Abroad101 Advisor Newsletter Summer 2015

Abroad101-reviews-logo-webHappy Summer from Abroad101,

With students overseas or off-campus during the summer months, most study abroad offices are quiet, which gives staff a window to tackle some strategic projects.  We hope one of these projects will be deeper integration with the free tools and services offered by Abroad101.  In this newsletter we’ll provide some insight into the Abroad101 software and ways in which you might use it to advance study abroad on your campus.

Re-entry in a Box:

Before jumping into the nuts & bolts of the system, please take a minute to think about Abroad101 as a method/vehicle to guide student re-entry from their time away.  Some colleges use the Abroad101 system as their official program evaluation platform. 

The Abroad101 survey offers a review of the entire study away experience in ways that encourage the student to think and write reflectively while providing criticism and praise to multiple of aspects of their program.  Students have a chance to take responsibility for their actions, give a sense of who they were before they went and who they think they are now. 

While technically evaluating a program, ultimately the reviewer is offering a testimonial to their personal growth and achievement.  This in turn speaks as much to the success of a program as the star ratings that accompany their review.  Colleges can also add their own questions to the 37-question standard survey if they feel something more specific needs to be included in the evaluation.

Reviews Help Students/Parents Prepare for Study Abroad

Reviews are often used for a variety of reasons, including researching program selection and to help set expectations.  For future students and their families, the reviews from previous students provide good insight as to what to expect and situations to be aware of.  That’s why a number of advisors use Abroad101 reviews in pre-departure orientation exercises and we’ve even heard of some program managers using reviews as part of their arrival orientation (think first postings to new student Facebook groups.) 

With this in mind, adding links from your program webpages to Abroad101 program listings can help your study abroad community better prepare.  Abroad101 gives each program its own web page and we welcome your link to it.  Find the program here and copy the link for your website.

Another option is to link to your university profile that lists pre-approved/recommended programs and all the reviews generated by study abroad alumni from your university.  Every university has a profile on Abroad101 and you have the ability to update and manage it.  Use the search box at the top of any page on Abroad101 to find your university profile.  If you need access to this portal, please contact support@abroad101.com

Abroad101’s widgets allow content from the reviews to be displayed on your website.  We have a University Widget that works in conjunction with your pre-approved list and a Program Widget that creates a badge like graphic for a single program.  No contract or paperwork required, just use the tool, copy the code and install it on your website or as an addition to your own program search in your directory system.

Abroad101 Program Widget

Abroad101 University Widget

Connecting Reviews to your Enrollment or CRM System

We have been pushing to get Abroad101’s process of program evaluation and our set of questions as a standard part of everyone’s study abroad.  The students give us a lot of data that a growing number of institutions are using in their analysis and management of education abroad.   Abroad101 is set up to pass that data to you in several ways:

  1. “Graphs” tool in your account dashboard compares the scores of the individual ratings questions.  You can see how your students do against 24,000 other study abroad reviews. 
  2. “Export to Excel” function that creates a spreadsheet with all of the data collected in each review, including any custom fields that you have added.
  3. “API” is a computer system linkage that allows your system to dynamically pull the review in.  Your programmers use the unique API key and the review serial number to get the review pulled into your systems.

The Power of the Review Serial Number:

The Export and API functions are even more powerful when this data can get tied to the student’s account in your computer system.  Key to this linking is the Abroad101 review serial number.  Each Abroad101 review gets its own serial number and if you enter that serial number after “/reviews/” it will redirect to the full program link.  For a recent review, serial # 29619 can be viewed here http://www.studyabroad101.com/reviews/29619

If the advisor or the student enters the serial number into your student information system, you can forever refer to the review.  We recently posted an article with one creative way the serial number can be utilized in Terra Dotta Software and similar systems.

Review them all – Faculty-led, Exchange and Third-Party!

Abroad101 allows you to manage program evaluations for each type of study abroad program, or them all.  For example, Abroad101 has more than 1,700 foreign universities listed on the site, each with a catch-all listing for your outbound exchange students.  Through Abroad101 your students can review any of the 4,000 third-party programs or if you’d like, we can add your own to the 4,500 faculty-led/university-run programs in the directory.  University-run programs listed on Abroad101 even have the option to be listed as home-students-only which means they will be listed as closed to outside students, yet you get all the advantages of Abroad101’s reporting, data collection and the publishing tool for students to generate insightful, powerful and career-boosting testimonials of their experience abroad.  Since 2007, Abroad101 is Fast. Free. Easy.

