How we design communities for UG applicants
Undergraduate applicants don't engage with online peer communities in the same way as your PG or International offer holders. There are a couple of key differences and it is important to reflect these in your community design to ensure maximum benefit/value.
Key differences in community design for your Undergraduate applicants:
Greater demand for niche interest based community groups - Online student communities are made up of 2 types of spaces - broad catch all spaces or groups, and more niche groups dedicated to specific themes or topics. Broad groups provide a suitable landing point for applicants to come together with a large cohort of peers (e.g. fellow September 22 starters), but to drive ongoing engagement applicants are keen to niche down to find smaller more intimate spaces to engage with more closely matched peers. An approach that is working really well at the moment is opening more interest based niche communities for those who want to connect around different types of commonality (e.g. Dog lovers, LGBTQA+, disability issues). In these cases the applicants themselves are part of the community design as they are invited to suggest a group. An ‘emergent design’ approach like this is a great way to drive ongoing engagement and prompt applicants to engage across cohorts and into other areas of the university community.
Immediate requests for applicant to applicant peer connections - reflecting the importance of peer and social reassurance for this cohort, undergraduate applicants often struggle with a sense of isolation and look for those at their level for support. One of their primary motivations in joining the community in the first place is to feel like they belong and helping them find their most relevant peers (often others on the same programme) is one of the most important first steps in the community. Time to value here is critical, so make sure that there is a little friction between their landing point and finding their subject group and peers. Your ambassadors can play an important role here and if you have the right set up they can guide a lot of the high value connections across the community.
Community participation should be recognised and rewarded - Incentivised community engagement is a must and one of the best methods among UG cohorts is to recognise and reward those who contribute the most value. You might find that its the same 10% who consistently engage and this is positive as they are keeping the more passive members engaged and coming back. Publicly rewarding their contribution is important while at the same time looking for opportunities (usually in smaller more niche spaces) to engage the more passive members of the community is a good strategy.
Ambassadors are better utilised as 'Community Guides' - We love that the University of Limerick student volunteers are called ‘Guides’ as we feel this much better reflects their role than ambassador. Traditionally ambassadors answer questions and share their experience but with UG applicant primarily looking to find their communities, student guides can support greater levels of connectivity across the community. As simple as checking in with an applicant to see if they have managed to find their peers, provides a lot of value. Giving your student team with a remit to support community building and opposed to solely responding to questions is highly recommended.
Warning! This cohort is harder to reach (especially via email) - there is no avoiding the fact that this particular cohort can be tough to reach and your community will need clear value positioning and promotion across multiple channels. Remember it’s still important to keep the community gated and provide a sense of exclusivity, while still showcasing and having lots of visibilty across other channels. Our partners use text messaging, promo video campaigns, phone calls, with social media campaigns to promote their communities. Working across teams here helps and bringing in faculty and marketing teams to support single strategy is key.