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Campaigns and Promotion

Here at VPEE, we aim to provide UCL with the leadership, expertise and services that enhance the quality and effectiveness of the university's communications and recruitment activities.

Made at UCL campaign
Through our UCL-wide campaigns, social media and direct e-communications, we strive to:
 
  • showcase UCL’s excellence, values and distinctiveness
  • create a sense of community among UCL staff and students
  • encourage a range of external audiences to take an interest in and get involved with UCL.

UCL-wide campaigns and promotion bring together colleagues from different teams within VPEE, including colleagues from the Strategic Planning and Business Partnering team (internal communications, campaigns) and from the MarComms team (CRM, social, advertising), working closely with Student Recruitment, Media Relations and Digital. 

Find out more below about how we can work together and maximise the effectiveness of our communications.

UCL campaigns

Getting involved in current UCL-wide campaigns - UCL Minds and Made at UCL

In 2019, we launched two UCL-wide campaigns to strengthen the perceptions of the UCL brand, by building awareness of UCL and demonstrating the value of university research - UCL Minds and Made at UCL. 

UCL Minds was launched as the umbrella for promoting all our public lectures, performances, exhibitions, podcasts and stories, which showcase the brilliant and curious minds here at UCL. Make sure you use the UCL Minds brand and channels, to maximise the impact of your campaigns when promoting public events.

One of the main vehicle for promoting public events is the UCL Minds calendar. Any public event listed on a faculty, school, department or institute events calendar can be filtered through to the main UCL Minds events calendar for promotion to a wider audience. If you would like to submit a public event for inclusion in the main calendar, follow the process for submitting events.

Made at UCL is a campaign which aims to bring to life UCL’s impact on people, lives and communities mainly through our ground-breaking research and discoveries. At the end of 2019, visitors had the opportunity to vote on their favourite stories. Voting is now closed but visitors can still interact with the site by liking and sharing their favourite top discoveries.

For everything there is to know about podcasting at UCL, including the UCL Minds and Made At UCL podcasts series, check our new podcasting guide here.

if you have any questions in relation to these two campaigns, please contact digitalcommunications@ucl.ac.uk .

Support available in relation to podcasts

We manage UCL Sound: UCL’s central SoundCloud account, which has more than 535,000 followers.
(also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Acast)

Under the Made at UCL campaign, we have developed a new #MadeAtUCL podcasts series which explores the disruptive discoveries emerging from UCL. The series is promoted under the wider UCL Minds umbrella. 

For everything there is to know about podcasting at UCL, check our new podcasting guide here.

 

Advertising

Advice on running an advertising campaign / working with Adgen

The following documentation is available from CAM.Advertising Sharepoint:

  • Campaign process outline and essential documents 
  • Adgen contract process terms and services
  • Best practice, how-to’s and guidelines
  • Presentations from monthly innovation sessions
  • UTM tagging guidance (including gathering conversion metrics all the way through to Gecko forms)

Click here to request access.

Data and insights on past advertising campaigns and recruitment channel performance

The following documentation is available from CAM.Advertising Sharepoint:

  • Past CAM advertising campaigns
  • Metrics, KPIs and benchmarks across channels – in development

Click here to request access.

Upcoming events and developments in relation to advertising activities

Read about other campaigns and activities across the university - request access to VPEE.Advertising Sharepoint.

View and book onto upcoming workshops and events, and take part in surveys and discussions to communicate campaign activity - join CAM+ Portal on Sharepoint and Student Recruitment CoP on Teams.

 

Social media

Guidance and best practice on social media at UCL

The UCL Social Media Practitioners Network has developed some guidance on the use of social media at UCL. This includes:

  • Guidelines for staff - A framework of best practice, actionable guidance and useful resources for those using UCL social media channels.
  • UCL's social media channels - Our directory of key UCL social media accounts and digital content. 

If you have any questions, contact digitalcommunications@ucl.ac.uk.

UCL social media accounts managed by the VPEE social media team

We manage the following social media accounts. We are also the main content creators for these channels:

We also manage UCL international accounts:

Please note that out of these, @ucl (Twitter), @uclnews (Twitter), @UCL_SRM (Twitter), and @UCL (Instagram), are embedded on UCL homepage. 

For queries regarding these accounts, contact digitalcommunications@ucl.ac.uk.