It all Starts with an Invitation

To get any of these projects going, you do need reviews and the best way to get reviews is to invite or require your students to submit one.  It has been our experience that students won’t take the time to review a program unless told to do so.  You can encourage them, offer them incentive, insist a published testimonial will be a good jump start to their careers, or tell them it’s required, but tell them something to make these tools work for you.  Direct or link them to the program page on Abroad101 where they will find a “Write a Review” icon or have them start here: http://www.studyabroad101.com/reviews/new

Contact Us:

As the summer progresses we hope you won’t hesitate to contact us with any requests or questions.  We welcome the chance to present our system to you in a web demo or though a telephone conference call, please send those requests to support@abroad101.com.

Thanks for your referrals and support and best wishes for a Happy Summer!

 

Mark Shay

CEO / Abroad101

+1-610-357-4648

mark@abroad101.com

http://www.StudyAbroad101.com

Follow Abroad101 on Social Media:

Facebook | Twitter |  Pinterest | Instagram | Linkedin

 

 

Using Terra Dotta and Abroad101

terra dotta logoAbroad101.com write a reviewAbroad101-reviews-logo-web

 

 

 

 

If you use Terra Dotta software (TDS) to manage your study abroad enrollments, you can still use Abroad101 as your program evaluation tool.

While managing the full lifecycle of applications with Terra Dotta, Abroad 101 adds the ability to oversee the publishing of student reviews, summary reporting, and the ability to compare ratings from your students against those at other institutions.

Interested in learning how to add Abroad101 Reviews to your Terra Dotta software?

Please read the full article here: http://oldblog.studyabroad101.com/using-abroad101-with-terra-dotta-software/

Resiliency as a Post Study Abroad Skill

Two hands stretching spring.Stretched spring. Resistance and opposition metaphor.

Be resilient – Bounce back

With study abroad on the rise and pressure for recent graduates to kick off a dynamic career in their chosen field (and avoid a lengthy stay living at home and working as a barista!), there is much talk in the media and international education circles about what skills are derived from an education abroad experience. We often hear about skills gained in the areas of linguistic ability (of varying degrees), observation and agility. On a recent Cultural Career Cohort discussion with Jamie Gelbtuch, Founder of Cultural Mixology, the concept of “resiliency” came up as an important and valid skill for those who have a study abroad experience. I was intrigued.

According to The Resiliency Center, resiliency can be defined as “Able to recover quickly from misfortune, able to return to original form after being bent, compressed, or stretched out of shape. A human ability to recover quickly from disruptive change or misfortune without being overwhelmed or acting in dysfunctional or harmful ways.”

Jamie mentioned this center to explore resiliency and suggested that we take the quiz, so I did. I scored an 82 (“very resilient”) and upon reading the description, realized how much my experiences abroad have impacted how I approach life and work. Those moments of being uncomfortable, trying to learn new words in a completely new language, getting lost, having my breath taken away by new experiences – they all synthesized into skill building of the highest order.

Here is some of what the quiz informed me about my own resiliency. The interpretation of the score I received includes many characteristics, but these are the unique behaviors that I think most speak to qualities that can be directly related to the power of academic travel. I can easily imagine them being utilized in an interview setting. I took the liberty of providing an overarching heading for each point:

  • Diplomacy: Express feelings honestly. Experience can express anger, love, dislike, appreciation, grief–the entire range of human emotions honestly and openly. Can also choose to suppress their feelings when they believe it would be best to do so.
  • Curious and Risk Taking: Playful, childlike curiosity.Ask lots of questions, want to know how things work. Play with new developments. Enjoy themselves as children do. Have a good time almost anywhere. Wonder about things, experiment, make mistakes, get hurt, laugh. Ask: “What is different now? What if I did this? Who can answer my questions? What is funny about this?”
  • Lifelong Learner and the Ability to Reflect: Constantly learn from experience.Rapidly assimilate new or unexpected experiences and facilitate being changed by them. Ask “What is the lesson here? What early clues did I ignore? The next time that happens I will….”
  • Positive: Expects things to work out well.Deep optimism guided by internal values and standards. High tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Can work without a job description, is a good role model of professionalism. Has a synergistic effect, brings stability to crises and chaos. Ask “How can I interact with this so that things turn out well for all of us?”
  • Solution Oriented: Read others with empathy.See things through the perspectives of others, even antagonists. Win/win/win attitude in conflicts. Ask “What do others think and feel? What is it like to be them? How do they experience me? What is legitimate about what they feel, say, and do?”
  • Always Improving: Gets better and better every decade.Become increasingly life competent, resilient, durable, playful, and free. Spend less time surviving than others and survive major adversities better. Enjoy life more and more.

