Community and belonging are critical in ensuring that your cohort of September 2022 incoming applicants go on to become engaged and successful students.

While most HEIs have a peer-to-peer (P2P) advocacy strategy embedded in their recruitment processes, they don’t fully unlock the potential value in cultivating stronger relationships between the members of the incoming cohorts.

Guiding stronger student to student peer connections and niche communities among this new cohort is key in building a more meaningful sense of community and belonging.

Last cycle we guided more than 10,000 applicant to applicant connections delivering a 75% enrolment conversion rate across Home, EU, and international UG and PG teams, .

Incoming applicants don’t only want to talk to your ambassadors!

We consistently see how students look to form valuable peer connections with fellow applicants around areas of commonality (e.g subject area, place of origin, halls of residence/accommodation, interests, etc).

And they do so because they really value them!

Every year we ask thousands of applicant who they wanted to connect with and what value they attributed to that connection.

• 60% of applicants said that connecting with a fellow applicant was very important to them.

• 37% suggested that connecting with a current student ambassador was very important.

Before you start at university, how important are the following?

When asked what was the best thing about connecting with their peers, representative responses were:

“Being able to connect with others on course”

“I loved being able to meet people who I’d be living with”

“It gave me the feeling that I wasn't alone during that uncertain time”

“Being able to connect to people on my course and accommodation”

“During these challenging time it has kept me connected and informed”

“Getting to connect with people before college starts”

What does this all this mean for university recruitment and admissions teams?

At the post application stage P2P platforms frequently report a significant drop off in engagement and given what we now know this is not all that surprising.

For undergraduate applicants in particular, there is a strong demand for access to others also starting out.  Institutions, however, often trust that this community will develop organically, that prospects will find same-subject peers on social media or at pre-enrolment events, but leaving this to chance is a missed opportunity for recruitment teams to take control, to choose how and when they occur, and have the ability to track and measure impact. 

For universities it also makes sound business sense!

Of the thousands of students using CampusConnect in pre-enrolment this cycle, applicants who made at least two peer connections were significantly more likely to go on to enrol than those that didn’t.  In fact, 96% of applicants who made 3 or more connections went on to enrol. This, combined with the availability of extended insight, makes for a compelling argument for cultivating an effective applicant-applicant digital community strategy