Whitelands Academy: An Admissions Achievement
Securing over 100 admissions for a new secondary school in just two months.
Eduprise worked with Whitelands Academy to successfully attract the sufficient number of admissions for a new secondary school to open in a full project length of two months.
Tools
The challenge.
The town of Bicester in Oxfordshire is a thriving area experiencing rapid growth as millions of pounds are invested in its infrastructure. As a result, their population is soaring, and with many families moving to the area, the need for a new secondary school quickly became apparent.
To increase the available secondary school places in Bicester, and provide people in the area with a greater choice, The White Horse Federation multi-academy trust announced its intention to build Whitelands Academy. This brand-new, state-of-the-art secondary school is to open its doors in September 2020, but first, they needed students.
When the application period began for secondary schools, on 1st September 2019, Whitelands Academy was not an option for parents applying through the Oxfordshire County Council online portal. Instead, parents were required to apply directly through the Whitelands Academy website. This meant it was crucial to raise awareness of the school and remind parents to follow an additional procedure.
Whitelands Academy needed more than 110 applications in order to justify a year 7 intake and opening its doors in September. To make sure that was possible, The White Horse Federation requested the support of Eduprise to raise awareness, increase the school’s exposure, reach new audiences, and drive admission applications.
The solution.
The Eduprise team understood the gravity of the situation they faced. If the target of 110 applications wasn’t met, Whitelands Academy, which had cost millions to build, would go unopened and unused for a full year.
There were two key elements to achieving that goal. The first was to make as many parents with children in year 6 as possible aware of Whitelands Academy, its fantastic facilities, and the opportunities it offered to students. The second was for the communications to persuade parents to complete a school-specific admissions application as well as applying for other schools through the council’s online portal.
So, with the tasks of raising awareness and initiating a desired action in mind, the Eduprise team got to work.
The process.
Eduprise got to work on establishing a marketing and communications campaign that would appeal to the target audience — parents with children aged between 10 and 11. With this criteria in mind, the vast majority of the audience would be between the ages of 30 and 45.
Research shows that, in 2018, 92% of 25 to 34 year olds and 87% of 35 to 44 year olds had social media profiles. It was therefore clear that social media was going to be an important channel in this campaign.
The team focused the admissions drive through social media, releasing daily organic posts across Facebook and Twitter. They also launched three paid ad campaigns — two on Facebook, one on Twitter — targeting parents in the school’s catchment area with children who would be leaving primary school in 2020. This focus on social media was accompanied by an email to contacts who had previously expressed their interest in securing a place at the school.
While these campaigns ran on social media they would drive admissions and raise awareness of Whitelands Academy. But there was still more work to be done for the school to become a well-known household name in Bicester. Eduprise contacted the Kingsmere Front Runner — a small but popular community magazine that covered events taking place on the Kingsmere Estate, where Whitelands was being built — and encouraged them to place an article about the construction progress taking place at the school. While the Front Runner’s readership may not be the same demographic the team was targeting, it reached out to a different audience and helped raise general awareness of the school in the area.
| Total Impressions | 93,603 |
| Total Reach | 12,909 |
| Link Clicks | 378 |
| Unique Link Clicks | 313 |
| Cost per Result | Around £1.10 on average |
The Twitter campaign also captured the imagination:
| Impressions | 33,169 |
| Link Clicks | 89 |
| Cost per Result | £1.69 |
| Total Engagements | 436 |
Through a combination of paid-for, targeted social media advertising — a channel rarely used by schools — and wider marketing that increased overall awareness of the school and its fantastic offering, the Eduprise team filled an entire year group of a new school in just two months.
