How Babson College hosted an online open house to drive conversion
About Babson College
An independent, not-for-profit institution, Babson is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, and the EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS). In the 2018–2019 academic year, more than 2,350 undergraduate and nearly 1,000 graduate students are attending Babson, representing more than 80 countries.
The Challenge
In a hyper-competitive recruitment environment Babson College needs to stay ahead. As a leader in entrepreneurship, the institution is always looking at ways to stand out and attract the best-fit applicants to the institution. While hosting webinars has been a part of their strategy for some time, they struggled with driving the highest attendance possible while also duplicating efforts on the part of their presenters.
The Solution
Partnering with PlatformQ Education, Babson shifted all of their webinars from a legacy web meeting platform being used for webinars to the Conduit platform. This transition enabled the team to leverage the managed services offered by PQE to ensure webinars are of the highest quality. Additionally, the superior software capabilities when compared to other webinar platforms means that all of the presentations conducted by their team are immediately available to students on the same platform; alleviating the need to find a place to store and share archived webinars. These enhancements ensure that prospective students can access content easily while minimizing the work needed by Babson’s team to generate and re-use the content.
As part of Babson’s transition to Conduit, they started by hosting targeted webinars for prospective students who had registered for events on their legacy system. This meant sending students Q-Token (encrypted direct login links) to specific populations of students. Leveraging CRM Bridge, Babson is able to ensure that participations in webcasts are tracked appropriately without creating duplicate records or missing the opportunity to leverage the insights from the event in future recruitment efforts.
The Results and Next Steps
Babson’s virtual open house (which focused on applying, financing, learning and succeeding at Babson College) provided the institution with the opportunity to interact with over 90 attendees. This represents over two-thirds of pre-registrants attending the live program.
Babson will continue to host online events for specific audiences throughout the year. These sessions include presentations for part-time MBA prospects and incoming students. Additionally, now that this content is produced they can use Conduit’s “Simulive” feature to replay a presentation for a fresh audience without asking presenters to invest additional time in discussing the same topics again and again.
“Moving to Conduit by PlatformQ Education [from our old webinar platform] enables us to demonstrate Babson’s brand of innovation and entrepreneurial leadership to our prospective students with this unique platform that perfectly aligns with our institution’s identity.” Courtney Minden
Vice President of Enrollment Management and Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid
Babson College
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