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University of Aberdeen: Using Gecko to maximise your Clearing Campaign

University of Aberdeen’s Enquiry & Conversions Manager, Megan McFarlane talks about Clearing Campaigns and why you should be thinking about Clearing now. 

I know what you’re going to say. It’s only March and you’re posting a blog about clearing campaigns! There’s too much to do before we can even start thinking about that! – However as a self-confessed clearing-fanatic it’s NEVER too early to start preparing for the best day of the year. Especially if you want to get your academics involved.

Last year I took on the task of arranging a follow-up call to every clearing offer holder from an academic in their chosen subject area. At the University of Aberdeen we offer over 500 undergraduate degree programmes, and throughout the A level results day we field around 1500 calls, making around 300 offers of admission on the first day alone. In order to make this slick, automated and accurate, I knew we had to use Gecko.

The diagram below shows how we used Gecko to make this happen, ensuring that with the click of a button the details of the offer holder would land in the inbox of the academic who had been trained to make the call, and with a few more clicks we’d send and receive personalised communications to the offer holder and gather rich feedback on the call. The Gecko icons show where the product played a part in the process, removing manual intervention throughout the day and making everyone’s lives a lot easier.

In preparation for the Clearing campaign, I trained the 43 academics who were taking part, showing them how the Gecko forms worked and the workflows we had built on the back of them. After running 15 training sessions to ensure everyone took part, one academic even commented that he felt ‘prepared for battle’ and this kind of military-style training and preparation should be the blue-print for all future academic engagement. – Good to know!

The Clearing campaign was a big success for us, and we have since surveyed our converted students who have told us that the academic call contributed to their decision to choose the University of Aberdeen. A real win!