Looking for something new to try this spring for your recruiting efforts? I recently saw a demo for CollegeWeekLive and was quite impressed with its features and the possibilities it creates for recruiters across the country.
Side note: This may seem like a sales pitch, but it’s not. I don’t work for CollegeWeekLive, nor am I a current client. I’m just an impressed individual who works in marketing and communication at a university, and wanted to share this with you, as I hadn’t heard much about them before seeing this demo.
Although their service is called “CollegeWeekLive,” their service is much more than one week of live events. They have two major events each year, one in early November and the other in March. In addition, they provide a number of other specialized events for guidance counselors and other targeted groups, and you can have your own Virtual Open House just for your university on any day of your choice.
When students login during CollegeWeekLive, they first see a virtual reality-type view of what it would be like if they walked in the door of an auditorium at an in-person traditional college fair.
This lobby gives them an overview of their choices, a list of colleges participating, and other live features. When a student chooses to browse through the booths, they see this:
When they select a booth, they’re greeted by that university.
While in the college’s booth, they can chat live when counselors and other representatives are available, add documents to their “my stuff” section to come back to later
similar to picking up printed materials at a traditional college fair booth.
CollegeWeekLive attracts students that many of us are seeking in our recruiting efforts. The average attendee has a 3.42 GPA, averages 575 on the Math SAT, 556 on the Reading section, and 557 in the Writing, all which are well above the national average, according to collegeboard.com. According to CollegeWeekLive, 60% of their attendees classify themselves as minority students. Their biggest pull was recently from California (20.4%), followed by Texas, Florida, New York and Georgia.
Admissions offices who are seeking these kinds of students, and especially those that are dealing with smaller budgets and less travel, should absolutely try this service. I was floored at how affordable this is considering the vast reach, customization and personalization capabilities universities have.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting one of the guys from CollegeWeekLive, and can tell they are the type of vendor I’d want to work with. They are very hands on, provide you with many ideas and opportunities, as well as suggest next steps for effective follow-up after your events.
I personally know at least two colleagues at other universities who are current clients and rave about this service. I’d love to hear more success stories, and hear about other unique ways university’s are customizing their booths, how they’re structuring their virtual open houses, and how their follow-up is going after these events. I think CollegeWeekLive has the potential to be a major player in the higher education recruitment space, especially in tighter economic times and a smaller number of eligible students to recruit in certain areas of the country.
Let us know if you are a client and how it’s going for you.
I can vouch for CWL. We’ve (the Mount) participated in their last four events andare gearing up for another this spring. Aside from initial unexpected server load failures, it is a fairly good experience. As with all technologically related efforts, you can expect the possibility of a glitch.
But overall I’d give them a B+ and worth the $.
I think these virtual fairs are a great idea. We participated in the Macleans Virtual Fair (https://www.macleans.ca/oncampusfair/) last year and will again this year. With the need to attract students from outside regular catchment areas, these virtual fairs are great tools to use.
I can agree that CWL is a great way to not only reach a large volume of students … but more importantly a large volume of qualified students. We (University of New Haven) have just signed on for another year and will be hosting a couple dedicated open houses online with CWL next year.
UC Davis participated with the other UC campuses in a “UC Day” event last fall at CWL, and also participated in the Nov. CWL general event. Seems like it has given us good exposure to prospects we might not otherwise reach, esp. out of state. We have yet to see if it’s been worth the $$$ as we’re still getting fall applicant data loaded. Set up of the virtual booth and use of the online/video chat features were pretty straightforward. CWL was generally good about responding to our questions and they provided promotional materials for us to use.
This is the first time I hear about CWL. It seems to be a very interesting concept, and something we should really be doing in Norway as well.
There are several businesses that are offering similar services in Norway, but nothing like the virtual open houses and the virtual college fair.
Thanks for sharing.
Maybe I’m the lone dissenter, but the admissions officers and I sat through a webinar on CWL last year and none of us were very impressed, especially for the price. Conversely, we all loved what Zinch had to offer, and we decided to go with them.
Never heard of this service before, but will definitely look more into College Week Live. Might need this for the spring.
-Kai
We took part on an early (free) CWL fair. It was long and we didn’t see many students. If we had paid for that experience, I would have been upset.
I’ve talked to a few colleagues at other schools about it and none were enthusiastic (one even suspected that some of the participates were “bots”). The comments here are the first positive ones I’ve seen about the experience of using CWL.
Sorry to say that the person who called me about signing up again was very aggressive when I explained that we wouldn’t be participating.
I have shared office space so i dont mind leaving home but I love the ideas!