Prospectuses, prospectuses

It's around this time of year that we publish a new Undergraduate Prospectus, and so it seems a timely opportunity to inform you more about the process of creating our printed prospectuses, as well as why we do it. The following post covers:

• The University of Chester's 2014 Undergraduate Prospectus - available now
• An explanation of the Marketing Department's prospectus timelines
• Why our prospectuses are important marketing materials

The 2014 Undergraduate and 2013 Postgraduate Prospectuses

2014 Undergraduate Prospectus
We are pleased to announce that printed copies of the new 2014 Undergraduate Prospectus are now available. To see up-to-date information about what the University offers to undergraduate students for the 2014-15 academic year, be sure to pick up a copy of the prospectus - available on campus.

Credit where credit is due...
Producing our prospectus is a team effort, and so many thanks go to Marc Kneebone, who did an excellent job with the prospectus design work, and Annabelle Davies and Sarah Markillie, who very helpfully proofread the course pages within the prospectus.

What are the timelines for the University's prospectuses? 
As you may already know, here in the Marketing Department we publish two prospectuses per year. However, what you may not know is when the prospectuses are scheduled to be published, and the annual timelines that we adhere to. So, without further ado, here are the timelines for publishing our Undergraduate Prospectus and Postgraduate Prospectus each year:

Timelines for the Undergraduate and Postgraduate Prospectuses

As you can see, it's a lengthy process! However, this hopefully gives you a good idea of when we produce the prospectuses and when they will be available.

How important are the prospectuses?
It seems that whatever electronic, social media and one-to-one marketing we do, prospective university students will always want a printed prospectus as well. Indeed, in a survey conducted by Youthsite* in 2010-2011, the most popular source for finding out information about universities was found to be the prospectus, closely followed by open days.

In the survey, more than 80% of University of Chester students and more than 81% of students to our direct competitors also said that a useful and appealing prospectus was a 'very' or 'quite' important factor in their decision about which university they chose to apply for. So, our printed prospectuses are evidently an important and integral part of the University's promotional mix, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Feedback
If you have any feedback about our prospectuses, please do get in touch by emailing me at m.smith@chester.ac.uk. All comments are welcome!

Until next time,

Mark

* Thanks to Niall Farrall for supplying the Youthsite statistics.