Abroad101 Providers Newsletter Winter 2015

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Abroad101 Providers Newsletter Winter 2015

As J-Term ends and spring semester begins, our best wishes to you and your organization through this busy season.  While many of you are now focusing on summer and fall recruitment, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to review your presence on Abroad101 and explore ways to incorporate the many tools we offer into your marketing plans.

Check and Update your Free Listings:

Free Listings are the core of Abroad101’s directories, one per program.  Listings provide an opportunity to showcase a program with photos, descriptions, videos; listings are also the home for student reviews.  Each organization is provided an account to edit and manage their listings to help recruit future students as well as to help interested students and parents better understand a program and set their expectations. 

We encourage you to visit Abroad101 and try the search box at the top of the page to find your program(s) and see what the students, parents and academic advisors see.  Type your organization name in the search box and see the provider list that summarizes all the Free Listings for your organization; then login and edit your listings.  Contact service@abroad101.com with any questions about your Free Listings.

Use the Abroad101 Program Widget:

The Abroad101 Program Widget creates a badge-like graphic for use on your web site.  Using as much space as a small picture, the badge shows a tally of reviews, overall review score and a star-ratings graphic in an image designed to look like an award that also links back to the reviews.  There is no charge to use this, no forms to complete.  Pick one or pick all of your programs.  Simply copy the code generated from the widget maker and enter it on your web page where you might otherwise have a photo.  The code is dynamic and your badge will constantly refresh and stay current.

The badge is also great for your university partner websites.  If they have a webpage about your program then help them get the badge on their website to give you a competitive edge.  Click here for the Abroad101 Program Widget

More Benefits of Reviews:

In any directory on Abroad101, Free Listings are displayed based on a formula that favors recent reviews.  Since people come to Abroad101 for the reviews, the programs with the most reviews move toward the top.  Most reviewed and best-rated programs will be seen more often and have the greatest chance to generate new student inquiries for you.  As a reminder, those inquiries go to you, and only you, and are not repurposed in any way.

Programs with reviews are also more popular with Internet search engines, another benefit of drawing reviews through Abroad101.  Microsoft’s Bing has recently included Abroad101 star rating icons in their search results, so you not only get SEO with added reviews, you get an eye catching graphic on your Bing listing.  Here’s a star-rated search example

Still using Paper Evaluations?

A number of organizations use paper-based evaluations, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting those reviews online.  We understand that paper data collection generates high participation results, so if you’re not yet ready to jump to a completely online system, we suggest you consider a hybrid, two part process where paper is done first, then scanned and loaded into a database and that database integrated with the Abroad101 system.  The Abroad101 system would then send the student a confirmation and prompt them to complete some additional questions, add photos and then publish the review on Abroad101 to share their experience with the world.  We estimate the cost (with modest volume) to be $5 per paper review for the conversion.  If you are interested in engineering a 2-step process for your evaluations (paper or online), please contact mark@abroad101.com

Include Abroad101 in your Advertising Budgets:

In addition to your Free Listings, advertising on Abroad101 is designed to raise the visibility to your programs and increase the volume of student inquiries you receive.  Advertising comes in the form of Featured Listings in our city and country directories plus advanced search.  Cost is $500/year/program with volume discounts for multiple program purchases.

There are two run-of-site display ad options, banners on the city and country portals, plus our high visibility Global Rotation Ads, a group of six featured programs that appear at the top right of just about every page on the site.  We have lots of creative ways to mix-and-match ad to build an effective campaign to meet any budget. 

In addition to the added exposure that Featured Listings and Display Advertising offer, advertisers on Abroad101 get the following extras:

  • Ability to receive leads and reviews through automated API downloads directly into your CRM/database
  • Receive extra student leads, hand-matched from the general student inquiries Abroad101 receives.
  • Twitter posts of student review highlights that include a student quote, the home university and provider Twitter address, a link back to the review and relevant hash tags where possible
  • Facebook posts of the best of the Twitter stream, plus periodic boosted posts of Featured Listings
  • General favor for advertisers in professional references, student, advisor and media communication

For more details on advertising on Abroad101, please contact Sales@Abroad101.com or call +1-212-321-0928

Nominate an Advisor

In addition to Free Listings or providers, Abroad101 offers free accounts for universities to manage and control the review process. Abroad101 also produces an Advisors Newsletter for university staff and we are always looking to expand our advisor contact list.  If you have advisors who might be interested in using Abroad101, please direct them to us. They can also subscribe to our Advisors Newsletter 

Call, Meet or Just Say Hi!

As Abroad101’s CEO, I will be attending the upcoming AIEA conference in Washington.  Abroad101 will not have a booth in the exhibit hall, so if you’d like to arrange a meeting, please email mark@abroad101.com  I will also be attending re-entry conferences in Boston and Philadelphia in February.

Abroad101 will have a booth at the Forum conference in March.  If you are attending, please stop by and say hello.

If you have any questions about Abroad101 or would like a web demo of the system, please don’t hesitate to contact me to schedule an appointment, or just give me a call at +1-212-321-0928

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for your interest in Abroad101.

Regards,

Mark Shay, CEO

Abroad101

mark@abroad101.com

+1-212-321-0928

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