Last year, Australian Catholic University (ACU) achieved their goals of increasing leads and event attendance with the support of Swoogo’s event management platform.
When 2020 forced ACU to move their Open Day and orientation events online they needed a virtual platform that could help them maintain the engagement, branding, and excitement that they usually delivered in-person. Swoogo’s virtual platform encapsulated the features they needed to replicate—and exceed—their in-person success in the new online format.
The Challenges
Like most universities, ACU relies on Open Days to promote courses and recruit new students. In addition to recruitment, ACU hosts orientation events which are a crucial part of onboarding students—it helps them to establish a sense of belonging. Both types of events were traditionally held in-person, on campus.
“Beyond the relative ease of implementation, Swoogo gave us the capabilities to deliver events and a campaign that exceeded all of our KPIs. We were 393% ahead of KPIs on lead generation, 180% up on event attendeance, and 92% of our event attendees reported that our Open Days were good or excellent.”
Luke Williams — Associate Director of Digital Experience, ACU
ACU knew from research that students’ perceptions shift when they come on campus for the first time and that it was crucial to maintain that positive experience. With the restrictions faced in 2020 and the ongoing uncertainty of 2021, ACU needed to move all existing Open Days and orientation events online while maintaining branding and the level of engagement and interaction required to help students build positive affinity with ACU.
The Solution
From customer experience research, ACU knew that the type of interactions students were seeking from a virtual event was very different from just recreating in-person events, and they would have to find an events management platform that could be tailored to their exact needs.
With Swoogo, ACU was able to rapidly build out a solution that incorporated the features that students were seeking, while also allowing them to tailor the solution to be on brand and closely aligned with their user experience across their entire digital landscape.
ACU utilized group chat, one-to-one video meetings, and large-scale webinars to build a series of virtual events that catered to their students and the needs of their facilities and staff while crushing ACU’s expectations and KPIs. What started as a year of the unknown and worry, quickly turned into an exceptionally strong year of student recruitment.