Imagine your students being able to speak to these skills in an interview instead of sharing the typical language around “deals well with ambiguity” or being “highly adaptable.” Taking the quiz and linking the skills back to specific experiences will help study abroad alumni understand how resilient they are and will certainly provide new language to differentiate themselves from the applicant pool.

Having students write in their personal journals about challenging times upon their return home is also a way to explore resiliency. For example, students charged with putting themselves in new and uncomfortable situations back at home (for example, taking a bus to a part of their town with its own subculture that they have not explored before) is one way to affordably open up the door of discomfort. Getting lost, observing, and engaging appropriately in an unfamiliar environment allow for practice of various resilient qualities. Writing as an intentional journal activity to consider more deep reflection on such an activity helps a student to hone in on articulating these fresh skills further. Journal prompts could include:

  • What did you observe?
  • What feelings surfaced for you as you embarked in this new community?
  • How did this experience remind you of your time abroad?
  • How did you succeed in this situation? How did you fail?
  • What could you have done differently, upon reflection?
  • What resilient qualities did you utilize in this new experience?
  • How did these qualities help you to engage and reflect?

Visual learners can be prompted to take a photo of their domestic sojourn as a jumping off point to illustrate and describe the experience and can use the same set of thoughtful journaling prompts.

For the career and education abroad advisors out there, what ideas do you have to gently adjust your re-entry programming to explore the concept of resiliency? Share your thoughts in the comments below so that we can share ideas!

 

Missy Gluckmann

Melissa Gluckmann, contributor to the Studyabroad101 Blog and founder of Melibee GlobalMissy Gluckmann is the Founder of Melibee Global, which aims to elevate the discussion about education abroad, culture, diversity and the lifelong path to global citizenship by offering trailblazing toolsspeakers and professional development for the global education and travel communities. Raised in New York, Missy has lived abroad three times and traveled to dozens of countries. Missy currently resides in North Carolina and experiences culture shock there on a daily basis! She can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Generation Study Abroad

girl holding generation sab sign

Abroad101 has joined IIE’s Generation Study Abroad with the hopes of doubling the number of American students who go abroad.  The following article comes courtesy of IIE and hopefully brings more students and their parents to believe that study abroad is an essential part of the college experience.

Top 5 Reasons to Study Abroad

We believe that study abroad should be an essential component of a college degree, however according to the Open Doors 2013 Report on International and Educational Exchange less than 10% of the 2.6 million graduates last year studied abroad. It’s time to make a change and give all students what they need to succeed in today’s interconnected world!

  1. Globalization is changing the way the world works. Employers increasingly seek workers who have both cross-cultural skills and cutting-edge technical skills.
  1. Competency in languages other than English is increasingly important. Today’s graduates are just as likely to work with people from Beijing and Bangalore as those from Boston or Boise, making the ability to work across cultures essential to success in all arenas.
  1. Study abroad opens students’ eyes to new ways of thinking, instilling a more informed approach to problem-solving in cross-cultural contexts.
  1. Many of the world’s most influential innovations are originating from the collaboration of cross-cultural teams, often located continents away.
  1. Study abroad has been shown to improve grades, boost confidence, and help with college graduation and retention rates.

#GenerationStudyAbroad | www.generationstudyabroad.org
Powered by the Institute of International Education

Abroad101 Advisors Newsletter Spring 2015

Abroad101-reviews-logo-webGreetings from Abroad101,

As the spring semester wraps up and thoughts turn to program evaluations/reviews, we wanted to reconnect and give you an update on the happenings at Abroad101.

What is Abroad101?

Abroad101 provides many services to many people, but first and foremost, it functions as a study abroad review website. With more than 24,000 reviews published on our website, StudyAbroad101.com, we are the first and largest collection of study abroad program reviews. Reviews are listed by home university, program and their provider, and/or host institution. Programs are listed in directories by city, country, and area of study.

The Abroad101 reviews are in-depth summaries of students’ time abroad; we like to think of them as “re-entry in a box.” In order to get students to think critically and be reflective, the standard evaluation is a 37-question survey that draws students through a series of prompts.  Each review is then published with its own unique web page, which pushes students to be forward thinking and showcase their experience to the world.