Promoting my content on UCL social media accounts

If you would like your content to be promoted through any of the accounts listed above, please use our content submission form.

#loveUCL Instagram competition

The #loveUCL competition is a competition run by the CAM Social Media team throughout the academic year. UCL students can enter by sharing their photos of life at UCL on Instagram, and tagging them with #loveUCL. 

There's a monthly winner (£25 Amazon voucher) and at the end of the academic year, one of the monthly winners' photos is picked in a public vote to win 'Photo of the Year' and a £100 Amazon voucher. 

Do promote the competition if you can. For more details, visit the competition page. 

 

CRM, e-communications and forms

Radius (CRM / e-comms) and Gecko (data capture)

Radius (formerly known as Hobsons) is the solution used by the CAM CRM team to manage prospective students' data and to communicate with them. Radius is currently helping us automate email marketing and transactional communications and provide a more personalised journey from enquiry through to acceptance of an offer and pre-enrolment. We currently do the following in Radius:

  • Student communication plans for enquirers, applicants and offer holders
  • International online events management
  • Integration with Gecko data capture tools to connect with event attendees 
  • Reporting and metrics

Faculty/Departmental staff also have access to Radius, although access is limited to certain functions such as the email template editor.

Gecko is the data capture solution used by the team, in conjunction with Radius. Gecko forms are used within the prospectuses to capture prospective students information.

Faculty/departmental access to Gecko is limited to the use of registration forms via the Gecko Capture app. The CRM team is disposed to supply faculty/departmental colleagues with registration data.

Contact the CRM team at vpee.crm@ucl.ac.uk for more info.

Training to use Radius / Gecko

As faculties/departments are responsible for designing their own email templates, Radius training is available. Contact the CRM team at vpee.crm@ucl.ac.uk for more details. 

The CRM team has also developed a video tutorial on how to created effective communications in Radius, go to the CRM team YouTube channel.

As access to Gecko is limited outside of the CRM team, training is not available. 

Contacting (current / prospective) students by e-mail

For UCL-wide communications to current students, we use our weekly newsletter (called myUCL) which is managed by the CAM internal communications team. For details on the process for getting a story included in myUCL, check the Internal Communications page.

If you would like to communicate with prospective students with an interest in your subject, speak with your faculty communications lead to find out who in your faculty has access to Radius. Ask them to help you create an email template. Provide them with copy and any images you wish to include; they will co-ordinate with you on building the template.

Building an online form

If the form you want to build is for student recruitment, contact the CRM team at vpee.crm@ucl.ac.uk to discuss the possibility of using the Gecko solution. 

For other types of forms, you may consider using Google Forms.

Data insights to help with student recruitment

We can provide staff with registration data collected through the Gecko forms, based on your requirements. Contact the CRM team at vpee.crm@ucl.ac.uk for more details.

Also, a number of dashboards are available through Tableau - giving access to data on admission & enrolment, education & student experience, sector benchmarking and research programmes. Contact UCL Data & Insights. 

Data protection and staying compliant

The Compliance team in Student and Registry Services (SRS) provides UCL staff with the guidance and support to ensure that all prospective and current student communications meet our consumer protection obligations.

SRS have also recently launched an online training course around students' consumer protection. The course provides an overview of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) guidelines for consumer protection at UCL.

For details, go to our Consumer Protection pages.

Locally held spreadsheet of prospective students - staying GDPR compliant

If your list is of prospects with an interest in undergraduate programmes, we recommend you follow these steps. Write to your contacts one last time informing them that you and UCL take privacy seriously and that, in order for you to keep contacting them, they must ‘opt in’ to emails by registering interest in UCL via the UCL+ form. Advise them to select your subject from the list. (While doing this, you may continue to respond to individual questions directly with your contacts.)

We can then work with you to enable you / your communications manager to use the data. Contact the CRM team at vpee.crm@ucl.ac.uk for more details.

Posting physical mail - postal addresses?

The CRM team does not capture or hold full postal address data. You can get postal addresses from UCL Admissions or UCL select.

For non-student audiences, what mailing system is currently in use at UCL?

Dotdigital is an online email campaign tool which is available on request to UCL staff. Find out more about using Dotdigital.

 

 

Who's who

 

Meet the team