Products
Driving student recruitment growth through strategic marketing
How can we help?
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PACE Programme
Create the conditions for domestic student recruitment growth and instil an institution-wide ‘Culture of Enrolment’ with our transformational 12 month PACE programme.
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Stealing Strategy
Tackle stalling student numbers in a specific subject area, school or faculty and develop a strategy to acquire market share from competitor institutions.
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Upskilling for Student Recruitment
Maximise your return from open days and applicant days, supercharge your outreach activities, and ensure strong course launches with a one-off workshop for either marketing and student recruitment teams or academic colleagues.
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Keynote Speaker
Book Penny as your keynote speaker at your next conference or Away Day
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Bespoke Consultancy
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to tapping the student recruitment potential of your university, so our team offers tailored projects to help you achieve student recruitment growth.
PACE Programme
In our experience a truly thriving institution is one that creates a Culture of Enrolment.
Our unique 12 month PACE programme provides an opportunity for us to work collaboratively with all the critical change agents in a Higher Education institution — from marketing and student recruitment teams to executive leaders and academic colleagues.
Together, we work to create sustainable growth in applications and acceptances.
Through an intensive programme of workshops, data analysis, coaching, and strategic planning, we work to instil a ‘Culture of Enrolment’: a committed, institution-wide approach to driving growth in student numbers.
And it really works — this approach is proven to deliver longer-term recruitment growth for universities.
When they come to us, our HE clients are often struggling with three common challenges:
a worrying downward trend in undergraduate home student numbers.
a feeling that their university’s offer is confused, or that their broad portfolio of courses isn’t meeting market demand.
concern that central marketing activities are not delivering a strong return on investment, along with scattergun (although well-intentioned) marketing and outreach efforts being carried out by colleagues around the university.
The PACE programme is an integrated approach to address these concerns and secure longer-term student number growth.
From a ‘quick wins’ assessment, delivered in the first 3 months of the project, to a longer term plan that ensures continued growth in applications for 2-3 recruitment cycles, PACE gives you the tools to review your portfolio, assess your marketing activity, and make data-led decisions about how to move forward.
During our time working together, we guide you through our four core strands of solid student recruitment performance: Propose, Attract, Convert and Enable.
Propose: We’ll support you to develop a crisp, competitive, market-led proposition and curate a high-performance portfolio of courses.
Attract: Assessing all the lead-generation channels available, we’ll hone strategies to foster strong relationships with pre-applicants.
Convert: Together we’ll craft an onboarding process from enquiry to enrolment, utilising the full range of conversion techniques available.
Enable: Acknowledging that no marketing and recruitment team can change the student number picture alone, we’ll build a framework that empowers and enables teams around the university to support your student recruitment endeavours.
There are four core strands to a solid student recruitment performance:
This is how we structure our support for universities to deliver results. We have developed a 12-month intensive PACE Programme for members of the Marketing/Student Recruitment/Admissions teams to follow, with a separate LEADERSHIP stream for the leaders of these functions and an accompanying ACADEMIC stream.
Instilling a Culture of Enrolment is about making marginal, but potentially transformational, gains in lots of areas. The compound effect of many considered, creative, data-led adjustments is incredibly powerful — and we’ve seen this raise the confidence (not to mention the applications) of entire institutions.
Marketing Partnership has worked with over 40 Higher Education institutions, and we believe that no one else does what we do. We deeply understand the sector, and we’ve seen first-hand that, following our path, you can achieve student recruitment growth, even in this challenging market.
The programme runs in three concurrent streams:
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Alongside a menu of workshops to choose from, teams will create a set of actionable plans via our online ‘Plan-Builder’ sessions and all-team ‘Grand Challenges’. These encourage innovative thinking, data-informed decision making and facilitate reflecting on core issues in a truly integrated way. Whilst the programme encourages innovative ideas, it also offers support to critically analyse what to progress – and (crucially) what to stop.
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We deliver advice and support through one-to-one coaching, regular check-ins, and bi-monthly accountability calls for a core group of change agents, such as managers or directors of marketing, student recruitment or admissions. We see participants in this stream of the project gain the clarity to keep on track with their plans and the confidence to lead transformational change in their institution.
