From the Nominator

"The University of East London’s brand pillars focus on careers, community, and location. While our careers messaging is front and center, and our community is well represented, we have often struggled to effectively utilize our extraordinary location in campaigns. Our successful “Be the Change” campaign, initially launched in 2020, was the perfect platform to express the vibrancy, diversity, and history that East London has to offer—especially as we emerged from a global pandemic. 

For the 2022 cycle, we expanded the campaign by utilizing an ambitious, interactive online platform to immerse the user in East London and allow them to explore the region through the eyes of our students. We conducted research that revealed students were feeling disconnected from university life due to the lasting effects of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis. Their online research behavior centered on finding out about student experience and the “In Real Life” (IRL) aspects of the university. Pre-applicants were finding it difficult to imagine university life and had forgotten the excitement attached to moving to and exploring a new city. The “Where Next?” platform has been a huge success. The content exceeded expectations in terms of depth and quality, receiving exceptional feedback from focus groups and stakeholders. We met the brief by creating a unique, immersive site that authentically showcases east London as a diverse and exciting place to live and study. Explore the platform at wherenext.uel.ac.uk."

From the Judges

Nice goals and associated metric tracking. Good to see offline engagement as part of this program. Good benchmarking and research. This was innovative and unique. The impact shown in their numbers proves it did well.