As Project Manager in the Creative Services & Insights team, I have the rewarding role of working with our university partners to develop and deliver projects from our Creative and Insights offering here at Cubed.

From overseeing brand development work to inject new life and better speak to the prospective student audience, to conducting market research to help a university understand barriers for applicants beyond the local area and how to overcome them; or organising a film shoot on campus and managing the production of videos that encourage applicants to book onto an in-person Open Day – no two projects (or days!) are the same.

Planning and delivering a variety of Creative Services & Insights projects in collaboration with our clients – each uniquely designed to the opportunity being explored or challenge being overcome – is what makes me tick. This is because, as you might expect from a Project Manager, it is greatly satisfying to define and then deliver a project from start to finish and take a client on that journey (and do it well). However, the bigger kick working within HE is that by supporting our client teams in their various marketing endeavours, in turn, we are helping to unlock the potential for more people to access the transformative power of education.

This couldn’t be truer for a recently completed market research project we delivered to help one of our clients, the University of Sheffield, to understand and define their bursary and scholarship offering to better meet the needs of prospective and current students.

Simply put, the project goal was to understand and improve the University’s current financial aid packages to encourage students to apply – who, without additional finance, would not be able to access the often life-changing benefits of university life and all it offers. Timelier than ever as we see the cost-of-living crisis present ongoing financial concern in pre-applicants.

To answer the brief, we took a multi-phase, mixed methodology approach including data analysis, novel web scrape, qualitative focus groups, stakeholder interviews and quantitative surveys. This meant we could benchmark the current offering against the market, establish what compositions of financial aid models would be attractive to a range of stakeholders (including prospective and current students, staff, and donors) and then test those proposed models with the market, to ultimately deliver a suite of evidence-based recommendations.

The project culminated in a presentation delivered to a group of 30+ stakeholders who will now implement strategies to move their bursaries and scholarships packages forward. By challenging the status quo using deep sector knowledge, data, and a passion to drive change, we very much lived and breathed our agency mission statement.

One thing that stood out about this project was its intrinsic goal – to understand and improve financial aid packages so that the inherent value that the university provides becomes even more attainable, which embodied Cubed’s key value of GIVE A DAMN – we believe in our sector and the value that it brings. This brand valuefeeds into all we do as an agency and was at the heart of this project.

Partnering with a University with a shared ethos about the value of higher education, along with a forward-thinking attitude and appetite for change, was key and inspiring to see – personified not only by the open-minded and collaboratively-spirited project team that we worked closely with throughout but also the wider body of staff from Alumni Relations to Student Administration and many more – all of whom engaged with our various presentations and recommendations along the way.

As for the findings, these will of course remain those of the University we partnered with. What we can say is that there are some suggested ‘quick wins’ that will make an impact, and there are many medium to longer-term takeaways that echo our vision as an agency that to transform the future of education marketing we need to dare to be different.

We do not doubt that they will now take on the challenge of building upon their financial aid offering armed with the findings and their ambition for progress. The exciting bit of implementing change now begins – and we’re really excited to now see how they dare to be different.

With the project wrapped up, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the meaning behind this project for me, summed up by the two quotes below which show the life-changing impact that the HE sector’s financial support can have: 

Participant 1: “Without the scholarship, I would have crumbled and dropped out, it would have been too much, my course was too intense for the first two years, and I wouldn’t have had the time to get a part-time job”.

Participant 2 “I took a month’s placement… I could take all the opportunities that were on offer, it gave me the chance to get everything out of university that I wanted.”

I am excited to see the outcome of this work and hope that continual review and adjustment of financial aid models in this way across the sector will enable more people to not only access higher education, but make the most of all the amazing opportunities that come with it.

ELLIE WINDLE

Project Manager