UCAS

Student collaboration project

How we worked with UCAS and a hand-picked team of student content creators to provide peer-to-peer support for new students to ease their transition from schools and colleges to university and Degree Apprenticeships.

Brief

Getting ready for university is a big deal. New students have all sorts of questions. But who can they turn to for advice? UCAS asked us to help position them as the trusted source of information and independent advice by working with student content creators to provide the insight new students craved. We set out to create authentic and reassuring content only real students could provide with a TikTok first approach that would also work across Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and the UCAS website.

Solution

We researched, sourced and collaborated with a small team of students from a range of universities who had created their own engaging social content about university life. To reflect different experiences, we picked three undergrads, a degree apprentice and an international student.

We ran briefing workshops, mentored the students, gave feedback and provided them with specific themes relevant to their experience. Our content plans avoided duplication, delivered different insights and made sure we were able to cover key issues, such as making friends, what to pack and the differences between school and uni. To ensure authenticity, all of the creators were given the freedom to create content in their own distinct visual style.

Results

Shared across UCAS’s social platforms, the creator videos achieved an incredible reach and widespread engagement with almost 36,000 collective views on TikTok and nearly 8,800 on YouTube Shorts. This just goes to show the huge appetite for peer-to-peer content that is authentic, trustworthy and talks directly to students.