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We’ll support you to engage academic colleagues in the right activities with a list of tangible actions which make a difference to their course intakes, and a toolkit for activities and planning which dovetail neatly with the wider strategy. Academics regularly tell us that they want to do more to attract students; they tend to recommend our sessions to their peers – and they watch our supporting videos independently.
Stealing Strategy
If a university wishes to grow its UK undergraduate student enrollers there are clear opportunities to swim in new geographic pools or by stealing share from competitors.
However, there needs to be a strong, loud, and compelling reason for prospects to eliminate other institutions from the shortlist.
We deliver Stealing Strategy support to Academic Schools and Faculties to help them to take advantage of larger pools of prospective students where available, and grow their applicant and firm choice numbers.
It shows them:
which course titles within their portfolio have the greatest propensity to command a greater applicant share (according to our six ‘Hero Markers’)
and what to do to enhance their competitive position.
Very few universities (and even fewer Schools/Faculties) invest time in assessing the market value of their courses and programmes due to a heavy focus on internal factors - such as guidelines on credit allocations or adhering to pedagogical terminology. This can lead to course launches that are not always based on market demand or outdated messaging due to a lack of time available to track the activities, facilities investments and curricula changes of competitors.
Our framework helps you to achieve this.
We have delivered Stealing Strategies for Nursing, Teacher Training, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Sports, Law, Creative Arts, Media and Business Schools with several key client institutions - and have earned excellent feedback for these projects.
Most importantly, each one has provided a roadmap for academic colleagues to support their chosen subject’s overall student recruitment objectives. We provide data analysis, support and advice to specific subject areas, enabling them to claim a strong position in their market and, ultimately, gain market share.
Participants engaged in the Stealing Strategy process see:
Academic teams developing their innovative thinking in relation to student growth and assessing their competitive offer with fresh eyes.
The development of a trusting team approach between academics and marketers to start to produce an overall compelling narrative for the School/Faculty.
Academic colleagues knowing which activities can make the most difference to student recruitment outcomes e.g. market-led curriculum or module changes, outreach planning, finessing open day and applicant day pitches.
Upskilling for student recruitment
Our workshops can help your institution to tackle some of the issues that stand in the way of maximising your recruitment potential.
We offer one-off workshops (or a workshop bundle) for either marketing and student recruitment colleagues or academic colleagues, on the following topics.
For Academic Colleagues:
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In this compact session, we equip academic colleagues with the essential skills to maximise the number of students adding your university to their UCAS shortlist.
Our research has found that prospective students are significantly more likely to add a university/HE provider to their UCAS form if they have attended an open day. And it is no surprise that the academic subject session has proven to be the most important element of the day itself. However, this is hugely dependent on the strength of the session.
In this workshop we will share some tips on how to engage with prospects at this crucial ‘shopping around’ stage of the cycle and create space for colleagues to share good practice with each other.
Academic colleagues will leave the session empowered to maximise the number of enrolled students for their subject area by delivering a compelling subject ‘pitch’. We will share our expertise on how to make the most of a short subject session by generating excitement, fostering a sense of belonging and leaving a lasting impact in your prospective students’ minds.
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The Applicant Day (or 'offer-holder' day) is the crucial ‘second viewing’ for an offer-holder. And even though an applicant day needs strong student ambassadors, a strong accommodation showcase and good overall organisation, the subject session is still the most important element of an applicant day.
Our research suggests that universities are around twice as likely to convert their applicants if they can encourage their offer-holders to attend an applicant day after an open day. So, how can we encourage as many 'double attendees' as possible?
In this session we reiterate why the content of the two events need to be distinctive enough to convince an applicant to attend for a second time. We will also reveal our top tips on how to engage with applicants at this important stage of the cycle and encourage participants to share good practice with each other.
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A strong menu of courses that neatly aligns with market demand is a powerful tool for growing applications to your School or Faculty. But when is launching a new course the right thing to do? And when should we simply consider refreshing our current portfolio?
In this powerful session, academic colleagues have the chance to hear some insights on:
establishing market demand for new course areas.
ensuring the 'offer' is fit for purpose.
the tried and tested ways to promote and invest in a new course launch.
