 as our first client relationship management system for prospective students and applicants. Having a more comprehensive picture of all our interactions with these students means we can deliver a more streamlined and personal service.

We’ll also launch a combination of new website features, Help and Support, to provide an enhanced experience for those looking for information on our website.

We expect to roll this out from end of May 2024.

Discover more about the programme


Explore our dedicated SharePoint where you can keep up to date with news and learn more about what is being developed and why this is important to our prospective students.


Visit our SharePoint

AEM DAM 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 finding footage 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 are now not 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 heightened our asset usability on digital platforms and allows us to govern our assets for accuracy, relevancy and consistency.

Lisa Gilligan-Lee

Image & Photography Manager

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

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.

Undergraduate students sitting on the bandstand steps of Nottingham Castle, Nottingham City Centre - November 2021.Izzy Armorgie (blue hair); Jane Israel (striped top); Mariam Abedraba Abdalla (pink hat); Lily Pearce (braids); Elizabeth harding (cream hat); Jade Gattegno (black sweatshirt); 16 Bolusefe Akande (sunflower hat); Ella Moss (short blonde hair); Fearne Darbyshire (curly blonde hair); Emily hay (orange hoodie).