Ourstudentportfolios.com invites new art & design schools to use our self-managed student portfolio tool School Portfolio Connect(tm) to serve their self-managed student portfolios into the ourstudentportfolios.com admissions site www.ourstudentportfolios.com/admissions.aspx and generate leads and lift inquiry conversion via additional school level www.ourstudentportfolios.com/ai/admissions and campus level admissions sites www.ourstudentportfolios.com/ai/vancouver.

Lift your career services student placement rates via the employer side of www.ourstudentportfolios.com/employers.aspx and a school level http://ai.ourstudentportfolios.com site and campus level site http://ai.ourstudentportfolios.com/fortlauderdale. Market to new employers, and invite current employers to register to use their Employer Tools including ability to ask students questions about availability, post and manage their job postings and so much more.

Why not also take advantage of our School Portfolio Connect(tm) webservice and allow all the portfolio content to serve in real-time back into your .edu site to generate low touch content.

If you would like to set up access for your school via a test or jump right in please contact studentROI.com today.

Career Services professionals realize that as their schools grow so must their network of employer contacts interested in hiring their grads.

Where a school’s admissions department generally has the marketing dollars to promote student growth, the career services department is rarely afforded the same privileges when growing their student placement rate.

Here are some ways you can cost-effectively insure your placement rate is well positioned for growth - and that you are taking advantage of all the benefits the online space has to offer:

·         Teach your students to interact with you online via as many real world online communication tools as possible – this will make them more adept at using these tools when looking for work on their own, as well as make them more

          desirable to employers when hired.

·         Take advantage of your school site to promote your schools’ career services department not only to prospective students as an advantage to enrolment, but to your current students and alumni. Give them a reason to interact with you

          online by providing tools such as job postings boards, or a mail system where you can distribute job postings to individuals or entire program/s.

·         Use your career services site to also distribute career services event announcements and allow your students/alumni to register online.

·         Distribute material/learning via a webinar or WebEX where students and alumni register and sign-in to watch the presentation and interact with you as a group.

·          Create and manage a program specific online resource library for your students as part of your career services site. Research and add leading online publications, blogs, forums, associations, job boards specific to the industries your

           programs are aligned with.  If this page is optimized for the engines correctly using strong SEO if will also attract new students to your site. Link exchanges with outside sites, is a great way to build traffic to yours.

·         Encouraging your students to promote themselves will go a long way to helping raise placement. Empowering them with a self-managed online portfolio tool, which allows them to upload their images, reels, projects, resumes, bios

          and so much more, allows them to simply use a link to promote themselves to employers. Our School Portfolio Connect(tm) career services tool does just that.

·          By empowering your students with an online portfolio - and having them use this link to virally show their work on social networking sites, job boards, and on their resumes - they attract employers to your site to view work coming out

           of all of your programs. What they might not need in one area of their organizations today, they might need tomorrow – or they can pass your school site onto a colleague responsible for additional hiring inside the company.

·         Establish a job posting tool, which allow your department as well as employers to post and manage their job postings to individual students, entire programs, or all students at the school.

·         Secure an email marketing/list management firm to professionally promote your employer events via email to your current employer file. Remember to always include a viral component on each piece of email creative to allow for viral

          pass-along from recipient to colleague.  Drive all registrations back into your career services site via an online form. Your provider should be able to provide all of your database and data mirroring/list management/segmentation/list

          rental/online registration/opt-in and opt-out processes/creative development and optimization/tracking and analysis. StudentROI’s data and email marketing arm emailbank.ca does this currently for many of your educational clients.

·         Providing the option to opt-out is not only law – it is also a great way to clean your lists of those who are generally not interested in hearing from you or have gone out of business – you will then save time and money in the future

          trying to contact them via phone or direct mail.

·         Business to business opt-in email list rental for acquiring new employer leads is a cost effective media channel. You can use the same creative you send to your current employer file promoting your events to this file as well. All who

          register now become part of your new and improved employer file.  

·         Consider a career services site independent of, but one that works in tandem with, your school site. The School Portfolio Connect(tm) platform offers self managed portfolio tools, job posting tools, mail platform tools, as well as a

          career services site to serve an d market all of these tools within via our ourstudentportfolios.com site.

