{"id":319,"date":"2019-11-13T10:28:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T10:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/marketing\/?p=319"},"modified":"2019-11-13T10:50:56","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T10:50:56","slug":"friends-in-high-places-getting-to-know-department-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/2019\/11\/13\/friends-in-high-places-getting-to-know-department-heads\/","title":{"rendered":"Friends in high places: Getting to know department heads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>During our series of offer holder communications last year, we saw some of our best engagement with an email containing a written message from the Head of Department. This year, we decided to take it one step further and record video messages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hello from your friendly neighbourhood academic <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p> We decided to go for a \u2018native\u2019 style for these communications. We wanted the videos to feel like they could be a personal message that the Heads had recorded themselves: 30 seconds to a minute of kind words to spur on students who were probably in the midst of a stressful exam season. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter is-resized\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media.giphy.com\/media\/3ohhwIO1gO5gIgq4fu\/giphy.gif?resize=355%2C305&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"355\" height=\"305\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p> Anyone who\u2019s ever tried to find 30 minutes with a Head of Department will know that these senior academics are very busy people. It was tricky to find even just half an hour with all of them but, with some careful planning and quite a lot of dashing across campus, we managed to do it. It took a couple of months of weekly filming days to get them all in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The finished product <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>We ended up with just under 30 short and sweet videos that included a quick hello, a flavour of what to expect in the first term and well wishes for exams. For some departments it made more sense to film someone other than the Head, for example when their role involves more contact with undergraduate students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"A welcome from Mariana Lopez, Programme Leader for Film and Television Production\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/n5XbER0TXuw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p> Some departments felt that a video just wasn\u2019t right for them \u2013 and we said that was fine because we\u2019d already thought of a Plan B. Students holding offers to study <a href=\"https:\/\/www.york.ac.uk\/study\/undergraduate\/applying\/exceptional\/jennifer-potts-biology\/\">Biology<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.york.ac.uk\/study\/undergraduate\/applying\/exceptional\/rachel-vipond-spsw\/\">Social Policy<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.york.ac.uk\/study\/undergraduate\/applying\/exceptional\/katie-graham-spsw\/\">Social Work<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.york.ac.uk\/study\/undergraduate\/applying\/exceptional\/paul-johnson-sociology\/\">Sociology<\/a> received links to profiles of academic staff. During the interviews for these profiles, we learned some pretty cool things about our academics and our departments, and we\u2019ve ended up with some pretty neat content that we\u2019re now using in other places.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"513\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/marketing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/Paul-Johnson-profile-snapshot-1024x513.png?resize=1024%2C513&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-321\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/Paul-Johnson-profile-snapshot.png?resize=1024%2C513&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/Paul-Johnson-profile-snapshot.png?resize=300%2C150&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/Paul-Johnson-profile-snapshot.png?resize=768%2C385&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/Paul-Johnson-profile-snapshot.png?w=1222&amp;ssl=1 1222w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><figcaption>The academic profiles gave us the chance to get to know some of our colleagues, and to showcase <a href=\"https:\/\/www.york.ac.uk\/study\/undergraduate\/applying\/exceptional\/paul-johnson-sociology\/\">their amazing stories<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p> After we\u2019d edited all of the videos and uploaded them to YouTube, we put them into lovely emails sent out to all offer holders for each subject. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">It was all worth it in the end <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking at the analytics for all of the emails sent, we saw that, compared to last year\u2019s Welcome from the Head message, we\u2019d managed to more than double our click-through rate.<br>\u00a0<br>The good news doesn\u2019t stop there. YouTube told us that most students were watching all the way through and students viewing the academic profiles stuck around on the pages for nearly five minutes (this could mean a few things but we\u2019ve decided to take it to mean that they read every single word with awe and admiration).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We\u2019re so pleased with how it turned out that we\u2019re hoping the recreate the success with more special messages from academics in next year\u2019s communications. Fingers crossed it\u2019ll be just a tiny bit easier this time around!&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During our series of offer holder communications last year, we saw some of our best engagement with an email containing a written message from the Head of Department. This year, we decided to take it one step further and record video messages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[35,11,10],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-conversion","tag-departments","tag-student-recruitment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/Friends-in-high-places-feature.jpg?fit=825%2C510&ssl=1","uoy_author":{"name":"Emily Robinson","bio":"","image":{"src":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=200&d=mm&r=g","width":200,"height":200,"alt":""}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}