Reviews come to Abroad101 through invitations from advisors, providers, and host universities and from students who are eager to publish their story about their time abroad.  Home universities have the option of using Abroad101 as their official program evaluation software that allows some additional customization with extra questions.  This FREE SOFTWARE is cloud-based, requires very little maintenance, and comes to universities at no cost, thanks to the support and sponsorship of program providers and foreign universities looking to recruit students.  Advisors using Abroad101 now have a tool to compile evaluations by program, provider, and city, and to then compare them against a set of other universities that use the same 37-question set.

Reviews Are Social Media:

Once students publish their program evaluations, they become reviews; once these reviews are on Abroad101, they become Social Media. As Social Media, these formatted first hand accounts of experiences abroad become great points of pride for the students as well as great reference material for advisors, future students, and parents.  As social media, reviews have many uses, enabling:

  • universities to promote study abroad to their own students
  • students to research programs and view first hand accounts from their peers
  • parents to set their expectations
  • advisors to keep informed of outcomes and student satisfaction
  • university administrators to gather data.

Students are encouraged to share their finished reviews with their friends, family, and peers.  Students are also prompted to include their review in their Linkedin profiles and to reference their publication in cover letters and grad school applications.  The ability to include photos and writing samples can boost the pride a student takes in creating their review.  Each day, we push and promote at least half a dozen of our student reviews on Twitter and our other social media outlets.  When you see one of your student’s reviews, we hope you will recognize it, “like” it, identify it as a favorite, and re-tweet it.  It’s great content for your followers!

Using Abroad101 at Your University:

For advisors and university administrators, Abroad101 can also be program evaluation software for all or parts of your study abroad enterprise.  In addition to Abroad101’s ability to generate promotional content, there are a great number of tools designed to help you manage the study abroad evaluation process.  Updated daily, the Abroad101 directory of programs is among the best in the field. To use the system, you simply enter the email addresses of recent or returning students and the directory begins working for you.

Abroad101 also has a host of more advanced tools which allow for reviews to be fed back to your website or management systems.  This includes reviews fed to you individually through our API, a widget or in a file (spreadsheet).  Graphs are popular reporting tools that show how your students measure against other universities. We use the 0-5 Star ratings scales for overall satisfaction, academics, program administration, housing, food, social integration, health care, safety, and cost of living.

While most people associate Abroad101 with our comprehensive directory of third-party programs, colleges can also use Abroad101 to manage the evaluations for exchanges and faculty-led programs.  It is fast, free, and easy.  Every university is given a free account. If you don’t have one, or need assistance with your login, please email support@abroad101.com

Time to Send Your Review Invitations!

As students begin returning home from their spring semesters abroad, we encourage you to use this perfect opportunity to send the invitation to submit reviews.  Over 70% of all reviews on Abroad101 come from the invitation of advisors, so please login to your account, use the Invite Tool, and start collecting reviews.  By using our Invite Tool, you will make it easier for your students to start the process of creating reviews.  The system will also send timely reminders to students, excluding students who have already completed a review or who may have been invited by a provider or foreign host university.  It’s never too late to request a review. If you haven’t sent an invitation in a while, or tried using means other than the Abroad101 Invite Tool, please resend using our Invite Tool. It’s as easy as copying and pasting a list of student email addresses.

TECH TIP: If the student email addresses are in a spreadsheet, you can quickly load these into the Invite Tool if they are separated by comma.  A trick to comma-separate easily is to create a new column in the spreadsheet and use the Concatenate function.  =CONCATENATE(A1,”, “)  then “fill down” the column.  Next, copy the column and paste into the Invite Tool’s window on Abroad101.

If you’d rather have us load those addresses, feel free to send us a file with the email addresses of those you’d like to invite. We’ll load them into your account and start the process on your behalf.  Abroad101 is committed to the security and protection of student names and does not re-market or sell this data.

If you prefer to use your own method of communication, please direct students to find their program in the Abroad101 directory and use the “Write a Review” button to start the process.  They can also bypass the search process and start writing here: http://www.StudyAbroad101.com/reviews/new

Study Abroad Rankings Released 

Abroad101 released its fourth annual Study Abroad Rankings in late March. Designed to highlight the thousands of program evaluations and reviews that we collect each year, the rankings are compiled from rating scores in our student reviews. The rankings recognize top study abroad semester programs, top summer programs, and top providers.  Also highlighted are top non-traditional destinations, budget-friendly countries, most livable cities, and top food cities (remember, these are college students!).

