Engaging student members

How a 70’s ICON reached an audience of Millennials

Viki Bell, our guest blogger, is writing about a particularly successful student campaign fueled by a seventies space-hopper! Like many Professional Institutions, the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) was in the challenging position of attracting and retaining Student Members into full membership of the Institution.  Many (most) of the student members were paid for directly by their university as part of their accredited degree so, the relationship kept the IET at arm’s length.

“More Energy – ON CAMPUS – an innovative campaign was conceived by the IET Academic Account Manager to bring together students, academics and local IET members (local networks).  This was nothing that we weren’t already doing of course but the difference was we decided to name it, brand it and celebrate it – bringing awareness “on campus”.

With accredited degree courses in most of the UK’s universities, we had a wide pool of students to reach out to and the campaign had a few key objectives:

• Raise awareness and understanding of the IET
• Connect students, societies, academics and local employers / members
• Create some buzz and make it fun
• Ensure students were aware of the huge range of benefits available to them from the IET both as students and when they transitioned into full membership upon graduation

The process

Phase one focused entirely on the student audience to increase engagement, awareness and understanding of the IET.  It was also key that we changed the perception of Professional Institutions to show their ongoing relevance in the 21^st Century.  The campaign used the tagline “More Energy” and we chose the 70s icon, the space hopper, as a fun symbol of how far the institute had come and its enduring relevance to students.

We decided the best channel to reach a millennial audience was of course social and we needed something fun, photogenic, easy to get involved with and – most importantly – appealing to an engineering audience. Then we launched a selfie competition with the simple task of “do something innovative, fun and engineering based with a space hopper”.

Student groups who applied to take part with were provided with space hoppers for their teams and we launched a Facebook page for them to post their photos and videos – the judging was to be by their peers based on how many likes each post received.

We were unprepared for the huge rush of content that followed. It went viral when we had to launch the campaign a second time on Webo for our students in China.  We received entries from student groups from universities from all over the world.

We had videos of Pacman with students on space hoppers racing around an engineering lab, we had a Newtons Cradle of hoppers, we even had an almost feature length video of the space hopper’s journey – the students loved it.

The content was entertaining, fun and we broke down the stereotype of “crusty Professional Institutions that were no longer relevant to the engineers of tomorrow”.

I am pleased that we reached students in a completely new way with entities from universities across the world. The Facebook and webo pages saw great traction with likes and shares and the legacy this created is still bearing fruit today. The student groups that formed to make these great posts went on to become more involved. Now the IET have On Campus Groups with more structure that is receiving ongoing funding from the IET volunteer board.

The lesson learned, do your research, conduct your focus groups and from there, develop your value messaging.  Take the time to understand the right channels and develop something that “connects”; none of these students were old enough to remember the space hopper the first time around, but they loved it, interacted and shared it.

Its about finding that sweet spot and listening to your audience, we did through focus groups and used data available but most importantly, put yourself in their shoes and recognise that what may work for a Chartered Member of Fellow may well not appeal to a student. Simple really and when you get it right its great fun! Plans for future? Doing more of what works.

Would you like to know more?

Is communications research something that your association could benefit from? Lots more on segmentation and personalising campaigns for better engagement is covered in our Membership Masterclass.

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