Virtual Academia: Colleges and Universities Reach Students and Alumni with Webinars
Webinars don’t just belong to the corporate sphere anymore—many colleges and universities find them advantageous for various initiatives.
"Our college and university clients use webinars as a way of reaching prospective students and alumni who are geographically diverse, and working students whose tight schedules permit them from being able to attend workshops or seminars in person," says Julie Glazer, Senior Account Executive for Infinite Conferencing.
Some university HR departments also do webinars to reach retired employees. In addition, schools of medicine utilize webinars to communicate with students doing residencies.
Crossing the Divide
We recently spoke with the associate director of a career management center for a major university which uses webinars primarily to reach alumni and working professionals in the school’s MBA program.
"We wanted to become relevant to groups that we weren’t able to reach through our on-site workshops," says the associate director. "We have a huge online MBA program, and we also have a large number of students that work full-time and attend classes in the evenings, so in order to meet the needs of these groups we had to look into an alternative method of delivering our career management services.”
The career management center’s webinars teach students and alumni about how to use resources in the center, and also offer instruction and lessons on the critical issues of career management—networking, resume and cover letter writing and branding.
Expanding the Possibilities
The associate director reports that since introducing webinars two years ago, he is better able to meet the more specific needs of different populations. “We’ve been able to drill down and invite certain populations into more focused webinar services,” he says.
Offering recordings of webinars is also a great way to maximize the value of your efforts. “We always record our webinars so that if somebody misses it, which is inevitable with a population of working professionals, they can just go to the Web site to view it.”
Meeting the Challenges
The associate director leads the webinars himself and says that learning to navigate Infinite Conferencing’s system was easy. In fact, his biggest challenge has been content and marketing. “Because information is so readily available today, our challenge is to deliver valuable content and make students and alumni aware that it’s there for them. The old saying ‘build it and they will come’ isn’t always true. They have to know about it.”
He tackles this challenge by using a comprehensive marketing process, coupled with the advantages of word of mouth. He also recommends conducting an initial survey to discover availability times, and then sticking to that schedule. “That way when people talk about it, you don’t have to rely on marketing as much to let them know when the webinars are—they can tell each other when they are because they’re regularly scheduled every week.”
For more on Infinite Conferencing’s Event Management Services, or for a no-cost quote on management of an upcoming company event, call 888.203.7900, or log onto http://www.infiniteconferencing.com/virtual-event-management.asp. You can also learn more about marketing a successful event by downloading a copy of Infinite Conferencing’s Virtual Event Management white paper.