To be considered for the rankings, programs must be listed in the Abroad101 directories and must have received a sufficient number of student reviews.  From the 1,424 programs that received reviews, our analyst crunched numbers, set thresholds, and used Bayesian Analysis with a Standard Deviation adjustment to generate the scores that determined the students’ choice winners.  We were quite pleased at the diversity of the programs that were recognized in this process and hope that the publicity this generates draws more students and their families to look at the breadth of what study abroad has to offer.

We’d like to thank this year’s sponsor, StudentUniverse, who offers academic group travel programs in addition to helping students save money on individual flights. They also offer some nice administration tools for program managers, please contact them for a rate quote

See You at NAFSA:

For those headed to NAFSA, we hope you will stop by our booth (#1203) and discuss how you can turn those once static program evaluations into a dynamic user voice that is in such great demand from students and parents alike.  Be sure to pick up this year’s version of our popular T-shirts and let us know a bit more about how we can help you.

We are also available to offer custom web demonstrations of our system for you and your team throughout the year. Please contact support@abroad101.com to schedule a 30 or 60-minute presentation using WebEx.

Happy Spring!

Mark Shay

CEO | Abroad101

+1-610-357-4648  |  mark@abroad101.com

http://www.StudyAbroad101.com

The Study Abroad Advantage reaches 2,000 members!

SAA-2,000-MEMBERS

The Study Abroad Advantage is a Linkedin Group designed to help study abroad alumni bring their experiences to the professional market.  Students who have returned from abroad are encouraged to publish a review of their experience abroad and use this to highlight their ability to communicate, to use social media and their new perspective on the world.  In addition to a place to network with other study abroad alumni and alumni group organizers, the Group features postings on career development and advice on how to apply lessons from abroad to the professional world.  Prospective employers are invited to join the group to do some recruiting of the members and promote their firms.

The group hit a milestone last week with the 2,000th member, a student named Alexis Lupton from Brigham Young University.  We asked her to comment on her study abroad experience and she said “I am always willing to embarrass myself a little for the greater good.”  She went on to add more detail about her study abroad experience.

My study abroad experience was quite different than most, in that my study abroad was a travelling one instead of in just one city. We also did not have a traditional classroom. Our classrooms included: the UN, the U.S Embassy, Pepsico, UNESCO, and every where in between. My experience really taught me a lot about myself. I learned how important it is to step out of your comfort zone and really try new things. I saw the world from many different perspectives, from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral to the slums of Paris. Sometimes plans change unexpectedly and you just have to go with the flow (like our Morocco trip being cancelled and going to Vienna instead). I gained the independence to be able to do things alone even though it may have seemed a little unnerving, and you too, in the end, truly will not be let down. Overall the world is a fascinating place and my study abroad instilled a desire to always continue exploring. 

Alexis Lupton

Alexis Lupton – Student at Brigham Young University

If you’d like to connect with Alexis, you’ll find her profile on Linkedin:  http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexis-lupton/26/107/152 

We invite you to get the study abroad advantage by joining and becoming active in “The Study Abroad Advantage”  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Study-Abroad-Advantage-8159424/about 

Abroad101 Advisors Newsletter February 2015

Abroad101-reviews-logo-web

Thank you for spending a few minutes reading this and catching up with latest news from Abroad101, the first and largest study abroad review website.  It’s been 7 1/2 years since we posted our first review and now, 23,000 reviews later, Abroad101 is as strong as ever continuing to help students, parents and advisors get more out of education abroad.

Crowd-Funding for Student Study Abroad

Crowd-Funding is not just for hi-tech start-ups, students are increasing the use of crowd-funding to pay for their education abroad.  Abroad101 is on the front lines of this hot new trend with our “Abroad101 Student of the Week” program designed to boost individual student efforts to raise money to study abroad.  In this partnership with GoEnnounce, a prospective student is recognized each week and their mission (campaign) is boosted with a small grant and promoted through Abroad101’s wide reaching social network.

To further demonstrate our commitment to help one student at a time, Abroad101 recently doubled our crowd-funding donations as part of our pledge to join Generation Study Abroad.  If you have ambitious, hard-working students who are finding it difficult to raise money for study abroad, we encourage you to get them started on a crowd-funding mission for study abroad, please link to https://www.goennounce.com/l/sa from the financing study abroad portion of your advising website.

