WhatsApp in higher education: a UEA case study

Here at Pickle Jar, we love knowledge sharing, and we’re particularly keen to hear the latest from universities, schools and colleges in terms of how they’re using social media. As big fans of the messaging app WhatsApp, we were interested to find out how one institution – the University of East Anglia (UEA) – is using it to connect with their audiences.

We spoke with Jono Read, Social Media Coordinator at UEA, to learn how the University started using WhatsApp to engage with students at Open Days, its impact on their digital activity and audience communication, and their tips for the wider education sector. 

What prompted you to start using WhatsApp?

We launched the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) WhatsApp service last Spring as a previously untested area to engage with prospective students at Open Days. We had considerable success for a number of years using Twitter and Storify to support our digital activities at these key events, but this has now become the norm for universities, and we wanted to stand out from the crowd.

What we wanted to do was find a medium that allowed conversation to be sustained far beyond an Open Day and throughout the Applicant Cycle. In my experience of using social to communicate with prospective students communications at UEA, I find the most honest and meaningful conversations are had away from the Twittersphere. Whether that’s on Facebook messenger, Direct Messages, a Private Message on The Student Room, and (as much as it pains me to admit) the archaic form of email. It’s one thing sending a 140-character tweet with a hashtag, but not all prospective students are as open about their thoughts or want their peers to know about the questions they’re pondering over.

@Mia_020613 Congratulations Mia! Stay in touch, and see you at an Applicant Day soon? pic.twitter.com/QtlHMZCihc

— UEA (@uniofeastanglia) February 15, 2016

What role do you see apps like WhatsApp having in higher education?

Snapchat has real potential in HE, but I feared for the sorts of engagement we would receive, and I felt it would be too difficult to comprehensively report on engagement. So with more businesses using WhatsApp to interact with a young demographic, I felt there was no reason we couldn’t replicate this within HE. I set a goal of trying to increase engagement on WhatsApp compared with the Twitter activities we ran, trying to prove the use of an untested area for a UK Higher Education institution, and to show it’s a medium we can use to stay in touch with enquirers and applicants beyond a big event such as an Open Day.

As someone who approaches social media from a marketing perspective, my overarching goal is to try and use different mediums to raise brand awareness and recruit new students. So for us, WhatsApp became an integral part of our Open Day communications in advance of the event, with the view we would run a series of interactive activities throughout the day. The fact that so many of those who had signed up prior to the day were engaging with us in great detail even before the event showed we had tapped into something we weren’t doing as successfully on Twitter. Without the character limit, the possibility to send a variety of multimedia sources, and with the instant notifications going direct to the user’s phone, I found there was a lot more potential using the platform.

What was the impact?

Trying something new created a buzz at Open Days and the number of unique prospective students interacting with us increased by approximately 200% at each Open Day in 2015, compared with the activities on Twitter in 2014. Alongside this, we continued to run a Twitter experience for those users not on WhatsApp or those members of the wider UEA community who want to shout about what we were doing during the day. Feedback about the day highlighted the WhatsApp scheme as a “clever” and “unique” way that added to the Open Day experience.

As this is an open day service a lot of emphasis is on interactivity before and during the event. As with all social media questions, it can vary from being quite specific event questions to more creative questions about the university and the student experience we offer here. After the event, the questions became more specific about applications, courses, accommodation, and so forth. The experience was made more personal to users because I fronted it, and I had the insight of being an alumnus of UEA, so I could throw in some personal opinions too.

How many WhatsApp messages did you receive at peak time and how many do you continue to receive now that the Open Days have passed?

The biggest task for me was dealing with initial tranche of people signing up before the Open Day and on the morning of the event itself. The WhatsApp service was pushed out through a number of different channels and in marketing materials, and in the first couple of hours (long before the 9.30am event kick off!) we were getting hundreds of messages. After several cups of coffee and lots of engagement, this became more manageable.

The level of messages received in a week can vary depend on what I’m doing on the platform. If I am proactively pushing out messages to all of those signed up I am likely to get more messages back, than if it was just reactively replying to what comes unprompted. Some weeks I can receive more enquiries from prospective students over WhatsApp than our other social media channels.

My objective was to just use this on open day attendees in 2015, but there is no reason why it can’t be used as a platform to be used more widely for the next applicant cycle.

Any tips for other HE professionals wanting to try WhatsApp?

I expect readers of this blog will think it all sounds rather simple from how I have explained this, but actually there was a lot of work involved in kicking this off. There are very few pieces of CRM software to support WhatsApp at present, and some of the processes involved have not been so intuitive and have felt very manual. While for UEA it has been certainly a success, readers should be mindful of the fact that the more people who sign up the greater the demand there will be, and with our activities planned throughout the applicant cycle this has become another social media network to monitor and resource. However, there are plenty of different ways to use the medium, and using it for recruitment is just one of them. The possibilities seem endless, from a student support team offering one-to-one advice to an internal communications team wanting to use an alternative to emails that students may never open. Providing you plan and you have the resource, I think it will be a positive experience.

Are you experimenting with something exciting and innovative and interested in sharing your knowledge with the higher education section, please get in touch.