Setting our priorities beyond 2025
I’ve been looking at future work in recent months while the team have focused on rolling out our new service. We still have a lot of improvements to bring to the prospective student online experience, and we want student recruitment marketing and admissions colleagues to help us prioritise what we do next.
How we decide what to do
An early job for me when building our team was to establish a governance structure which could help us establish what was most important to focus on and why. I am fortunate to be supported by a group that meets roughly quarterly to help direct what we work on in the coming months.
The Prospective Student Web Steering Group consists of student recruitment and admissions leaders from all three colleges, plus senior managers from the professional services most important to the prospective student experience.
In recent years, while we’ve worked on the project to deliver a new website to replace the degree finders, I’ve not needed their direction on priorities quite so much, but as the new service rollout concludes later in the year this is changing.
Help inform our priorities
As we look towards what we’ll focus on in 2026, I’d like the student recruitment marketing and admissions community to help inform the priorities that will ultimately be signed off by our steering group.
I need you to spare 5 to 10 minutes to tell us what’s most important to you, in terms of improving the prospective student experience.
Building a backlog
A backlog is just another name for a to-do list, with supplementary information to inform what happens when.
I’ve been building one this year, ready for the point when we’d retired the degree finders, migrated to our new service and were ready to move on to new things. The items on the list have come from several sources:
- Consulting with colleagues in student recruitment, people running services for prospective students and of course our team.
- Keeping note of the things we aspired to do but knew we couldn’t if we were to stay focused on the most important things needed to deliver a replacement for the degree finders on schedule.
- Conducting user research with prospective students to surface unmet student needs that we could potentially address.
Take part in our survey
If you want to have a say in what we do next, please spare 5 to 10 minutes to complete the survey.
It’s a simple, one-question approach where you pick up to 5 items from the list that you think are most important for us to focus on. If you feel we’ve missed something really important, there’s space for you to add your own suggestion in too.
Complete the prioritisation survey (Edinburgh staff login required)
The survey will close on Monday 25 August.
What we will do with the results
First of all we’ll share them with you. I’ll write another blog so our student recruitment community can see how their views stand against those of their peers.
I will also share the results back with our Steering Group. In particular, I’ll share filtered versions of the results so representatives for our three colleagues can understand what’s seen as most important in their area. This will help them to focus their feedback.
The colleagues who represent the interests of the colleges are:
- Rupert Lezemore (Director of Student Recruitment and Admissions, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences)
- Tessa Rundell (Acting Head of Recruitment and Admissions, College of Science and Engineering )
- Lynne Cooper (Head of Admissions and Recruitment, College of Medicine and Vet Medicine)
Our prioritisation happens roughly quarterly, so we will continue to use the insight this survey gives us on into 2026 and 2027 and report on progress against these goals in this blog.
