Is there a secret to great student engagement? Nottingham Trent University in England is finding one key to success is peer-to-peer communication. NTU’s Content Collective initiative won a 2022 gold Circle of Excellence Award in the category of Student Engagement.

By recruiting a team of students to serve as social media content creators, “we have put the authentic student voice at the heart of our content with huge increases in engagement,” says Emily Gill, Social Media Manager at NTU. “The Content Collective really shows our community what we’re about, with stories, tips, and advice from people like them.”

Launched in 2021, the Content Collective is an intentionally diverse group of 38 students who receive training, support, and guidance from the NTU social media team. Students in the collective generate content on topics ranging from mental health and student-friendly meals to city life and sustainability. They focus on TikTok and YouTube but repurpose content across channels to drive community growth. Additionally, they pop up to help with online Q&As and forums. Content creators are paid hourly, and NTU budgets around £7,000 annually for the project.

The student-created content has generated some of the university’s highest click-through rates. NTU’s TikTok now has more than 9,000 followers (including prospective students) and has seen a 20% increase in engagement year on year.

“I love having the opportunity to represent my university with pride, [and] in particular being given the creative freedom to produce the student content I needed when I first started my university journey,” says Gaia Cawley, a psychology and criminology major.

Rakshith Bangalore, a mechanical engineering student and member of the collective, says the student group creating content for their peers are gaining “employer-ready skills such as social media, content creation, and video editing, as well as being confident in front of a camera.”