Every November, SACO organises a series of education fairs in different parts of Sweden. This year, however, they were all replaced with a virtual fair. Using SACO’s mobile app, visitors could download material, watch films and pre-recorded seminars, and chat with Uppsala University’s study counsellors and student ambassadors at a virtual stand, with numerous channels for different areas of interest.
“This is a completely new way of working, which is very exciting and creative but takes an enormous amount of time,” says Anna Sonnevi, communications officer at the Communications Division’s Student Recruitment unit.
Extensive preparations
Some of the challenges for an exhibitor at a virtual fair are to prepare relevant content with questions and answers, and produce pre-recorded webinars and films for viewing at the virtual stand. You also have to take the technical solutions that the fair offers visitors into account. One strong recommendation is to enlist the help of technical support and always have support at hand.
“Thirty ambassadors were working from home, along with study counsellors and student services representatives, and we feel very satisfied that we managed to pull off this virtual education fair, which had more than 29,000 visitors.”
Did the visitors’ questions and feedback differ in any way from previous years, or were the communications more or less the same as usual?
“Current upper secondary school students belong to the Google generation and are used to searching for information themselves, but the questions certainly remain the same: What grades do I need to get in? What are the admission requirements? What’s it like being a student in Uppsala?
The big difference was simply that rather than asking questions at an in-person meeting, the visitors were using digital solutions that, all in all, resulted in a very successful event.