How To DEVELOP A TECHNIQUE FOR Your Virtual Open Day [Free Planning Kit]

Open days certainly are a great way to market your university, show prospective students your campus and invite them to see it first hand. Students will get a glimpse of life on campus, and universities can connect to students. Regardless, an open day will offer more to your market when compared to a prospectus does. A virtual open day continues to be an open day, just in a ‘virtual venue’.

Virtual events certainly are a huge area of the future. Marketers cannot deny their benefits. They permit you to reach a worldwide audience and assist you to analyze the event and its own success with empirical data. They even eliminate travel requirements and added expenses. Because of this, 71% of marketers expect virtual events to keep beyond 2020.

As folks are warming up to the thought of virtual, we have been here to assist you maximize the huge benefits you get from your virtual open day.

It’s likely that that you will be already planning your virtual open day 2021.

But are you currently struggling with the place to start planning?

We realize important it is so that you can set the proper impression, and to connect to your prospective students effectively. That is why we’ve prepared a planning sheet to truly get you started and to show you in creating a technique for your virtual open day.

Without further ado, let’s go!

Technique for Virtual Open Day

Define Your Event Plan

Develop a arrange for your event, beginning with the fundamentals. Set objectives, outline goals and target your audiences. Defining an obvious arrange for your event can help you stick to course, without permitting you to deviate from your own end goals.

Think about the following when you begin to define your event plan:

• Goals: everything you desire to achieve, setting objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge the success of one’s event
• Market : define who you’re talking to, that are the decision-makers and target groups you need to reach

• Virtual events platform : research virtual event platform providers to see which suits your needs and will translate the needs you have to a virtual event
• Event strategy: identify sponsors, sponsorship packages, ticketing processes, exhibit halls

Pro tip: Before you move ahead together with your planning process, chart out your milestones. This can help you keep an eye on your targets, tasks and deadlines. Because of this, assisting you deliver your virtual open day within an allotted timeframe.

Hereon, creating your strategy gets easy you may already know your goals, market and what your location is hosting your virtual open day .

Another question however is, where can be your target audience landing. The solution is simple. Your squeeze page.

Design A STYLISH Landing Page

That’s where all of your marketing efforts lead. That’s where your target audience involves for all information relating to your virtual open day. From event dates, schedules, to agenda, everything is displayed the following. Your event website landing page also needs to create excitement – visitors ought to be itching to wait. Offer sneak peeks in to the event and highlight the speakers attending.

Additionally, ensure a registration form is preparing to effectively gather consumer data. Create registration forms which are quick to perform and easy on the eyes. Integrate with tools that enable you to collect consumer data. For example, integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) software could help collect basic information such as for example names, numbers and addresses, etc. These details could possibly be valuable in future promotional activities.

With vFairs , establishing your squeeze page is effortless with constant support from the project team, who ensure the procedure is seamless from the get-go!

And lastly, go live together with your website landing page!

Pro tip: create trackable event landing pages . This enables one to collect data which ways of event promotion will work best and which method gets the highest ROI.

Given that you have successfully attracted people to your event. Let’s discuss how exactly to keep them there. Keeping them engaged , helping them connect to fellow attendees, exhibitors and hosts significantly regulate how successful your event is.

Make sure to are the following features which will boost the engagement degrees of your event.

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Develop Informative Content

You will need content to help keep your attendees effectively engaged. Spark their interest with interactive documents and videos. Content offers tangible value to your attendees.

Hence, think about the following when designing your articles strategy:

• Welcome video : welcomes attendees, outlines agenda, guides attendees through the function and sets the stage for all of those other virtual open day
• About us : add basic information regarding your schools, departments, programs, life in the town, life on campus. Add short videos on success stories of alumni.
• Campus tour : tour video taking students round the campus covering accommodations, cafeteria, sports grounds and auditoriums for a visual representation
• Geographic area guide : where you can buy everyday essentials, local tourist and entertainment spots, bus/train stations, addressing and from campus
• Visa information : visa processes, checklists and timelines

Whether you select videos or documents, in any event, your articles should help students make their decision and the otherwise intimidating process effortless. Students will be able to download this material to reference down the road.

Engaging Exhibitor Booths

Your exhibitor booths may also be a hub of information. Attracting students to the booths and making certain they stay and obtain the required information is vital. Information booths predicated on school funding, visa processes, student body, and career services could be setup to let your students have relevant info on each one of these. Clearly laying them out may help your audience easily navigate through. Adding in a few of the key features could keep attendees engaged:

• Chat: add a ‘chat’ button, assign chat room attendants who’ll enable effective communication and put in a schedule of students managing the boards
• Speaker notes: answer faqs (FAQs) from the prior open days
• Downloadable documents and videos: add checklists, instructions, key documents and videos presenting valuable information

Pro tip: Add information booths about various departments, universities, societies and activities that happen in your university. It is a possiblity to adequately highlight all your university provides.

