Imperial College London: market research and promotion of evening courses
Imperial College London offers an extensive range of short evening courses through its Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication (CLCC). These programmes include languages such as Japanese, Russian and Mandarin, and arts and humanities subjects including Creative Writing, Photography and History.
The College came to Pickle Jar Communications seeking our help to develop a marketing strategy with a particular focus on digital channels that had been previously under-utilised - to generate more interest, and ultimately more enrolments to the courses.
As well as improving promotion of existing courses, the College was keen to explore the feasibility of offering more science courses. Some scoping work had been done in this area, but it was felt that more market research was needed to help define what the offer could look like, and whether it would be an appealing proposition to the target audience.
We began by reviewing existing marketing and communication activity and conducting consultation with staff, including 1-2-1 telephone calls and a wider survey of course tutors. The purpose of this discovery phase of work was to:
Understand existing audiences
Identify potential new audiences
Identify any existing recruitment challenges and gaps
Identify areas of strength (in terms of provision and also promotion/marketing)
Gather insights from staff for development of new provision
We then moved on to review existing research insights from current students, as well as undertaking further surveys to understand why they decided to take the course, how they found out about it, why they chose this course over competitors, and what other courses might be of interest to them.
We also wanted to gain insights from potential students who hadn’t previously undertaken a course with Imperial. To do this, we recruited student volunteers to undertake street surveys with members of the public in the vicinity around Imperial. This area is rich with museums, tourist attractions and other large businesses and efforts were focussed around transport hubs i.e. nearest tube station exits. We also conducted an online survey of people within a 5 mile radius of the University campus as attending in person was a requirement at the time.
We also reviewed providers of learning opportunities (both formal and informal science learning providers) to assess successful content approaches and tactics for provision and promotion of science content. In this instance, the review focussed on London adult education providers and extended to organisations such as the Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Cafe Scientifique, Pint of Science and Open University. This helped to identify where there was greatest interest in the sciences and where opportunities might exist.
The outputs of this work included a marketing strategy for promotion of evening courses, recommendations on where to focus new course provision (and how/where to promote it) and an implementation plan to support the team with prioritisation and implementation.
Photo credit to Thomas Angus, Imperial College London, public images.
