Finally arrived in Boston for the OACAC BOS10 – Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling Conference. Traffic delays brought me into the city well past midnight, and onto the Northeastern campus at almost 1.30am. I remembered that the last email from the OACAC team had mentioned an iPhone App, since I didn’t have my agenda on me, I quickly downloaded it in the hopes it would actually be, you know, helpful.
Wow, thanks so much to the web development team at Northeaststern for putting the tjme into developing the rockin’ OACAC BOS10 conference app for the iPhone. A simple to use interface allows even the frazzled traveler to stay organized. The interface and nice and simple:
Screenshot - OACAC BOS10 App
The *only* item I would have added would have been a campus map – or maybe that was only needed while searching for the housing dorm at 1.30am after arriving on a much delayed flight.
NAFSA better not have ANY excuses for not having an app available for next year’s conference!
The agenda is easy to access, each session is listed on there, and all the pretty social media icons are easy to access (facebook, twitter, flickr). Be sure to properly tag the conference if you will be tweeting with the #BOS10 hashtag (however, I think lots of people will just use the #OACAC10 hashtag as well).
Screenshot - Sessions
The *only* item I would have added would have been a campus map – or maybe that was only needed while searching for the housing dorm at 1.30am after arriving on that much delayed flight.
NAFSA better not have ANY excuses for not having an app available for next year’s conference!
If you didn’t already download it, what are you waiting for?! See you all in a few hours!
160 pounds of mail from colleges and universities during this student’s search. Wow. While there is certainly a discussion and post in there about the OVERabundance of information thrown at high schools students in the US, what *I* thought about was how many Universities were sending viewbooks overseas? How much are you spending on mailing tons of paper across the world? Often to countries where the mail system is so poor the chances of the student receiving it in a timely manner is completely out of the question (yeah Saudi Arabia, I’m talking to you).
So are you still doing this? Are you still spending money on random direct mail campaigns? Does it work? What is your ROI? I am curious because I would think on average a University should be sending a hundred or less viewbooks to a country like Saudi Arabia each year. The rest of your budget should be spent on using the hundreds of better and more effective methods of connecting with the student on a personal and emotional level. That’s what will connect most of them to your institution and make them interested in attending.
…of course I say all this as an international student who chose her school based on its brochure and chose NOT to go to another based on theirs. Of course that was more than 10 years ago…the recruitment game has changed, and its time to give the students virtual hugs and handshakes, not just more mail.
Finally! We’ve secured our facebook URL, took a little longer than it should have… but that was our fault for not pushing it a little more in our marketing efforts. We’ve concentrated on getting the Al Jamiat facebook fan page going, and we’re happy to be reaching almost 500 fans within just 5 weeks of having it up.
I hope you’re keeping tabs on the fun stuff going on at Al Jamiat, our student traffic continues to grow as our content increases. Let me know if you have any articles or students who would be interested in sending something in!
When Facebook began handing out vanity urls a few months ago, most people saw that there were some potential issues with copyright infringement. Facebook was very insistent that you “choose your username carefully” because you were never ever EVER going to be able to change it! Well, we assume a combination of pranks and frustrated colleges who lost their online IDs to random folks has made Facebook change its policy.
Without much of an announcement, Facebook is now allowing you to change your username…but just one time. Or so they’re saying. So here’s your chance to contact the person who’s sort-of squatting on your name (hey Otterbein, do you hear me???) and request they change their username so you can grab yours.
And if you are completely confused by this post, I think you need to give me a call. If your school is not on Facebook, or if you still don’t have an admissions tab to increase international (and domestic!) student recruitment and engagement, you are missing out folks…I’ll just leave you with this:
In both Lebanon and Tunisia, Facebook is the #1 most visited website in the country.
Of course that was more than 10 years ago…the recruitment game has changed, and its time to give the students virtual hugs and handshakes, not just more mail. 