·         It is one thing to teach your students to engage with you online, another to supply them the tools which will empower them and have them act virally for you. The final piece of the puzzle is traffic generation. What is your strategy for

         generating traffic for the site/s. One way is to engage a strong SEO company that knows the education vertical.  When we are contracted by one of our clients to handle their search engine optimization (SEO) we make sure we start

         with their objectives: target industries; graduate programs; calls to action inside their marketing plans i.e. employer events, site registration, etc. We track and analyze traffic to determine site conversion. If more traffic is needed we

         create a PPC campaign now knowing the amount of clicks we need to produce to generate a lead.

·         Pay per click (PPC) marketing is also a cost effective media channel and one that allows for deep reporting via Google Adwords. PPC allows you to monitor the keywords that have the highest ROI and adjust your campaigns to your

          strength. You also have the ability to turn traffic on/off or up/down depending on your needs. Another great advantage is you can set up and tailor your campaigns by program or area of interest.

To discuss how studentROI can help you promote your students online to employers looking to hire them via a single or multi channel approach please contact us today.

Schools spend a great deal of time and money communicating program details to prospective students. Every school does it. Most feel that if a prospective student can’t find a suitable program from their program list that maybe it is as simple as their school not being a good fit and they move on to the next.

In reality, students spend a great deal of time trying to figure out not only if their interests match the program, but if they will be concentrating on these interests inside the program and after graduation. We all know it is easy to say ‘I want to be a designer, an architect, an animator, go to business school to get my MBA, or cooking school to become a chef...’.

Admissions departments hear it every day from those interviewing for possible application to the school ‘...what exactly is expected of me if I apply to this program and what will I be able to do when I complete it?’.

Allowing prospective students to step into the shoes of current students and alumni by having them search on and view portfolios of their student work including their projects, bios, reels, images – then having the ability to reach out to them and ask them questions about their interests and experiences goes a long way to helping new students decide on the program that is right for them.

If you engage prospective students, and help them in their decision making process they will appreciate your help and open up to you and trust your opinion.

Showing your student work via an online portfolio system to prospective students allows them to see the extent to which you promote your students to employers – and are genuinely interested in not only showing them how to proactively market themselves, but expect them to enter the workforce in their area of study immediately upon graduation.

Online student portfolios are a strong indicator that your school stands behind the work that is coming out of your programs. They also promote the fact that you are proud of your faculty and students, and want everyone to know it – your school has nothing to hide.

When students and alumni utilize their self-managed online portfolios to upload their work they act as ambassadors to your school and prospective students see their pride. They also act as viral marketing tools when they add links to their portfolios on their favourite social networking sites, and job search sites – the subsequent traffic can come in the form of new prospects or employers interested in knowing about your grads.

New lead generation occurs when the unique content of your online portfolios is optimized for the search engine to find. Once potential students land on your online portfolios from a search engine search they have the ability to move to your request information page at anytime.

Lead conversion is also a major benefit of online student portfolios. Prospective students can be shown online portfolios as part of the interview process. They can also be used to show the buying committee who were unable to attend the interview as well as be used for phone interviews for those out state.

Employers can use online student portfolios to find the students they are interested in interviewing for their next position.

The content of online student portfolios also adds to the stickiness of your school’s website.

To discuss how studentROI can help your school benefit from online student portfolios using our School Portfolio Connect(tm) platform please contact us today.

Out of all the students who pass through your school doors how many actually help your school get noticed by prospective students? How many promote your school to employers looking to hire grads?

Most schools have no idea – but all would agree they would like their students and grads to do more of both.

Today, the online world offers your students a plethora of social networking applications and sites to offer their opinions and promote their work. Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Technorati to name a few,  all offer the ability for your students to get their opinions out to those searching on this specific information. Facebook, Myspace, IM’s, tweets, blogs, etc all allow your students to let their friends and colleagues know what they are doing at any given second.

Not too long ago, kids talked on cell phones, now they simply text.

There has never been a better time to empower your students to promote their work and your school online. They enjoy doing it, and you have instant buy-in.

