Consultants for Fairfield School or Business student recruitment campaign, helping them fill two classes in four weeks after re-opening.

Fairfield School of Business (FSB) commissioned Rhodium to consult on and design assets for their September 2021 intake in the Croydon area. Reopening for students after 18 months of the pandemic the challenge was to engage the local community and build awareness of FSB offering and values.

FSB is a community-based Higher Education college offering degrees in Healthcare and Business to students who may not traditionally be able to access them. They are affiliated with both Bath Spa and De Monfort Universities and offer inclusivity and empowerment to all students.

How we helped

Rhodium started with a workshop session involving key stakeholders including student recruitment, finance, marketing and the CEO. This session helped to distill the objectives, identify audience demographics and brand TOV as well as auditing past and current activity.

We then implemented direct marketing through a stall in the high street to engage the key target audience, the local community. We created exhibition collateral and flyers that were combined with a QR code, leading to a digital landing page with capture details to provide contacts to the recruitment team.

This campaign was supported with paid social activity on Facebook targeted to the local area and identified demographic as well as utilizing Facebook’s copycat audience functionality from graduates and past leads. PR and organic social posts also used the schools new affiliations with De Montford as a tool for targeting a wider social reach.

Learnings

We concluded that a mixed approach was necessary to meet the short term needs of fulfilling the cohort. Combining traditional direct marketing and social media advertising enabled FSB to reach a targeted audience in a short period of time.

The positioning and messaging were key in engaging the target audience. The social messaging focused on ‘Let's get back to business’ promoting the fact that they were up and running again and looking for students after a period of inactivity during the pandemic. It also utilised a play on words for the emphasis on Business degrees and empowering local people to get back into education and work.  

The workshop and persona mapping exercise were extremely useful to the team to refocus and plan for future cohorts and wider marketing activities.

Beyond

The campaign ran over 4 weeks and Fairfield School of business were able to fulfil their cohort quota with good insights and learning for future recruitment campaigns. The campaign was created to provide a springboard for future recruitment drives as the college re-establishes itself.