UWC: raising the profile of the recruitment process
United World Colleges (UWC) is a family of 17 schools around the world. UWCs share a mission to work towards global peace and sustainability by bringing together young people from all walks of life for an education experience like no other.
While UWC provides bursaries and scholarships to a significant majority of its students, a parallel application route – the Global Selection Programme (GSP) – was introduced for those without the need for funding support to apply to the 16-19 IB Diploma Programme, thus freeing up National Committees to instead focus on students who do need financial support.
In 2018, Pickle Jar Communications was appointed to design and implement a digital marketing campaign in target countries to raise the profile of the GSP.
Our work included:
Designing campaign landing pages specifically for advertising activity
Developing a lead generation campaign by producing a series of “useful guides” that require a visitor to provide their email address to sign up to receive them
Running social media and search advertising, in particular through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Google AdWords
Supporting organic social media, with particular success seen in our use of Instagram stories to drive downloads of the useful guides, and thus lead capture
Influencer outreach encouraging online influencers and other relevant groups to share our content, or work with us on original content to reach their followers online
SEO and content marketing activity driven by creating a series of blog posts aligned to key phrase research insights, and designed to be useful to our parents and students
Running email campaigns with content targeted at those who had opted-in through downloading useful guides or through social media advertising lead generation campaigns, as well as creating encouragement emails for those who have started but not yet completed application forms.
Our work helped to drive tens of thousands of new prospects to the UWC website, create a database of “warm” leads, and support applicants in their decision-making. Above all, it provided a basis and content bank for future promotional activity.
"Over the past three years, we had the joy of working with the Pickle Jar Communications team on different projects. From a global online marketing project to an optimisation of our website, from rephrasing some of the key language we use to explain UWC's mission to make education a force for peace and sustainability, to facilitating projects with members from across the UWC movement: Pickle Jar Communications was involved in many different aspects of our work.
It has always been an absolute pleasure to work with the team who from the beginning gave us the feeling that they really wanted to understand who we are, what we do and why we do it and who always demonstrated a thorough interest in UWC's work, mission and appreciation of UWC's values. They were able not only to navigate the complexities of our global organisation but also to work really well with different members from across the UWC movement: From seasoned communications professionals to young and enthusiastic UWC volunteers and students.
Their work is thorough, audience-centric, creative and of reliably very good quality. They pushed us out of our comfort zone when we needed to be pushed -- and they were always willing to engage in conversation and brainstorming.
And what we maybe love most about working with Pickle Jar Communications is that they try hard to work hand-in-hand with us and that at times it almost feels as if we had all become part of one team. One team united by the wish to make the world a better place through education -- and through communicating well about it. We would always recommend them and whoever gets to work with them is lucky!"
Hannah Tümpel, Deputy Executive Director, UWC International