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When it comes to promoting student accommodation properties, it's common to see a heavy emphasis on keeping up with sales targets. While immediate conversions are undeniably important, it's equally vital to invest in building brand awareness over time. By centring your efforts around your brand values, highlighting the people and lifestyle connected to your property, and nurturing your audience, you can establish a formidable and enduring presence in the market. 

Let’s explore the importance of cultivating brand awareness and actionable strategies for running long-term campaigns that can effectively connect with potential residents over a span of 1 to 3 years, perfectly aligning with the duration of a university course. Continue reading to unveil the power of sustained brand development and its potential impact on your student accommodation business.

Understanding the importance of brand awareness

Brand awareness goes beyond merely promoting your...

Disclosing that you have a mental health condition can feel daunting. It’s understandable to wonder who will find out about your condition or whether it will impact how you are treated on your course. Letting UCAS know can help you access the support you need. When you share your mental health condition through UCAS, you have certain rights to privacy and reasonable adjustments which can set you up for success in your studies. 

Getting support early can help you maintain good mental wellbeing and means you get the help you’re entitled to as soon as possible. Sharing your condition is a personal choice, but knowing your rights before you share and the benefits of doing so can help you make an informed decision.

How do I share my mental health condition through UCAS?

The purpose of sharing is to ensure students with mental health difficulties can access the support they are entitled to at university or college. For a mental health condition,...

When you’re speaking to a market like this, there’s no homogeny. It’s impossible to boil them down into neat brackets or customer personas. But one of the few unifying factors that can transcend the vast differences between a young person’s history or experience is mindset. It’s not an exact science by any measure, but as an indicator of the sorts of things you should be taking into account during student recruitment, it can be a powerful way to align your messages to real life pain points – many of which change from one Clearing to the next.

Having spent time reviewing our latest findings on what this year’s offer holders are thinking and feeling, there are three standout changes that we should be talking about:

Confidence – it’s coming back.

Across the board and from every angle, student confidence is increasing.

Almost every single offer holder (97%) is now confident of getting a place at uni, with a huge number (89%) having...

At the University of Cambridge, we have added children of prisoners (students with imprisoned parents) to the list of characteristics we prioritise for widening participation programmes. I am calling for other providers to follow suit and consider being a child of a prisoner as a key piece of contextual information in the application process. 

How many are there in the UK?

There are an estimated 312,000 children of prisoners in the UK. We have no systematic way of identifying them. When a parent is sentenced there is no mechanism for the local authority to be notified if they have children or even accurate records of if a prisoner has children.

What does current research tell us about this group?

Being a child of a prisoner is shown to correlate with compounding of disadvantage. In a...