Competence and competition from the South

The University of Tromsø really decided to put effort in to getting students from Southern Norway to apply to UiT this spring and designed a big campaign with some pretty awesome prizes.

Kjetil Undseth was responsible for the campaign at the University of Tromsø. (Bildet tatt av: Vilja Savolainen)

The University invests in recruiting new students every year, but this time they went all out. Utropia sat down with Kjetil Undseth, the project manager for the Snu Norge – campaign at UiT, to find out how a University creates a recruiting campaign and why it’s necessary in the first place.

Creating a campaign

If you walked around campus this spring, you probably saw the posters about turning Norway upside down. The University of Tromsø and University Colleges in Harstad and Finnmark worked together and with the help of an advertising agency, created a campaign to raise attention to Northern Norway as a possible place to study. The University provided the background information and the agency came up with a concept for a campaign which was mainly executed online.

High school graduates are a difficult target group and big prizes – one year’s student loan and rent – were one way of getting people’s attention. In order to reach the young people, the campaign had to go where they were : the social media. This is the first year such a big part of the University’s recruiting campaign has been in the social media, but at the same time they wanted to keep the message serious.

-          We know that young people are very serious when it comes to their choice for the future. We’re trying to give them serious reasons for why they should come to us, says Undseth.

The hard part of marketing

The main part of the campaign was a game on Facebook, which almost 6000 people played. In addition to that there were ads in Google, Spotify, different blogs and some magazines, tells Undseth. Recruiting is of course essential to a university, but why does a Northern university need students from the South? Undseth says that having students from the South will make the University a better place to study. Southern students bring competence and competition, which are always good. But is it really necessary to give away a year’s free student loan and rent just to get new students?

According to Undseth, the University did some research on other competitions and their prizes, and decided that it needed to either go big or go home.

-          We had to be sure that at least the prize money was sufficient.

Developing the game and advertising the campaign takes a lot of money, so the prizes had to be interesting enough to get people to actually play the game.

-          That’s the hard part of marketing; you never know what’s sufficient, adds Undseth.

It’s up for debate whether it’s necessary for the University to spend money on recruiting students from the South or having competitions with big prizes, but one thing is for sure: at least one student must be very happy with the campaign and its prizes.