If you’d like to read more about Crowd-Funding for Study Abroad, check out our recent article on Noodle.com.  We hope you’ll share it with your students.

Its Time Again to Invite Returning Students to Submit Reviews

Now is a great time to invite students to submit their program evaluations (reviews) through Abroad101.  Fall and January term students have had time to settle down, think about their experience and are just waiting for you to guide them to showcase their time abroad.  Over 70% of the 23,000 reviews on Abroad101 have come from the invitation of advisors, so please login to your account, use the Invite Tool and get those reviews flowing.  If you are using your own outreach, please direct the students to http://www.StudyAbroad101.com/reviews/new to begin their review.

Remember, it’s never too late to ask for a review so if you’ve not sent an invitation in a while, or you tried other means than the Abroad101 Invite Tool, please come back and use the Invite Tool for past participants.  The Invite Tool is smart enough not to send invites to student who have already been invited and won’t send a reminder to those who have already completed a review.

Student Reviews of Exchange Programs

Abroad101’s evaluation tool works great with third-party providers, faculty-led and exchange programs.  Each foreign university has a catch-all “Direct Enrollment & Exchange” listing where students from all over the country will submit reviews of direct enrollment, consortia exchanges or bi-lateral exchange programs, all through this one listing.  It’s a great place for your students to see the benefits of these programs and for students to share those with the world when they return.

The Abroad101 Pre-approved/Recommended Programs Feature

For universities who use a pre-approved programs list or recommend programs to their students, Abroad101 offers an easy way to show those choices to students searching on the site.  When a student logs in to Abroad101, they will see your recommendations highlighted with an approved icon.  They also have the option to view only the pre-approved programs in any directory or only view programs that have been reviewed by students from their home university.  The pre-approved programs are easy to manage using your account dashboard.  If you’d prefer we maintain them for you, simply send us the source of your approved programs list (web links, spreadsheet or other document) and our team will take care of this for you, free of charge!

Use the Abroad101 Program Widget on Your Website

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 review count, overall average review score and a star-ratings graphic in an image designed to look like an award that links back to the reviews.  There is no charge to use this, no forms to complete.  Simply copy the code generated from the Abroad101 Program Widget 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 a great complement to any program listed on your website, including you own faculty-led, exchange or recommended provider program.  The badge also helps students and their parents become more comfortable with a program and the link back to reviews can help set their expectations for that program.  Take a look!

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, that data 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

Call, Meet or Just Say Hi!

As Abroad101’s CEO, I will be attending the upcoming AIEA conference in Washington, DC.  If you’d like to arrange a meeting, please email mark@abroad101.com 

Abroad101 will have a booth in the Exhibit Hall 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 for you or your staff, please don’t hesitate to request an meeting.  We’d be happy to give you 30-45 minute walk-through of the features of the system.  Contact sales@abroad101.com to schedule an appointment.

Thanks again for taking the time to read this and for your interest in Abroad101.  Your suggestions and comments are very much appreciated as is your support.

Regards,

Mark Shay,

CEO, Abroad101

mark@abroad101.com

+1-212-321-0928

Join the Abroad101 Social Media Network on:

FacebookTwitterPinterestInstagram and Linkedin

 

 

Study Abroad Advisors – Tips for better student reviews on Re-entry

Truman students jumping high in the gold coast australia

Your students have successfully completed an experience abroad that is most often described as “Life Changing” and “The Best Four Months of My Life” and you’re now looking to help them take that experience and do more with it. Some have blogged about it, described it on their Facebook page and made friends and family members of their inner circle aware of all the their discoveries. Abroad101 now encourages you, their advisor, to take another step and have them submit a thoughtful program evaluation/review through Abroad101.

Reviews on Abroad101 will help advisors and program providers gain better insight into a student’s experience and give you something to promote and share. Reviews will help future students and parents understand what to expect on the program, the destination and study abroad in general, AND the best reason to submit a review on Abroad101 is to help the student.

Student reviews will be published on the Abroad101 website and each will become its own webpage.  This creates a great place to feature experiences and use those experiences to open doors to a future career.  Employers are looking for people with an international background and a review on Abroad101 is a perfect place to jump-start career searches.  We suggest that you encourage students to think of a review as a writing sample, a chance to showcase who they really are.  A well written review can show future employers and other recruiters that the student can be constructive in their criticism, take responsibility for  outcomes, be reflective and be forward thinking.  Students should state their new worldview and use the review as a place to shine.  If there are a couple pictures of  community involvement or doing good deeds, this helps to really separate them from the pack. To begin a review, visit the StudyAbroad101.com, search for the program and click the “leave a review” button, or start here: http://www.Studyabroad101.com/reviews/new

When the review is complete , we also encourage students to include a link to their review in the education section of their Linkedin profile and then join the Linkedin group called “The StudyAbroad Advantage

As an added bonus when they complete their review, you’ll get a promo code for an additional $20 off their next flight or excursion abroad with StudentUniverse.com.

