This Open Day review was almost very different.
My second Open Day for the year was a bust – but by ignoring the instructions and going straight to the coalface, I came across an extraordinary person who should give up law and devote his life to training Australia’s recruitment teams full time. A gold medal communication and engagement performance happening in an unsanctioned event off to the side of the main institutional campaign is rare – but shouldn’t have to be.
A quick recap. Unlike some other years, I am visiting a select few open days as a genuine parent. Josh, our 17 year-old, wants to study law, not because he is a tosser or because he wants to coin it in, or because he wants people to say, ‘oh wow you’re a lawyer’, but because he has spontaneously plucked a passion for improving the condition of other humans out of thin air and sees law as a tool to try to do that. I have told him that only one in 12 law students end up practicing and some people find it rigid, hierarchical and bland, so he is not deluded by the glamour, but is still keen to head down that path.
We have winnowed the options down to four (I forgot RMIT has a law school, but it’s probably not on the list this year because I made the young fella tag along to an appalling Open Day there with his older brother a couple of years ago and there is no way he is volunteering to attend again – which in itself is a valuable Open Day lesson). We went to La Trobe last weekend, but can’t make ACU this weekend, due to family commitments. We live in the country and it’s quite the journey to get down to the big smoke, so I said ‘no drama, I’ll just ring up and organise a chat with an academic on another day.’
Stupid me.
I had already registered somewhat greedily eyeing off the $2.5 k prize for showing interest and so the first problem began when I realised we couldn’t go and I wanted to find out how I could organise a quick hook up with an academic. I tried six times to log into the open day site, and used a couple of my different email aliases to set up accounts, but kept going in circles and couldn’t for the life of me find a ‘forgot password’ button.
Anyway, I finally got in and there were no options for book in to chat another day or watch our sessions online, just gumph about the day we were going to miss. So I contacted the AskACU team as directed. I should say this is not intended as a critique of the person who responded (I imagined a nice student type working as a casual to respond to all sorts of enquiries armed with a script and strict instructions). Nor is it a criticism of ACU, as I will get to further on – it’s simply observations which may (or may not) prove useful.
Here’s what I learned:
- Ordinary folk can’t talk to academics direct unless it’s on Open Day – the AskACU team would not allow me to interact with the researchers kept safely away from the great unwashed in their ivory tower (well glass and steel actually, it’s a pretty nice building on the Melbourne campus, well done Stephen Weller)
- The AskACU peeps would try to answer any questions I could think up and if they couldn’t come up with an answer they would ask an academic and then ferry the response back to me so I could then relay it to my son, third hand. In case it’s not obvious, this is not a strongly persuasive approach to engaging school leavers.
- In response to my question about what makes ACU better than law courses of competitors such as La Trobe and Deakin, I only received a bland responses about features of La Trobe’s course. Nothing comparative.
A couple of things:
- Conversations drive conversion. Broadcast mode went out of fashion with demand-driven funding. And if we are conversing, you need to listen to the question and answer it, not dip into a grab-bag of responses and spit out the one that might be closest.
- Personality counts. I have asked similar questions mystery shopping various unis at other times when I didn’t have a son interested in attending, and even via email exchanges some authenticity and personality really counts. It sounds real.
- Know your onions, not just the script. It is possible to be comparative, authentic and truthful without being salesy but you have to really know your course and also the course of others. Which is exactly why you seek out academic or professional staff who are embedded in a specific discipline to find out which course you should go for and why.
In summary, the Ask ACU correspondent did a pretty reasonable job working with the script and rules they had to work with, but the process was not useful. I could book into a group tour of campus, I couldn’t speak to an academic and in terms of the question of what made Law different at ACU, I got a list of benefits of ACU. I relayed a couple to my son and he said ‘I think the others offer that as well.’
I was surprised that Ask ACU emphasised that students needed to find their own pro bono placements – I had just worked with a range of clients who employed placement officer to tee up placements.
I had no information that had progressed my understanding of ACU law at all, apart from information about not getting easy access to academics and having to find your own way with placements. But I also had had a couple of meetings with academic staff at various institutions angry that they were not allowed out to talk to the public. So I decided to subvert the system and reach out direct to a Law academic. A couple of Google searches later, I emailed the first person whose details I could find.
The quick retort is of course academic staff can’t cope with responding to every prospective student. Which I, of all people, understand. But at a time when every uni needs more enrolments, and too much time and money is invested in trying to reach people who will never enrol in your institution, the answer is not retreating to the ivory tower and pulling up the drawbridge for 365 days in a leap year. The recruiters you have posted at the gates armed only with generic scripts are not going to provide the connection or nuanced insights that you need to seal the deal and enrol a significant proportion of your prospective students.
One of the reasons I persisted was that during COVID I connected online for a few minutes with an amazing, articulate and passionate ACU academic when I was enquiring about study options for another of our boys. In five minutes he described exactly why his degree was different and convinced me that ACU was a serious option to be considered. There was no selling involved, he just knew what he was talking about, was a great communicator who would be easy to learn from and could articulate two key strengths that made the course a stand-out. That engagement stood out from interactions I had had with open days across the country that year.
Next day, I had just finished writing my review of ACU’s Open Day – waving goodbye to any hopes of the $2.5k prize as I did so (sorry son) and then an email popped into my inbox. The lecturer I had randomly contacted had fished my mail out of the spam box and was available to chat straight away.
Some 22 minutes of conversation later, I had been served with an extraordinary masterclass in recruitment and engagement from an experienced, enthusiastic, interested academic who told me everything about the market for law degrees in Melbourne that I wanted to know and provided concrete proof points that left me convinced that ACU should be the #1 preference for my child.
I told him afterwards that I had worked in the sector for decades and wrote about open days, in case you are left wondering whether that influenced his decision to invest effort in engaging with a complete stranger and it’s safe to say that he (politely) didn’t give a toss.
What worked:
- The first questions were about my son, what he was interested in, why law etc
- He sketched out a frank (and in my view fair) appraisal of law school options, emphases and the constraints of a curriculum which satisfies the law gods in Victoria
- He offered proof points in terms of graduate outcomes, explained QILT in a sentence and was fair in outlining strengths of competitor schools.
- He talked about strengths and experience of staff and the number that combined practice and teaching.
- There was no sell. He finished the call saying there was still time to decide and he was willing to sacrifice even more of his time to answer further questions / talk with Josh
This is clearly unsustainable for already overworked academics to do en masse, but equally, it is a classic demonstration of the power of effective engagement. Domestic recruitment is not about selling. It’s about matchmaking – linking people who want or need your course with the attributes that will benefit them.
This experience also underscores the importance of market research and knowing what the S1 2025 cohort is wanting, needing and worried about. Understanding perceptions and how to satisfy their questions. As a sector, we still really struggle with humility; imagining that individual student questions and concerns can be satisfied by expensive statement campaigns. In a market that is tighter than usual, with publicity about course costs, HECS indexation shock and the Government’s persistence in seeking to lower international enrolments, it’s critical to build deeper engagement with students, to minimise wasted marketing spend and resource investment and to recognise that students hold the upper hand, with most likely to receive multiple offers when January comes.
However, it doesn’t mean that marketers are not needed and academics hold all the answers. I have been to dozens of open day planning meetings where teams discuss how to keep crusty egotistical and/or slightly creepy staff away from the prospective students. Lots of good marketing and recruitment work is going on – but continuous improvement appears to be rare.
If you have not commissioned some market research recently to understand the 2025 cohort and are focused on folding or unfolding last years’ conversion plans, I would suggest changing course pronto.