To start you will need to give them access to a self-managed student portfolio tool such as School Portfolio Connect(tm).  The tool allows your students to self-manage their online portfolios and upload their projects, images, reels, bios, resumes, and so much more. Once they have, you the administrator have the ability to turn on/off an array of management tools, which allow you to be hands on, or hands off entirely.

The portfolios are then served into admissions and/or employer models on ourstudentportfolios.com – which allow the portfolios to go to work for your school instantly. The portfolios can also be served in real-time into your school site.

Each student portfolio has its own unique URL key so they can post it on their resume, blogs, social network sites, etc and thus open the doors to those interested in viewing their work and your school.

Empowering your students with an online portfolio tool allows them to work as ambassadors promoting your school in the following ways:

·         When your students include their portfolio URL to show examples of their work to their friends via their social network sites they drive this traffic into your school site to not only view their work, but to possibly continue on to view your

          programs and request information from the school.

·         When visitors view your student portfolios they come away with the strong impression that your school goes above and beyond to deliver cutting edge tools to their students and is genuinely interested in teaching them how to market

          their skills in today’s economy – they also understand you stand behind the work coming out of your programs and have nothing to hide.

·         The more student portfolios you have online, the more content you have out on the internet – content is king. A strong SEO strategy for your student portfolios will position the content as unique and make it easily found when

          searching on schools in your area offering your programs and areas of study.

·         Your student portfolios are edited by school administrators during the approval process if you choose to turn this feature on. The more positive online opinion and feedback you have on your school the less opportunity a negative

          opinion by a student who was dissatisfied will resonate on the search engines.

·         When your students post their portfolio URL on sites other than your own, you are link building back to your site which is a strong SEO tactic and will increase your search engine ranking and site traffic.

·         The simple effort by a student to create their online portfolio gives the automatic impression to those viewing it they are proud of their work and their school.

·         When posting their portfolio URL to job boards and on their resume they attract employers to your site to view not only their work but others as well.

To discuss how studentROI can help your school benefit from online student portfolios using our School Portfolio Connect(tm) platform please contact us today.

Having worked with school presidents, directors of admissions, and directors of career services to develop our own School Portfolio Connect(tm) self-managed student portfolio tool we know that for every school objective there is a solution.

To decide on the self-managed student portfolio tool that is right for your school needs you first need to understand there are 3 separate models on the market:

1.  Self-managed online portfolios used for assessment. Students sign-in to upload their work on an internal school server. Faculty then sign-in to grade the work, thereby allowing for better management, tracking, and less paperwork.

If you plan on using your student portfolio tool for internal assessment only this is the solution for you.

We like the Foliotek.com solution as an assessment tool.

2.   Self-managed online portfolios used by students as a repository of their work.

If you want to offer your students a basic solution to allow them to gather their work in an online format to include on their resume URL this solution is right for you.

Unless you endeavour to build a custom application yourself, your portfolios will not be served on any site other than the site you engage.

We like the coroflot.com solution as a basic third party portfolio tool

3.   Self-managed online portfolios used by schools, which allow students to build their online portfolios. Once approved by an administrator they are searchable by multiple custom criteria and served into your choice of site models designed to meet your school’s business objectives: 

custom school and campus admissions site models that generate leads and lift conversion 
custom school and campus career services site models for employers to help lift your student placement rate or 
serve the search component and portfolios directly into your school site to generate site content.

If you like to have a level of control for your portfolios this solution is for you – it allows for your choice of administrative management you wish to undertake. Approval prior to pushing the portfolios live can be turned on/off as can multiple other management features designed around a school's needs in mind – be as involved as you like, or completely hands-free.

Your portfolios are served into sites that are targeted to either prospective students or employers and can be turned on/off at any time depending on your needs. The ability to also serve the search component and portfolios into your own school site seamlessly is also a nice feature to help generate content.fforts as landing pages. They also come complete with online registration mapped to your school’s inquiry or CRM platforms.

The ourstudentportfolios.com sites have the advantage of an educational portal approach thereby attracting visitors that might not find you otherwise, combined with custom school and campus level functionality built in to sites 100% your own so can be used for your school marketing e

We like the School Portfolio Connect(tm) solution not just because we built it, but because it really is the only solution on the market that does what it does.– Part 2

To discuss how studentROI can help you discover the online student portfolio platform that is right for you please contact us today.