Marketing of ubcarts consists of:
- publicity in the eNewsletter sent regularly to all Arts students
- the creation of a website
- social media campaigns
- publicity by Arts Careers and Co-op and integration in many of their programs
- email marketing to the list of current users to encourage regular use
- communication to department heads, undergraduate chairs, and workshops with individual faculty on integrating ePortfolios in their curriculum and courses
Email and website communication is designed to be less 'corporate' than is typical of communications from the Faculty of Arts. The tone and design are intended to be youthful and authentic so that students recognize that this is a service they will choose and own.
We used student testimonial videos to show student ownership and enthusiasm about their portfolios.
We endeavour to continuously monitor the effectiveness of these marketing tactics, using our logs of site creation and site activity to evaluate their impact.
The current website, designed by the Faculty of Arts Communications unit, looks like this:
Our standup banner (and second website design) looked is below.
We've learned to be flexible and agile on how we communicate to students. A more informal tone for messaging has been important but challenging to some staff used to more official-sounding communications. We have found it difficult to take the time to analyze the impact of our marketing efforts. University staff are not used to using using system activity statistics to measure marketing success.