Putting students at the heart of your online events - how universities can use student content to help increase engagement in online open days

It's clear from Springpod research that talks that included students had higher engagement rates than those that didn’t. They were “definitely our best-performing talks”, according to Alison Sedgwick, Marketing Manager at the Royal College of Art (RCA). 

The History of Design talk from the RCA’s open day in October 2020 had the highest engagement they’d ever seen.  

In the session, the academics kept their sections brief and handed them over to the students to talk about their personal experience of the course. The engagement rate for this session was 87% compared with an average of 30–40% for the open day as a whole.

Although perhaps at an advantage in that the very nature of an arts and design university makes for more visually appealing presentations to many. One admissions tutor did report back that it was a valuable learning curve for the students, in terms of pitching work to an audience. As one current student said: “We really enjoyed sharing our work with a wider audience of prospective RCA students.”

Obviously, the pandemic has changed the way organisations run, perhaps forever. That needn’t necessarily be a bad thing though, says Alison. She stated that the RCA’s work in progress show, which usually takes place in January, will be staying online for the foreseeable future: “There’s no going back now.”

Impressive viewer stats backed up digital’s claims — these rose to over 1,000 compared to the usual 400-500 when the open day was in person — and, as Alison asserted, the RCA “opened up to the world” through its online offering. Diversification in terms of candidate applications went “through the roof” with more and more applications in target regions, such as the ASEAN region and India.

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