Advisors download our Student Re-Entry Flyer!

Winter 2014-2014 Advisor Newsletter

Abroad101-reviews-logo-web

Advisors Update from Abroad101 – Winter 2014-15

Greetings from Abroad101,

It’s the first anniversary of the new management team at Abroad101 and we want to sincerely thank you for your confidence and support.  We’d like to take a few minutes of your time and remind you of the various features of Abroad101, and hope that as the semester ends you will find ways to use it in your work in advancing study abroad.

Abroad101 is all about reviews and ratings, so we thought we’d put you to the test.  Please rate yourself on what kind of Abroad101 advisor you are, and don’t worry we’re not going to publish the results; this is just an exercise to help you understand the full power of our systems and the potential opportunities for you.

The What Kind of Abroad101 Advisor Are You Quiz:

1-Star User:

  • Subscribe to Advisors Newsletter
  • Aware of directories, occasionally refer prospective students to validate their choices

 2-Star User (all of the above, plus):

  • Reference Abroad101 reviews in pre-departure orientation sessions, especially for health and safety and travel tips
  • Refer prospective students to peer reviews in info sessions and campus presentations
  • Have an Abroad101 Advisors account and have logged into your dashboard
  • Encourage students to submit reviews to any review website on their return
  • Include Abroad101 postcards in resource library
  • Follow Abroad101 in Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Instagram, etc.)

 3-Star User (all of the above, plus):

  • Updated your university profile on Abroad101 though your Advisors account dashboard
  • Use the Invite Tool to encourage some or all of your returning students to submit reviews on Abroad101
  • Encourage students to join “The Study Abroad Advantage” and promote reviews through student’s Linkedin and social media
  • Link to Abroad101 from your department’s web page
  • Include reference and links to Abroad101 in email newsletters to students and parents
  • Re-tweet and Like any of your university’s activity on Abroad101’s social media

 4-Star User (all of the above, plus):

  • Create pre-approved/recommended programs lists through your advisor account dashboard
  • Read and approve/disapprove reviews
  • Encourage students to submit crowd funding initiatives through GoEnnounce the partner in Abroad101 Student of the Week
  • Use Abroad101 University Widget on your department’s web pages
  • Highlight The Study Abroad Advantage in your department’s collaboration with Career Planning and Placement Services
  • Let faculty-led and summer program administrators know about Abroad101, help them secure Provider accounts on Abroad101

 5-Star User (all of the above, plus):

  • Install Abroad101 Program Widget in your department’s own program pages, including Terra Dotta, Horizons and AbroadOffice directories.
  • Use Invite Tool to require reviews of all students making Abroad101 the official program evaluation tool at your institution
  • Submit faculty-led and “in-house” home student only programs to Abroad101 directories for review
  • Export review reports each semester and build statistical archive of student performance
  • Utilize comparison graphs for university accountability and share Abroad101 generated statistics with university’s senior leadership

 5-Star PLUS User (all of the above, plus):

  • Integrate the Abroad101 API tools into your student information system to collect reviews automatically
  • Publish Abroad101 reviews on your website
  • Use Abroad101 data and case studies in presentations at Academic Conferences and include Abroad101 in those sessions

The above exercise was designed to show you that Abroad101 is more than just a pretty website, it is a platform to capture and share the study abroad experience.  It takes a concept as simple as a review, and turns it into something very powerful by taking advantage of a standard set of questions, a sophisticated publishing system and a set of tools built specifically for advisors.  You will get a lot from Abroad101 if you invest some time and effort into harnessing its great potential.  The system is designed to be Fast – Free – Easy.  The rest is up to you.

Now is the time to Send Review Invites
As students from the fall semester return home, now is the perfect time to send the invitation to submit reviews.  It is our experience that students will submit reviews when invited, but rarely on their own.  Over 70% of all reviews on Abroad101 come from the invitation of advisors, so please login to your account, use the Invite Tool and get those reviews flowing.