Ways to identify if refreshing an existing course will deliver stronger results.
By the end of this session participants will feel better equipped to decide if a new course is the right answer to the problem – and how they can achieve ‘instant’ success.
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Here we look at the potential of a targeted academic outreach plan. Here we will discuss the development of a post-16 strategic schools/colleges liaison approach to boost the recruitment potential of your current and future undergraduate recruitment cycles.
We know that academic time is precious, and that colleagues want to feel that their outreach efforts are achieving maximum effect. In this session we'll share our experiences of the techniques that work.
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In this session we discuss the importance of outreach/schools liaison activity in relation to student recruitment (spoiler: we believe it's your secret ingredient). We'll start the session with an exercise to help you to identify your own individual strengths and how you can use them to help shape the university's outreach strategy.
Then we'll discuss how you can supercharge your activities by making them more memorable and even more inspiring. Finally, the session will conclude by creating a mini action plan. The workshop is intended to be fun and informal (but with some solid outcomes).
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For many marketing and student recruitment teams, we can usually generate sufficient bookings for our events. However, across the sector right now we have a huge issue with 'no-shows'. If you are running at a 50% bookings-to-attendance rate for your applicant days, this is the session for you.
We will share our research with the commercial world on the types of techniques that work to improve appointment attendance and help you to create a mini action plan on the day for your institution.
For Marketing and Student Recruitment colleagues:
Keynote Speaking & Mentoring
Keynote Speaking
Penny is a seasoned public speaker and can deliver engaging and entertaining sessions on HE Marketing and Student Recruitment to re-energise marketing teams and Higher Education audiences.
Client Testimonial from Callum Clark, Head of Portfolio – Higher Education and organiser of the HE Marketing Conference:
“It is a joy to work with Penny and the team at Marketing Partnership. Penny always delivers impactful, fresh content that resonates with our audience. We consistently receive feedback every year from attendees wanting to hear more from Penny and her sessions always rate as the most popular. I would highly recommend Penny for distinct, standout keynote sessions that connect with your audience and leave them with valuable takeaways.”
Team: How to work better together
Building a Culture of Enrolment in your institution requires a strong, collaborative team, which is why we recommend taking a step back to consider how your team works together.
Insights Discovery is a psychometric tool designed to help people understand themselves and others, and make the most of their working relationships.
We offer access to a team of Insights Discovery accredited practitioners. Through a detailed profiling process, individuals receive insight into their strengths and the value they bring to a team. Then, we seek to improve collaboration and individuals’ ability to connect with each other through one-to-one coaching or team workshops.
This is a powerful way of identifying how teams can better reach their collective endeavours. Making full use of the insights about your team, we also offer engaging and dynamic Away Days, Team Effectiveness Days or sessions with a specific focus, such as communications or influence.
Bespoke Consultancy
Perhaps more focused than our other services, bespoke projects might be a great option for you. As you work to maximise the recruitment potential of your institution, a bespoke piece of consultancy could help to address a specific challenge or need.
Examples of bespoke consultancy projects might be:
Fresh Pair of Eyes: building the team of the future
Are your marketing and communications functions fit for purpose for the changing world? Our team can provide valuable fresh eyes on the strength of your teams’ structures, skills and capabilities — and, critically, whether they are future-proof. Having benchmarked several UK and Australian universities we offer a unique perspective on what the team of the future needs to look like.
Outcomes of this kind of project might include a ‘Fresh Pair of Eyes Audit’ of a team or department, advice on achieving buy-in across the university, or providing leadership support when developing and implementing team reviews or restructures.
An audit of the offer delivered by key professional services teams
Many of our professional services teams are applicant-facing, yet receive very little support to ensure that their activities help to boost the student recruitment potential of the university. These teams rarely have time to benchmark their services against those of competitor universities. We have delivered the following successful projects:
The accommodation offer
Scholarships packages
Student money support and information
An audit of course interviews to maximise conversion
Efficiency in Admissions and the applicant journey
You may have something else in mind. Get in touch to see if we are able to help.
