Like their peers, the University of Kent closed its doors due to the Coronavirus pandemic that swept the globe in 2020. As a result, physical, on-campus open days were cancelled. Turning their attention to online engagement, they chose Hijack (an online event platform by SMILE) to power their future events.
The University of Kent is based in the south-east of England, with European locations in Brussels and Paris. 97% of research at Kent was found to be of international quality in the most recent Research Excellence Framework so it seemed fitting that our pilot event was focused on prospective postgraduate students.
The challenge for the University of Kent
We had to move fast. In the end, we helped the marketing team to construct their event in just 4 days. The university had already been registering attendees, so we had to make sure they had somewhere to go!
On the 21st May 2020, the University of Kent ran its PG Open Day, Online, using Hijack by SMILE.
How Hijack supported online open day goals
With a 50% conversion rate and Hijack’s data capture and tracking tools, it has provided an unparalleled level of insight.
Hijack is ready for rapid rollout and adoption. We worked closely with the marketing team to structure their existing content in a way that created an engaging online experience, whilst playing to the strengths of the system.
In total, 39 Hijack experiences were created, with content filling 46 different chapters. Over 400 images were uploaded and 196 profiles were added. Stories were utilised really well, creating a compelling narrative to each specific subject level experience.
One of my personal favourite facts about this rollout was that we even created an integration to the University of Kent web API to pull course data directly into the Hijack course database. It was fantastic that the university was so ready for this type of integration and it’s definitely something that we would like to see from more universities in the sector. This allowed us to very quickly obtain all of the required details for course promotion within Hijack™️. This was one of the key factors in the university being able to deliver so much in such a short period of time.
Results
The support we’ve received from the SMILE team for our online events has been outstanding. They quickly understood the type of event we wanted to run and helped us to achieve that. We’ve been delighted with the levels of engagement and feedback from our visitors has been very positive.
Clare Saunders, Conversion Marketing Officer at the University of Kent
The pilot event was a huge success, and Kent has been running a regular schedule of online events through Hijack ever since. Here are some headline statistics from the pilot event:
- 1000+ attendees
- 750+ questions answered by over 200 members of staff
- 15,000+ clicks from attendees recorded throughout the event
- Attendees from 100+ countries
- 1500+ data capture forms completed
