Abroad101 Provider Newsletter – Early Summer 2015

Abroad101-reviews-logo-webLike many who exhibited at NAFSA, we are energized by the show of support and growth in awareness that comes from the Exhibit Hall spotlight.  We handed out nearly 1,000 T-Shirts and the message of Free Program Evaluation Software rang through to many study abroad advisors and administrators in attendance.  In case you missed the latest news, here’s an update on Abroad101 for those of you who offer education abroad programs to American students.

New Subject of Study Portals

In May we released subject area portals, dedicated directories of study abroad programs in over 400 academic disciplines.  Students and Advisors can now easily find academic focused programs in subjects ranging from Accounting to Zoology.  The subject areas are organized using the US Department of Education’s CIP codes (Classification for Instructional Programming), a first for the study abroad field.  The CIP taxonomy has very specific fields of study rolled up into more general categories.  As a program provider, we encourage you to update your program listings and add the relevant fields of study.  We also suggest you pick carefully as students in this area are looking for specific courses, and in many cases looking to fulfill a course requirement.  Please note these should refer to the subject area taught, not the students’ academic majors.

Please Update/Edit Your Free Listings

Your account dashboard also lets you edit the contents of your program listings on Abroad101. We encourage you to use the friendly format to update your listings this summer and add subjects as well as engaging content.  If you need to have program titles changed, locations edited, or host universities added, our quality control process requires this be made from our end.  Our crew is ready and happy to help you with these; please send those details by email to support@abroad101.com

Add Scholarships to Your Listings

Another item in the providers account dashboard is the “Scholarships Available” tool that allows you to add scholarships to your listings.  You’ll find this on the left side of your dashboard, under “Provider.”  You can list multiple scholarships and link these directly to the scholarships page on your website.  The scholarships you enter will appear under the “Financial Aid” tab of the matching program listing(s) on Abroad101.  Please note that the Scholarships Available option is not part of the account dashboard for foreign universities.  Foreign universities should include mention of any scholarship options in the general description of their listing.

Review Your Reports:

As part of your account dashboard, on the lower left side, you will find a few report options.  “Graphs” tallies the star ratings submitted by students in their reviews and allows for some comparison of your program against all others, as well as by country. These categories include: overall, academics, program administration, housing, food, social integration, heath care, safety and cost of living. The resulting pie charts can be copied and pasted into your management reports and provide some added insight into how students perceive your programs.

Bring Advisors on Board

Advisors are a key component in Abroad101’s marketing and are responsible for bringing the vast majority of reviews to Abroad101.  As a provider, you can help this process by generating student reviews at the colleges in which you have a strong following. Here are a couple of ways to see how a university performs for you:

  • University Name in Review Summary: For Provider organizations, find your program summary listing all your programs.  Under the tab that says “Study Abroad Reviews” you will see a summary of all your reviews.  There you will also see the home university of the reviewer identified.  For Foreign Universities, find your “Direct Enrollment and Exchange” listing and you’ll see the university name in the review summaries. 
  • University Pages on Abroad101: Each home university also has a summary page.  Use the search box at the top right of the site to find universities where you think you should be well represented.
  • Pre-Approvals List: In your account dashboard (log into Abroad101), at the bottom left is a report called “University Approvals” which will indicate which universities using Abroad101 have selected which of your programs in their pre-approved programs list.

Once you know how well your key universities engage with Abroad101, please contact us about engaging them further.  Together we can bring Abroad101 into their process and help them use the tools to help draw more reviews, more visibility, and ultimately more students to study abroad.

Utilize the Program Widget

For programs that look especially appealing on Abroad101’s website, we recommend that you use the Abroad101 program widget to share your results. The Program Widget creates a badge-like graphic for your website that includes a star-rating icon and a link to the reviews.  There is no cost to use the Program Widget and it is easy to install as a photo.  Add the widget it to your website and directories and encourage staff to add it to their blog sites.  Hopefully you’ll get your partner universities to install it on their websites too!  Create your widget by adding your program name and the width of the resulting graphic, click here to start  Then follow the instructions to add it to the websites of your choice.  There’s no limit to the number of sites/pages that can display that code, so add this to your list of summer projects!

Targeted Advertising

As you have hopefully seen, the strength of Abroad101 is in its detail.  Most site visitors are in the middle of their selection process, and use the wealth of content to research and set the expectations of the students and their families that support them. We estimate that 20-25% of our traffic comes from parents who often use the search term “reviews” along with program/provider/city names.  Reaching students, parents, and advisors deeper in the process means inquiries that come from Abroad101 are much more likely to enroll.  Advertising on Abroad101 can influence the final decision, as the impressions that come through in the research phase of program selection may well be the ones that trigger the decision to apply.  Remember: when you see “App” in the inquiry type, this means a student has checked the box that says “I want to apply to this program.”  This may not only be a strong lead, but may also be a conversion of a student you already know.

As you enter into your new budgets and marketing plans for the upcoming year, think of using Abroad101 by program.  If you have programs that need a boost, consider advertising them above the others.  Small and special focus programs, for example, often do well on Abroad101. With the new subject portals included at no added cost, you have even more reasons to include more of Abroad101 in your advertising budget.  We can customize a campaign to meet any budget; please download our ad guide and contact sales@abroad101.com to get started.

Alumni Job Board and Abroad101’s career initiatives

Abroad101 enthusiastically supports efforts to raise the number of students studying abroad and we believe strongly that a well-written, thoughtful, and insightful review can also help students jump-start their career.  Many of you are aware of the Linkedin Group we manage called The Study Abroad Advantage. If you haven’t done so yet, please direct your alumni and alumni relations contacts to this group.  As another step to help ensure that study abroad will be an advantage for students during their career search, we created the first job board dedicated to study abroad alumni. In addition to a range of jobs that may interest these students, the Study Abroad Alumni Job Board highlights positions that REQUIRE a study abroad experience.  We hope that when you are looking to hire, you’ll post your positions on the site: http://Jobs.StudyAbroad101.com

Happy Summer!

 

Mark Shay / CEO

Abroad101

+1-610-357-4648

mark@abroad101.com

http://www.StudyAbroad101.com

 

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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

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