Taking current students online with Unibuddy at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM)

Challenge: Increase access to student ambassadors via digital channels – and understand more about prospective students

Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) recruits domestically and internationally for a range of courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. They were looking for a platform to get their best advocates, their student ambassadors, online. RSM wanted prospective students to hear about their school firsthand from current students and to understand more about their prospective student audience. 

Solution: Simple implementation process enabled student ambassadors to get online faster

RSM implemented Unibuddy to gain a more robust channel for their student ambassadors to communicate with prospective students. RSM appreciated that Unibuddy supported lead generation activities and provided more visibility from monitoring, data insights, and management standpoints. 

“We’ve been using ambassadors and peer-to-peer communication for a while, but we used to use Facebook. It had no lead generation and no monitoring capabilities, so Unibuddy has really enhanced our capability in that way,” said Johanna Goossens, Recruitment and Communications Manager at RSM. “It is very important for prospective students to hear from current students and it is very impactful, hearing from a current student really will make the difference.”

To help prepare the ground, RSM recruited 50 student ambassadors from a range of programs to be on Unibuddy; there were over 180 sign-ups within a month. 

“Our Master’s programs are only one year. We start the recruitment process once they’ve accepted their offer, in the summer,” said Goossens. “We send them a mail asking them if they’d like to be a student ambassador, and there’s an interview process in the first week of September.”

They restrict their undergraduate student ambassador program to second-year students, students who have had more time to get to know the school, the city, and the student life.

What Johanna is looking for throughout the recruitment process is students who want to make an impact: “We try to look for students who are in it for the right reasons and really want to help prospective students.”

Unibuddy made student ambassador training and management easy. In addition to providing RSM with in-depth training materials, Unibuddy also provided the school with tailored student ambassador training webinars. RSM supplied student ambassadors with links to key pages about visas and financial aid to use in their conversations with prospective students.

Ongoing ambassador management was also straightforward, according to RSM, via Unibuddy’s dashboard:

“With any kind of ambassadors, you have to monitor their work and Unibuddy makes this easy,” said Goossens. “It’s not too intensive – we look through unanswered conversations which usually takes about 1 hour a week.”

Results: Powerful conversation insights helped shed light on who their prospective students are – and what they needed to enroll

After one month, RSM’s Unibuddy platform had 182 signups from prospective students. 

As Johanna says: “It is very important for prospective students to hear from current students and it is very impactful, hearing from a current student really will make the difference.”

To help drum up interest in Unibuddy, RSM uses the main Unibuddy widget in addition to traffic drivers, like pop cards and Buddy Cards, embedded across the site to drive traffic to their Chat page. They have also created their own graphics and widgets, linking to Unibuddy, across a range of channels. 

“We are also using it more and more in our e-marketing mailings to our leads,” said Goossens. “We’ve run an Instagram campaign, highlighting a particular ambassador.”

One of the benefits of Unibuddy is the ability to get a real insight into student conversations and profiles. For example, RSM found that students from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) had very different concerns about higher education. They also gained insights into how conversations differ from their undergraduate and graduate student audiences. They plan to use these new insights to inform their future enrollment marketing strategies.