The noisy Open Day environment

The higher education landscape is more competitive than ever and Murdoch University, while an established player, is consistently outspent by its larger competitors. High School leavers are a crucial audience for Universities and the mid-year Open Day season is the time where all these organisations are spending big to capture their attention.

It was clear Murdoch needed a unique and captivating engagement idea to ensure the Uni stood out from the crowd as well as offering the support and guidance promised by the organisation’s brand campaign known as 'Free your Think'.

Enter the Think Generator

The Think Generator is an evolution of an original campaign developed by Equilibrium, and centred around a microsite designed to engage students and capture key information to build lead lists and aid further nurturing strategies.

Unique digital engagement

The microsite encourages users to complete a personality quiz by answering playful and age-relevant questions, designed to help the system generate their unique Think profile. Due to the most common web browsing behaviours of this demographic, the microsite was designed and built with a mobile-first mindset, resulting in a quick, touch-friendly experience from start to finish.

Clever profiling engine

On completion of the quiz, the user would provide some basic personal information and the Generator would utilise a custom algorithm developed by Equilibrium's development team to serve up a dynamic radar graph. This provided the prospective student with some high-level feedback about their personality.

The path to Murdoch

The algorithm would then use the results of the user's Think profile to suggest the most relevant areas of study at Murdoch, through a series of coloured circles. The larger the circle, the more relevant the recommendation.

Onsite activation

The online engagement was extended to feed into a fun activation event carried out during Open Day.

In partnership with radio station 92.9, prospective students were encouraged to attend Murdoch Open Day, and visit a pop-up photo booth and have a photograph taken with their friends using fun props which they felt best represented their own unique Think profiles.

The onsite experience tapped into Equilibrium's back-end data management systems which allowed students to double their entries into a competition to win a VIP Perth Arena Experience for them and a friend. More importantly it provided engaging visual content to further share throughout social networks, and further promote the university to key audiences.

A modern nurturing program

Students who completed the Think Generator received an entry to win a VIP Experience at Perth Arena, comfirmed via an EDM which also included a unique link, allowing every user to return to their Think Profile at any point in time.

Utilising Sitefinity's Digital Experience Cloud product, Equilibrium was able to profile every Think Generator user based on their preferred area of study, which was captured during the quiz. This profiling was designed to allow Murdoch to implement an EDM nurturing strategy which would serve the prospective student with the right messaging at the right time in their decision making process, as well as allowing personalisation of content on the University's main website.

Results

Over 2000 prospective students engaged with Murdoch's online ‘Think Generator' campaign, an increase of 40% from the previous year's campaign, providing the university's recruitment team with a list of qualified potential prospects for 2019 enrolments.

Woodside