Remember, it’s never too late to draw a review so if you’ve not sent an invitation in a while, or you tried other means than the Abroad101 Invite Tool, please come back and use the Invite Tool for summer and even spring of 2014 participants.  The Invite Tool is smart enough not to send invites to student who have already been invited and won’t send a reminder to those who have already completed a review.

Also note that reviews collected in 2014 or the result of an invitation issued from Abroad101 in 2014 will be considered for our annual rankings.  Send your invitations by December 31 and those reviews will automatically be entered into the rankings process.

Improving Review Participation
A few key words will impact participation.  Request/Require is the big one, indicating that you require reviews will likely drive more students to submit reviews.  To help improve the quality of those reviews, your message might also include the idea that submitting a review is good for the student.  Feel free to use or paraphrase this text:

  • Your review will be published on the Abroad101 website and will become its own webpage.  This creates a great place to showcase your experience and use it to open doors to your career.  Employers are looking for people with an international background and your review on Abroad101 is a perfect place to jump-start your career.  We suggest you view the review as a writing sample and a chance to show the real you.  Show future employers and recruiters that you can be constructive in your criticism, take responsibility for your outcomes, be reflective and be forward thinking.  State your new worldview and use the review as your place to shine.

Our experience shows that invites issued directly through our tool have a higher yield rate, perhaps it is the reminders or perhaps it is the link specifically to the submit review form (as opposed to finding the program, then clicking the “review” icon).  When invitations go out from our system, they average 15% completion rates when the request reviews button is selected, much higher if the “require reviews” button is selected.

If using your own means to draw reviews has response rates that are much lower, perhaps you might consider running one set of names through our system and another set through your direct list and do analysis on their conversions; A/B Testing as we like to call this process.  It may also help conversions if, in your external message, you provide a link directly to the page to start submitting a review:
http://www.studyabroad101.com/reviews/new

Reviews Are Social Media:
Like other forms of Social Media, Abroad101 is designed for sharing.  Reviews on Abroad101 are given a unique and permanent web address, provide comment sections and are distributed through a number of outlets.  On Abroad101, reviews are summarized by program, by provider, by home institution and by host institution (if applicable), each with their own fixed web page address.  Reviews are streamed to third parties through electronic feeds, software widgets and our associated community pages on Facebook and Twitter.

As you manage your own marketing and promotion efforts on campus, we hope you will utilize the Abroad101 content as much as possible.  As our “What Kind of Abroad101 Advisor Are You Quiz” highlights, there are ample ways to take data from Abroad101 and filter it to your student audience (web links to your university portal on Abroad101, web links to specific program pages, widgets, RSS feeds and APIs.)  Turning these into Social Media posts of your own is one way to utilize Abroad101 as Social Media content for your office; featuring programs and reviews are others.

Each day Abroad101 pushes several programs and up to half a dozen reviews into our Social Media networks.  The Cool Program of the Week and Student of the Week are two popular items to share with your social media followers.  We also put programs from our advertisers out as Social Media content, we hope that you will share some of these as well.  Reviews with their catchy titles and photos can themselves be fantastic content for your Social Media.  If you aren’t following us, please do.  Then when good material comes across your account, please like it, share it and use it to keep your followers engaged.  Reviews are Social Media and are most beneficial when shared.

Facebook.com/Abroad101
Twitter.com/StudyAbroad101
Pinterest.com/StudyAbroad101
Instagram.com/StudyAbroad101
The Study Abroad Advantage on Linkedin

Check Out Our sessions:
Abroad101’s CEO, Mark Shay presented sessions that outline these topics in further depth.  You can download the session slides from our blog:
ISEP Conference: “Social Media & Web Marketing Tools for Marketing and Advising”
NAFSA Region X/XI: “Why Require Student Reviews”

Working Closer with Abroad101:
We are eager to help you advance study abroad on your campus.  We want to see more students abroad and we want those that go be better informed beforehand and help them turn that experience into a career building stepping stone afterward.  We are delighted to help you do the same and are available to answer any of your questions by email or phone.  We also welcome the opportunity to walk you, and members of your staff though the system with an online demo of the back-end features Abroad101.  Please send an email to support@abroad101.com to take the next step.  Also feel free to use this account to nominate colleagues for our newsletter or offer them a free Advisor account with Abroad101.

And, as always, your comments, questions and feedback are welcome.  Thanks for a great year; the best is yet to come!

Thanks!

Mark Shay
CEO, Abroad101
mark@abroad101.com
+1-212-321-0928