The University College of Applied Sciences and Technology had a constant flow of new students applying for admission to newly established departments, yet as they started expanding their operations and opening up new departments, they needed to increase their admission rate.

They tried various types of strategies over the years, but the growth rate weren't as expected. They want a game changer.

For a start, the whole solution took us less than 16 actual work hours. Me, as a former student in this university 12 years before, knew a lot about them. But never got to the actual background process of admission, the inner works of managerial, administrative and financial procedures.

I started with the basics, defining the scope of work, assessing the current status and analyzing the case.

I realized that some parts of the process is a sign up form for the student to apply to. This sign up form needed optimization and a lot of UX work. I decided to move this internal tool to a 3rd party app (Airtable.com) and start receiving substitutions through a carefully crafted sign up form. Simple, direct & elegant. A mobile-first form will help us land more conversion for Ads.

We wanted to have a deeper understanding of the task in hand. I asked to assemble a committee with involved team members from the University to help build a Customer Journey Map (Student Journey), to reflect improvements on the overall process of admission, touching every part of the experience.

There were lots of regulations, prohibitions (Do's and Don'ts) along the way, usually, any university consists of departments, a procedure for decision making, especially when it comes to Public Relations, and hence, digital marketing & social media.

So we started by doing a two full-day test on the new submission form, which result into amazing results, so amazing we continued the test and it became the ongoing process!

We know that change can't happen in one day, so we started improving the parts we could improve right now. There were lots of lost info and data points. We had to figure out the CAC (Cost of Acquisition), and we wanted to find the actual Ad Spending, which in a huge organization like this isn't just a click away.

Omani-channel solutions always sound good, but we didn't have the time or resources to do it now, or we will risk the losing improvement in a semester or more. Other universities already started accepting admissions, the window is closing.

The solution consisted of the following:

Airtable: as our data management & daily operations,

Zapier as a method of integration with other platforms.

Meta Ads: To run the Facebook & Instagram Ads (obviously).

Bitly: Creating shortened links to make sure our Airtable Sign up form isn't malfunctioning, we closely monitored progress as the Ad started to make sure there's no down time or errors in accessing the sign up form.

One Dedicated Graphic Designer to help us bring a new perspective on how we communicate visually with students.

Chat Bot: On Facebook Messenger integrated into the University's official facebook channel to help increase engagement, raise awareness provide the students with content to help them choose the right faculty.

One workshop with everybody in the departments related to this project, where we presented the tested solution and made sure everyone in the committee and related departments do their specific task.

We broke some records, nation-wide. Our micro team managed to hit ROI positive in the first day (measured against work hours (labor), allocated ad spend, cost of tools & logistics).

I realized that if we spent more time perfecting the process, we will lose the initiative and end up with lousy output. And if we waited for an omnichannel solution to take place (and actually I will get paid even more), this would've taken the win from us. The positive reputation the college gained introducing out-of-the-box and 3rd party solutions to the admission process (nothing in-house), actually positioned them among the top-performing universities nationally. And the process (the newness of it) echoed in my city a lot, which helped me introduce LCNC solutions to other clients.

The actual results were:

CAC became 78% less.

Ad Spent lowered to the half.

ROI 4.1

2 days testing.

14 days ongoing campaign.

Overcrowded room (sounds bad, but it's actually good).