Given the nature of the widening participation and outreach work, there is an underlying aim to try and engage more with students from under-represented groups. Keble College, Oxford, wanted a way to connect with exactly these types of students, and so partnered with TAP in Spring 2020 to see what they could achieve.

The challenge

Outreach is tough, particularly for a grand institution such as the University of Oxford, which can often seem too daunting for a student from an under-represented group or who is a first-generation university applicant.

However, what can really help that process is connecting prospective students to current students who’ve gone through a similar journey to them; students who came from a similar background and have made it to Oxford to study.

Keble College decided to partner with us to help deepen their connections with a set of highly-targeted students, and allow them to learn more about life as a student there through building peer relationships.

Their TAP Page went live at the end of April 2020.

Results

In less than 5 months, they’ve already engaged with almost 150 prospective students, 84% of them being from state schools, with 53% from non-selective state schools.

Looking at the UK students that Keble have engaged with through the platform, 61% of them have fallen within Q1-Q3 of the POLAR4 quintiles, with 23% of them in the first two quintiles of Q1-Q2.

A large majority of students (51%) were from the West Midlands - this is unsurprising as Keble’s link schools are within this region of the UK and therefore it goes to show that they have done well to promote the page to their target learners.

The College has built a strong, diverse team of Ambassadors who have consistently engaged in high-quality conversations with the prospective students, exchanging over 2000 messages.

Keble exceeded every target they set for themselves in terms of using the platform within the first 3 months alone.

Impact

Keble has done a fantastic job at engaging their target audience, especially through their brilliant newsletter campaign to link schools (which brought in over half of the prospective students in the first three months alone).

Ambassadors have been excellent at providing not only informative responses, but describing their own personal experiences which have led to really meaningful and valuable conversations for the prospective students, primarily focused on what life at Oxford and Keble is like as well as questions around application advice.

As well as reaching students in the West Midlands, Keble’s Ambassadors have also interacted with prospects from Greater London, the South East, South West, North East, and Wales.

Find out more

If you’d like to see how we can help you build meaningful relationships with your ideal prospective students online, why not book a demo of our platform to see how we can help?

We’re also currently offering a period of three months’ free usage of all our features to give you time to get to know us and our platform better, and see what difference it can make to your recruitment efforts.