Tips for hosting a Covid-safe university open day

When it comes to providing an immersive experience for your prospective students, nothing hits the mark quite like an in-person event. Your visitors will have the chance to experience your campus first-hand and even engage with staff members and existing students across the campus.  

However, given the nature of the year we’ve had, you’ll still need to make sure that you’ve got the necessary safety measures in place to ensure your visitors feel safe. This will involve implementing the necessary social distancing measures, splitting your tour groups into smaller numbers and making sure that you’ve got frequent hand sanitising stations in place throughout your campus. A great way to manage your numbers is to have your guests register their attendance before the event. This way you can allocate arrival times and establish a check-in process.  

Once your guests have arrived, they’ll want to feel reassured that you are taking the active steps to protect their safety. An effective way to do this is to create some video messages or animations to broadcast on various screens throughout your campus to show your prospects that their safety is your priority. We produced something just like this just a few months ago for the University of Huddersfield, which you can see here.  

Thanks to incredible advancements in technology, hosting a virtual event is now a very feasible option for any university. And when it comes to your prospective students, a virtual open day is a great opportunity to engage those who may be nervous about attending an in-person event soon after lockdown, or may simply not have the time or means to visit your campus. 

Providing an engaging and immersive experience for your attendees is, however, trickier with a virtual event. So you’ll need to make sure that you’ve got access to the right equipment, as well as assessing the level of technical expertise you have internally and outsourcing whatever is required to create a top-class online open day.  

Many universities are now offering 360° tours on their websites, giving prospects a highly engaging way to interact with a university campus online. This is something we created for Lancaster University’s Science and Technology Faculty to enable their audience to view the facilities from any location, without the need to visit the campus. You can view the tours for yourself here.  

If a virtual open day feels like the right path for you this year, take a look at our blog on planning a successful and engaging virtual event for some helpful tips. 

Whether you’re planning for a physical or virtual open day, don’t forget to follow up with your attendees afterwards. Make sure that access to your event is gated so that prospects will need to give their contact details in exchange for being able to attend, which helps you with controlling your numbers as well as ensuring you have their contact details to keep them updated. 

This data is incredibly valuable, so make sure you are using it to your full advantage both before and after the open day has taken place. This will involve implementing an engaging email marketing sequence to provide them with useful information prior to the event, and then to nurture their interest afterwards by providing helpful details on the application process. 

If you're still deciding on which course of action to take when it comes to hosting university open days this summer, we’ve summarised the pros and cons of each below: 

Physical open days
Pros

• More immersive and engaging
• Gives prospects a chance to see your campus first-hand
• Opportunity to engage with staff/students face to face

Cons

• Difficulties around enforcing social distancing
• Prospective students and parents could be nervous about coming
• More difficult for international students to attend

Virtual open days
Pros

• Cheaper and more time efficient for prospects to attend
• No need for Covid safety measures
• More accessible for a wide audience

Cons

• Potential for technical issues
• Not as personal an experience
• Outsourcing the right level of tech expertise can be costly

If you’re looking for some help planning or hosting a Covid-safe university open day this year, get in touch with a member of our team and we’ll be happy to help.