Hacking higher education

At CASE Europe.
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Before I fill you in on some big news for SMILE, I want to give you a little background. About a year and a half ago, SMILE decided to focus on Education. A scary-ish decision, given our diverse portfolio of clients. But the work we were producing was better than ever, and the community started to notice. That’s when we bumped into Jim Tudor from Future Index. Fast forward a year or so, a few conversations on twitter and a few beers later and we’re collaborating on something really, really, awesome.

Jim is a seasoned conference speaker, and we’ve been getting our hands dirty this year too. But we know that we can offer something more to the community. So we pitched something different to perhaps the biggest education conference in your diaries: CASE.

CASE Europe is an annual event with one of the biggest attendances in the education world. So I’m excited to tell you that we’ll be joining Future Index on stage at this years annual european conference.

What we’ll be doing

We’ve got a great spot, we’re talking on Tuesday 1st September @ 17:00–18:00 in the first breakout session (so make sure you make the right choice 😉) and Jim will kick off with a piece on the very latest, and most relevant, digital strategy trends in Higher Education, with insight, global examples and benchmarks of the very best recruitment, story-telling, alumni community building and brand development. if you’ve ever seen one of Jim’s presentations before you’ll know that they’re fast-paced and high energy — everyone always comes away pumped to get their hands dirty.

And that’s where we come in.

We’ll take over from Jim and show you how to rapidly prototype ideas in a very short space of time. We’re going to prove that you don’t need to invest thousands of pounds or weeks worth of time to prove the viability of an idea or strategy. So Matt and I will be showing of some brand new tools, some top tips and a great process to wrap this all up in.

But we’re not finished yet.

The Hack Day

At the end of our slot we’ll be asking people like you, what your biggest marketing problem is. You’ll pick an idea and then we’re going to hack something together in a day — we call this approach a “Hack Day”. We’ll be providing live updates throughout the entire day, you’ll be able to join in the conversation via Twitter (#casehack) and in usual SMILE style, we’ll be putting together a very sexy website for all of this. So whilst you’re nursing a hangover the next day and you’re perusing all the latest and greatest at CASE — you’ll also be able to visit our custom built website and follow along with your idea being built in real time.

The After Party

So in just 24 hours, our website will show you the process from start to finish and hopefully it’ll be a useful tool for everyone involved in bringing ideas to life in Higher Education.

Nathan Monk
Nathan Monk

I'm proud to work for some of the world’s most influential brands that shape cities and define lives: Universities and colleges.

I provide advice to forward-thinking senior leaders on how to exceed their organisational targets by creating user-focused, digital-first strategies.