College is a big deal nowadays and many institutions of higher education have made tremendous strides in developing the level of housing necessary to accommodate their growing student populations.
However, building student housing can be expensive, and if students don’t live on campus that can detract from a university’s community atmosphere. With a lot of off-campus accommodations available to most students, finding ways to keep everyone on-campus is incredibly important.
Here are some ways you can promote on-campus housing at your institution.
Informational Booklets
It’s common for universities or similar institutions to send out informational packets or pamphlets to potential, intended or current students.
These are usually read by their intended audiences as they contain vital information about available services, costs, and directions. It would be incredibly advantageous to use this opportunity to promote on-campus housing options as people are going to be paying attention to college-related material.
These promotions should highlight many of the benefits of living on-campus, such as proximity to classes, convenient nearby facilities, safety features, university activities, and financial aid availability.
Leverage Your Social Media Presence
We live in the internet age and young people, which form the majority of the student population, are especially receptive to what occurs on the internet; social media sites in particular.
As part of your institution’s social media presence and campaigning, you should make a substantial effort to highlight the many upsides of living on-campus. This can include informational text or pictures, but releasing well-edited videos is an incredibly potent advertising strategy.
Videos are especially useful in certain realms of social media which focus on quick, simple, but effective snapshots. Social media apps such as Snapchat or TikTok are useful for getting the word out about what your basic on-campus offerings are.
For more discerning individuals looking to get a more in-depth understanding of a college’s housing situation, Facebook is a pretty good option since it has the formatting capability to display a long series of information seamlessly.
In pretty much all instances, it’s a good idea to develop meaningful connections with as many popular personalities, groups, pages, and financial partners as possible to maximize your advertising efforts.
In terms of when you should consider promotional activities, that’s going to depend heavily on context, but generally speaking, you should look at when people are most likely to start looking into university enrollment and at least a couple of months before a new academic year starts.
Promote A Giveaway
Everyone likes free stuff and you could definitely get people to get interested in on-campus housing by offering anyone the chance at something lucrative if they live there.
What exactly you would be offering is completely up to you, such as some sort of fantastic university perk or maybe a cash prize, although you’re likely to get the most number of people interested by offering a chance at cost-free housing for a semester or even an entire academic year.
It might seem a little costly at first, but creating a giveaway opportunity is likely to net you quite a few students who would have otherwise lived off-campus.
Create A Flag Campaign
Flag campaigning is a pretty standard, but nonetheless effective, that way you can promote your campus housing options.
Installing feather flags near key locations, such as next to buildings, at popular cross-sections, and along popular roadways is a fairly effective way to let both students and visitors to a university know about what kinds of housing are available.
Due to limited space, it’s a good idea to highlight key features available to those looking into housing options in large text, with maybe a picture or two to show off what rooms look like. Since it’s going to be short, to the point, and highly visual, flag campaigning is definitely going to stick out.
Getting Students to Opt for On-Campus Housing
College can be an important and transformative experience for a lot of people, so there’s some pretty substantial interest in making it as smooth as possible.
Institutions of higher learning have a vested interest and an obligation to get their students to access to the best possible resources to make it an effective experience, which is why a focus on-campus housing is so important.
