Structuring applicant online communities for your 2022 starters

For university recruitment & admissions teams, applicant online community management is now standard practice. It is driven by students, seeking out online community peer groups well in advance of setting foot on campus. As these communities continue to mature and grow, often with lots of new groups being formed by users as well as staff, there is a sense among teams of a loss of control, and a lack of clarity over ownership, purpose, and potential impact. Recently we have been working with teams who are looking to better resource, structure and manage their applicant communities for 2022. Here are a just a few key takeaways and points to consider if you and your team are at the planning stage.

What are your goals in developing an applicant community?

Firstly, it may seem an obvious question but quite often teams don’t have clarity on the purpose of their applicant community. Are your goals solely to boost applicant conversion, or perhaps you are looking for a better way to communicate with incoming cohorts (or both?). It is really important to call this out from the start as the design of your community will be driven by the business objectives you want to achieve. For example, creating more niche groups for applicants to connect and build relationships around subject area plays a big part in their decision to enrol (i.e. conversion). Therefore your community should be structured in a way that funnels applicants into their specific subject areas to support that type of applicant experience. A broad ‘catch all’ type group with a lot of members will help you disseminate key information quickly with applicants if that is your goal, but will be less effective at creating opportunities for more tailored and intimate experiences that support conversion. Clarity around purpose at the outset will help shape your applicant community in a way that ensures it’s delivers on your goals.

Why will applicants join your community?

To design an effective community experience we need to consider why members (in this case university applicants or offer holders) engage in the first place. It’s clear that the motivation for a new student to join is very strong and it can also be quite diverse. Applicants often join initially with a view to achieving a particular goal (e.g. getting information on fees) and then gradually become more integrated into the community as they find commonality and then friendship with other members. Examining applicant participation and unpacking their motivation in this way helps design a space where your applicants can become more integrated and committed members.

What level of resourcing is required?

Resourcing is perhaps the most sensitive consideration in applicant community development. For teams already stretched, there is often apprehension that creating a potentially large and growing community will drain what is an already scarce resource (especially staff time!). As a result, and in an effort to mitigate, applicant communities are designed as large single entity community groups often with thousands of members. However, this type of community structure creates more work for teams, not less. It also creates a poor experience for members as the community becomes hijacked by the few calling out for staff to respond to their individual queries. The pressure is on then to tend to queries in front of a large audience, and once you respond to that one query, the genie is out of the bottle!

While it might seem counterintuitive to create more groups to reduce workload, we always encourage teams to aim for greater specificity and closer related spaces instead of broad categorizations. Having more niche groups that bring students together around common areas will actually reduce the dependency on staff to support, not increase as you might expect. The reason for this is the members of those groups are more related and are as a result more likely to solve many of their specific issues within their niche community groups. They don’t need to go to you in the first instance as they recognise others within these groups will likely have similar queries. Set up in the right way, with clear escalation paths for unresolved issues, means you can generate significant scale within your community, reduce staff queries, while providing applicants with a superb student experience.

What type of applicant groups?

Typically an applicant community should include some broad and many niche groups for students. For niche groups the themes will often emerge organically from within the community when students try to self organise around more personalised key themes related to their enrolment. They tend to be smaller more focussed groups with a stronger commonality between members who will contribute more frequently as a result. For teams looking at conversion as a primary goal, these groups are powerful in strengthening the bond between the applicants who participate.

Broader groups are by definition more generic, and are made up of applicants who are more loosely connected in terms of their relatedness (e.g. different subject areas, different nationalities etc.). They are important as they give students a sense of the diversity and scale of the community which in itself provides a validation. These type of groups can be a suitable landing point for new members from where they can be signposted into their more tailored spaces. They work well for pushing communication out to the wider community but as covered earlier can become highjacked if allowed to go unchecked.

What groups do we recommend you start with?

While we can’t account for every group type that our applicants might require, we can recommend a template that provides the right blend of general to specific to meet the needs of your applicants. It is important that applicants understand the expectations within different community groups so clear onboarding is an important step to maintain group dynamic and purpose. Your ambassadors again can help set the culture/tone and expectations within each spcace.

Below represent 5 categories that cover most applicant areas of interest across all the teams we work with.

1. Groups based on subject area

Purpose: Connect applicants with others on their course or programme of study.

Bringing applicants together around subject area is one of the most important strands to applicant community building. The motivation for applicants joining subject related community groups is not simply to find out more about the programme, but to meet like-minded peers who have also made the same choice. The peer reassurance gained from connecting with others also committed to a particular programme choice is critical . By integrating your applicants into their subject communities you are strengthening the bond they have each other and you as the admitting university.

2. Groups based on accommodation

Purpose: Connect with others they are likely going to be living with.

Spaces designed around aspects of university that applicants need the most information on, such as their course or accommodation, are where incoming students seek information and reassurance about their choices. It’s a known fact that people inherently trust the reviews of peers over material pushed out by the university itself, and so these spaces excel when facilitated by current student ambassadors from the relevant subject or accommodation. Ambassadors can moderate, support and instigate conversations, all whilst sharing real-life experiences and helping to prepare incoming students.

3. Groups based on region, home city, or country

Purpose: Connect appplicants with others from their same locality, region, city, or country

Another popular strand, particularly for clients using CampusConnect for international students, are groups that line up with where students are coming from. Anglia Ruskin University currently labels groups as ‘Students travelling from India’ or ‘Students traveling from Nigeria’ etc. This gives students a space to support each other, with a mutual understanding of their current context. Previous cycles have seen students sharing Visa tips, helping out with Covid requirements and even booking travel together! 

4. Groups specific to hobbies or characteristics

Purpose: Help applicants develop a deeper sense of belonging with the wider university community

Social groups are often overlooked but they help integrate applicants into the wider university community. They also provide opportunities for curated content that is relevant to the individual, and relationship building on a deeper level. Such groups tend to be based on hobbies and interests, or personal identity. Liverpool John Moores University provides groups such as ‘Over 21s chat’, ‘LGBTQA+ chat’ and ‘JMSU sports teams’. Communities that are tailored to their audience are better able to treat their members as individuals.

5. Groups specific to university processes 

Purpose: Staff provide applicants with vital information to support enrolment

This type of group benefits the most from staff input, as it allows students to post queries about application, enrolment and onboarding processes. This doesn’t just benefit the students: it’s a highly time-efficient way for university staff to manage and respond to queries on a large scale, rather than spending time on individual emails. Having oversight of this type of group also means staff can be on the ball when understanding the current needs of their incoming cohort.