Evaluation of Overall Successes and Failures of Campaign
A creative and collaborative event
The biggest success of our overall campaign was bringing something to the RMIT Vietnam campus which had never been seen before. The whole aim of the event was to get students interacting creatively and actually involved in the process of the campaign. We changed the idea of providing food to students, with giving them a tote bag which they could instead take away making the event memorable. The biggest success of the event was the collaborative artwork. It successfully engaged students by making them want to participate in the art making project, or simply by drawing an audience in who wanted to view the artwork being made. Producing these kinds of creative and collaborative events will benefit the Global Mobility department in the future.
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Interactive games
Another huge success of the ‘Step Beyond’ event was the paper plane throwing competition. This again was a success because it got the students and target audiences to interact with the campaign. Vietnamese students were easily enticed to join in on the event if it meant they were going to win something. By also making the plane throwing games ‘dramatic’ by having a microphone announcing the actions and students names before they threw their planes, we were able to draw more of an audience to the event by attracting people passing by. Games like this where a microphone is used to guide the participants could be successfully implemented in future Global Mobility campaigns.
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Success of a large event in a popular locationWe found that the large event was very successful in creating hype and student engagement due to the large scale and audience surrounding it. Having a micro-event for each program would be time consuming and harder to manage and advertising, while having one single, large event focused attention in one place, and had a better atmosphere and community feeling. The location in the canteen next to Highlands was a very successful location, it drew in the lunch time audience which we didn’t need to advertise or market to prior to the event.
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A balance in social media marketingWe found that the Facebook posts worked most effectively when we created a balance between education and non-educational posts. This included a mix of posts detailing how to apply for exchange, and ones like “did you know in Canada _____ ”. We found that posts which asked questions and engaged with the target audiences as well as visuals and infographics were most effective in gaining online interaction. Posts with lengthy worded sections were much less effective. The social media marketing of the campaign could have worked more effectively if we worked on connecting the online presence offline, and then bringing the offline back online, as discussed in the recommendations of future campaigns.
Slogan appropriateness
In future campaigns, separate taglines may be more effective in connecting with, and relating to, the target audiences. Through our research and extensive evaluation, we found that the ‘Step Beyond’ slogan did not appear to work well with Commerce students specifically. This may because these students are generally more focused on the academic benefit of study exchange, rather than the cultural and travel aspect. For Commerce students, there could be a separate slogan that focused on the academic and studious benefits of the study exchange program.
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Travel Guide
One of the communication teams biggest failures was time management. The team underestimated how long the process of communication approval and printing takes. It would be more useful to have the travel guide designed and approved for print at least three weeks before any event. We were only able to have 50 travel guides at our event, and as the survey results show this meant that awareness was not successful gained through the travel guides.
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Discovering our Audience
Whilst the campaign effectively reached the target audiences by campaigns end, it would have been more successful to implement more research at the beginning of the campaign to very specifically identify them earlier. This can then be used to formulate a more effective marketing strategy aimed specifically at a smaller target audience within one course or program.
However, the campaign was successful at discovered a wide range of potential audiences throughout surveys and campaign research. The research discovered lecturers at RMIT Vietnam to be potential target audiences, as they can promote the exchange program and encourage their students to apply. According to the surveys, English students in the final semester of their studies particularly identified with our strategy and were very interested in the study exchange program, so this group could be further targeted in the future. |
Ability to solve problems as a team
Overall our communications team were successful at coming up with solution to any problems we faced. The team did face many issues at the start of the campaign to do with budgets, and realistic outputs. However, the team was successful in being willing to accept change and scrap ideas if they weren’t working. An example of this was they way we produced a bookmark when we realised that we would not have enough travel guides printed at the time of the event. The bookmark had a link to an online PDF version of the travel, as well as a link to the Facebook so it ensured that no students missed out on any further information whilst also further promoting the Facebook.
Survey of overall success and failures
In order to evaluate the overall success of our campaign and gauge awareness of the new exchange program in the student cohort with statistical evidence, we randomly surveyed around 100 students at the RMIT Vietnam campus. The survey showed positive results for the whole campaign.
Survey Questions:
Survey Questions:
- Do you know RMIT University has four new exchange destinations for students?
- How did you find out about them?
- What was your first impression of the campaign? a. Posters b. Facebook c. Exchange Event d. Tote bag e. Travel guide f. Desktop background g. Bookmark h. Word-of- mouth
- What is your Program at RMIT?
- Based on your Program, which countries can you exchange to?
- How likely are you to seek further information about the RMIT exchange program?
- Do you intend to participate in RMIT exchange program?
- a) Awareness of our new exchange programs increased, with nearly 80% of respondents saying they had already heard about the four new exchange destinations. Their awareness grew from various platforms, including the Step Beyond poster (55%), the Global Mobility Facebook (65%), Step Beyond event (60%), tote bags (62%), bookmark (56%) and from word of mouth (80%).
- b) Another success factor lied in the favorability of our campaign collateral, with students surveyed indicating that the following tactics were comprehensively effective: Step Beyond poster (49%), the Global Mobility Facebook (47%), Step Beyond Event (65%), tote bags (68%), Bookmark (67%).
- c) The campaign successfully encouraged a large portion of students to seek further information about the exchange program, with over 50% surveyed saying they “definitely will” pursue more information, comparable to only 25% who indicated they “definitely won’t”.
- d) Tellingly, the travel guide was seen as the least effective tactic, with only 4% of those surveyed saying that they are aware of its existence, as well as 90% of students ticking “Not applicable” for favorability. This can be attributed to the lack of availability of the travel guides with only 50 being printed in time for the event, therefore inevitably reaching less of our demographic. This could also be because the students were not able to identify with the exchange booklet as a ‘travel guide’, changing the name of the booklet could have a better response with the Vietnamese demographic in the future.