group work

College boosts engagement by moving beyond the calendar to the event horizon


Johnson & Wales University is using Localist, a SaaS-based calendar system to promote campus events through multiple online channels and then analyze performance.

Today, students want relevant information delivered directly to their smartphones, be it through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or e-mail. They certainly don’t want to be trolling through university websites, yet this is exactly where most college event calendars lie buried. Not surprisingly, many of the listings in these calendars fail to put bums in seats.

In an effort to reach students where they live, Providence-based Johnson & Wales University has turned to Localist, a SaaS calendar solution that uses a set of APIs to push event information to multiple platforms and websites. The software also allows the school to track performance across each channel.

Schools such as J&W are increasingly looking to events to help them build relationships with their target audiences. “What we hear from our university clients is that events are the top way they connect with their audiences, especially prospective students,” said Krystal Putman-Garcia, vice president of marketing at Localist. “They can’t just show them display ads and expect them to do anything. They need to have more authentic conversations with their audiences.”

These conversations have become especially important for J&W, an erstwhile culinary school that is rebranding itself more broadly as an institution offering a wider range of majors and is now pushing into the health sciences and other areas. Localist gives J&W a way not only to reach a broader audience for its events but also to build its brand through reinforcement.

“In marketing, the buzzword is omni-channel, meaning we need to be everywhere with our brand and message and keep our story fresh in their minds,” said Ed Garabedian, manager of digital analytics at J&W. “Reinforcement is very big in our marketing strategy, and events are great because they are typically something fun—a chance to see something or taste something.”

By piggybacking off information in the school’s CRM, J&W is able to identify the appropriate audience for events and then tailor multi-channel messaging to appeal to prospective attendees. If a high school student fills out a response card indicating an interest in being a chef, for example, the school can use that data to send him information via e-mail and social media about upcoming culinary events.

(Next page: Tracking performance with Localist; the calendar widget)

Tracking Performance

To track performance within each channel, J&W uses both Localist’s own system and Google Analytics. According to Putman-Garcia, the captured Localist data extends well beyond the old metrics of how many people registered or attended an event. “We’re able to tell schools their top trending events, their event reach, attendee geography, and the social activity that’s going on,” she said. “We’re able to capture all the social chatter and report that to our clients.”

For each event, J&W embeds a code within the Localist system that can then generate Google Analytics data on web traffic coming to the landing page. “We can easily see the different channels—social media, e-mail, organic search, direct search, or pay-per-clicks if we’re running an ad,” said Garabedian.

Garabedian acknowledges that it’s early days still in trying to discern which channels work best for different events and audiences, but the data helps J&W hone its approach. “It can be a bit like throwing spaghetti against a wall, but the analytics data give you a continuous circle of feedback,” he said. “You try something, check the data, adjust, and try again.”

He is currently working to pair this web traffic data with the school’s Talisma CRM. “We want to unify that data so we can begin to understand activities of personas, be it prospects or existing students, alumni, even parents,” he said.

Calendar Widget

Beside giving J&W the ability to promote events through social media channels, Localist also provides a calendar widget that can be embedded in J&W-related websites or on pages within the university portal. This way, the school can disseminate relevant event information to sites or pages frequented by specific campus audiences. If the Culinary Arts Museum holds a cupcake-decorating class, for example, the event information can be displayed directly on the Culinary Arts Museum landing page, in addition to the university’s homepage and the Events section.

J&W doesn’t have a large communications and media-relations staff, so it was also important that promotion of the hundreds of annual campus events not all fall under their day-to-day responsibilities. A user-friendly GUI allows anyone to publicize an event, meaning university staffers need only review and approve the event listing before releasing it. “We’ve been able to decentralize event creation over the course of a year, including event listings created by alumni,” said Garabedian. “Alumni can now enter events within Localist and then reuse those listings on their channels as well.”

The decentralized nature of the Localist product has helped it gain acceptance at J&W, which, like most universities, has its share of silos. At this point, Garabedian estimates that 75%-80% of all campus events are now put into Localist, but he concedes that a single calendaring system is probably not in the cards. Room scheduling, for example, is handled through the school’s CollegeNET R25 system, and several groups still use their own systems.

Nevertheless, he’s confident that the greater promotional reach of the Localist system will continue to win converts on campus. “Some groups might have a very simple event mechanism to communicate directly with their community, so it makes sense for them,” Garabedian said. “But we can give them broader exposure through our marketing channels. We’re moving from a more traditional marketing approach to a much more agile, digitally focused approach. You want to have that flexibility.”

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