Speaker Sessions

Hosting speaker sessions that the audience can study from and relate to may also be an excellent addition to your virtual open days. Invite successful alumni to speak about their journey in the university and beyond it. Some prominent faculty members or career counselors can discuss choosing careers, a qualification program, and even choosing which courses to take. It is possible to arrange for:

• live sessions, where speakers can host a dialogue making use of their audience
• semi-live sessions, in which a pre-recorded video is played but speakers can be found with a chat function, or
• pre-recorded presentations and webinars, where in fact the audience can observe the presentation by themselves time.

Don’t forget to generate session schedules, which means that your attendees know when each session is occurring. Set the sessions up inside your virtual event platform and add reminders within the platform for the speaker sessions, so attendees could be pinged every time a particular session is approximately to begin with.

Networking

Prospective students and their parents are arriving at the virtual open day to learn more concerning the university, the faculty, and life generally there. So get them to in a position to get that from the horse’s mouth. Develop a networking platform where they are able to speak to current students, faculty members and department heads for more information about your university.

Pro tip : to activate with some target students, book 1:1 meetings or group chat sessions to speak to them about their requirements, and highlight what your university provides in exchange. These students to arrive from high school could be selected predicated on their GPAs, extracurricular activities, or program preferences.

Create An Accessible Virtual Space

Your virtual open day platform ought to be a welcoming space for several. Enabling folks of disability and various languages to comfortably participate can go quite a distance for you. Thus, ensure that your event suits the blind and deaf community by making your event accessible . From navigation to color contrast, large font size to page narrations and captioned webinars, these small additions makes it possible for everyone to feel welcome.

Moreover, people may attend your virtual open day from a different country and feel safe with different languages. Enable these folks to participate by integrating features such as for example KUDO . This feature enables you to conduct multilingual webinars and Q&A sessions. Kudo may also help you focus on the deaf community since it allows translations in sign language.

And lastly, how will you make all of this effort without creating some noise?

Marketing marketing marketing… plus some more marketing

Once you put together a squeeze page and created a beautifully interactive platform for the virtual open day, allow world know! S pread the term all over. Use your social media marketing channels as well as your website to advertise your virtual open day. Get your students and faculty members to spread the term. Bring onboard alumni that are prominent figures and also have a following. Those who are arriving at your event as speakers or those who are sponsors can all be leveraged to accomplish your bidding for you personally.

Marketing may be the culmination of most your blood, sweat, and tears of bringing this event alive so leave no stone unturned.

And lastly, let’s talk about the function. How to proceed before, after and during the virtual open day.

THE ULTIMATE Stretch

Finally, you have setup your virtual open day platform. You need to also have your idea ready for a couple hours prior to the event, your technique for the function, and post-event.

Pre-event Day

• tell you the virtual event together with your project manager
• check if all features come in place and running well
• run tests with all speakers through the presentation platform
• campaign rigorously on social media marketing
• send out a contact reminder for the function
• work with a powerful Call-To-Action button compelling visitors to participate
• create your personal call center number that you could add to your squeeze page to provide support

Event Day

• make certain students and parents can simply navigate through the virtual venue
• monitor the function closely, in the event of any technical issues, immediately are accountable to assembling your project manager
• manage the info desk
• monitor reports regarding attendance and footfall in hotspots.
• monitor which of the pre-registered folks have not joined in and send them a contact reminder

Post-event Day

• thank registrants who attended
• distribute many thanks emails to parents and students who attended the virtual open day
• send emails to individuals who did not attend; add several helpful documents about your university, information regarding schools, departments, etc. to greatly help them
• get insights from your own project manager on what the virtual open day went, improvements which can be made the next time, and technical conditions that could possibly be avoided
• get event statistics and analytics

SUMMARY

The thought of a virtual open day isn’t just to meet up prospective students but additionally to promote the life span and experiences that await them at your university. Your objective ought to be to help them within their decision-making and guide them through this technique. So be sure you are empowering them with the relevant knowledge to create this nerve-wracking decision for themselves.

Have a look at IE Business School and Royal Holloway on the successful virtual open days .

It is possible to download your free planning kit to assist you host probably the most memorable virtual open day.