Historic University Attracts First-rate Students and Novel Business Opportunities

Serving 18,000 highly diverse students representing over 130 countries, our client is a prestigious university based in Central London. Founded in 1892, they provide first-class education through accredited vocational and professionally recognised courses, placements, and apprenticeships. They pride themselves on changing lives, communities and businesses with education and insight. And combined with their affiliated colleges, they have an annual turnover of more than £198m.

WHAT THEY NEEDED

With undergraduates facing debts of up to £45,000 following their studies, universities are looking for innovative ways to remain an attractive and affordable option for students. Rising tuition fees, the cost-of-living crisis and a decline in government funds means that students must ensure their next step is cost-effective and increases their career prospects.

Employer sponsored studies, industry placements and higher-level apprenticeships are becoming more attractive and provide an increasingly important revenue stream for universities. Our client wanted to improve the university’s appeal to prospective students and secure its position as a leader in vocational education.

Having won our first contract with our client through an open tender process, Blueberry has since widened its reach across three other university departments. A key factor for our client was to improve their inter-departmental collaborations when working with businesses. They were also keen to support, foster and maximise every business relationship.

WHAT WE DID

We commenced work on a project promoting Innovate UK funded Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs). Although partly funded, the project still requires a long-term commitment of resources and financial support from participating businesses. Our focus was to identify businesses that could take part in the innovation project. We built and nurtured a warm-lead pipeline, engaging with organisation’s decision-makers to understand their business needs and where they could fit into the scheme. Our campaign produced so many sales opportunities, that we had to pause it temporarily to give our client enough time to deal with them.

Since then, we have worked with five different teams across three departments within the university, including Business & Enterprise, Employer Sponsored Study and Employability. Each department originally had their own set of data, distinct marketing strategies and business links. However, the university was keen for the departments to harness their business connections by sharing information and introducing cross-selling.

Our client was eager to encourage better communication within departments and improve the way information was shared between various departments. For example, the Employer Sponsored Study department held data on companies paying for students’ tuition fees, but they had no direct relationship with the businesses themselves.

Within the Employability Team, businesses had the capacity to post jobs on the university’s employment portal. However, the university team had not proactively engaged with these businesses to promote their services. By cleansing the data, we could give the teams all the relevant information they needed to develop these business links.

We analysed each department’s data using a range of technical cleansing techniques, such as deduplication, PAF matching and data-appending. This enabled us to archive outdated records, source new details and improve the quality of the data.

We purchased additional data that closely matched the profiles of businesses the university already worked with. As well as generating new leads, this provided our client with a strong foundation for future marketing efforts and cross-selling across departments.

Our marketing efforts gave the university an insight into how employers selected study options for their employees, enabling them to target their audiences more effectively. We advised them on the best forms of communication to use with prospective clients and gave them a sense of their most popular services and qualifications.

WHAT WE ACHIEVED

Following the success of our initial telemarketing campaign, we have been actively involved in the university’s innovative plans to increase their revenue through business ventures. During that time, we have generated more than 600 leads and cleansed an impressive 8,000 records for five teams, across three different departments. By vastly enhancing their marketing databases, we have vastly improved our client’s reach and business relations. We have also reformed the way the university’s departments communicate with each other and external companies.

Blueberry has extensive experience working with professionals in the education and business sector. Discover how we can help you meet your business growth objectives. Visit https://blueberryms.co.uk, email: info@blueberryms.co.uk or call: 0113 4877013

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GLOSSARY

• Innovate UK is the UK’s national innovation agency, supporting business-led innovation in all sectors, technologies, and regions. They help UK businesses grow through the development and commercialisation of new products, processes, and services.
• Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) are dynamic collaborations between the business and academic worlds to drive innovation. They link forward thinking businesses with the UK’s world class knowledge bases to deliver innovation projects led by inspired graduates.
• Deduplication refers to the elimination of duplicate or redundant information, especially in computer data.
• The Postcode Address File (PAF®) is the UK’s most up-to-date address database and contains accurate address data for over 33 million UK postal delivery addresses. PAF matched addresses refers to addresses in your datafile that unequivocally match-up with the Royal Mail’s PAF database.
• A data append refers to the process of adding new data elements to an existing database.