University of Alberta adopt a student-led recruitment strategy

The challenge

The University of Alberta in Edmonton is one of the top teaching and research universities in Canada—they have an international reputation for excellence across the humanities, sciences, creative arts, business, engineering, and health sciences. With over 40,000 students from 156 Countries, U of A needs to ensure they are easily accessible and can connect with students from all over the world. 

U of A sought to fulfill the essential need for human connection with their prospective students; they knew it was time to go beyond the prospectus. “International student recruitment is one of our key priorities and we always go the extra mile to offer our prospective students an enjoyable recruitment experience. Shares Megan McCaskill, Recruitment Services Coordinator. 

“One of the main reasons we wanted to use Unibuddy was because we had a lot of prospective students asking us to connect them with our current students. They had questions about university life and wanted to hear from other students going through the experience.”

The solution

“We knew we had to find a platform that would enable our prospects to communicate with ease and Unibuddy was the right choice. We started looking into it last fall and launched about 6 months later. Our strategy has been to let it grow organically to see who comes across it, and so far we’ve got loads of interest, which has been awesome!” McCaskill exclaims. 

Once the decision was made, the Unibuddy customer success team jumped in and supported McCaskill and her team throughout the onboarding process, offering tips and tricks as well as training webinars and events. “The training provided by Unibuddy was great, I’ve not had any complaints, our students and staff have enjoyed using the platform, and they have nothing but good things to say.”

The results

Unibuddy was up and running in no time, and the University of Alberta is now able to offer its students the real human connection they were after. Despite their organic strategy and decision to not promote the platform, they’ve seen a rise in engagement and a lot of happy students having their questions answered.

“We’ve only been using Unibuddy for six months and the interesting thing is that, although we haven’t promoted it, we’ve noticed that a lot of prospective students have used it. They have a lot of questions and we’ve had a lot of engagement—we want to continue using it with our students for many years to come!”