.png?height=120&name=SB_Logo_Green-Charcoal-300dpi%20(1).png){kind=logo}
Create a curated tour experience
Why do we recommend launching with a curated tour?
Although our best practice is to launch with both a personalized and curated tour, the curated tour option is a great starting point to quickly begin gathering data insights about your visitors. The curated tour option allows institutions to put together a prescribed offering for any potential visitor and create content that can be used in future tours.
Want to start with a tour centered on "Wellness"? You got it. How about a "General Campus Tour"? That's a common use case too.
At the end of the day, you know what makes your institution stand out from the crowd 🦚 The curated tour option allows you to highlight different value points within a specific tour and give visitors a logical route to ensure no vital resources are missed.
- Launch with one focused, curated tour
- Use this tour creation process to understand the relationships within the tour platform
- Post-launch, follow our CVE Playbook for best practices to continue to build on your tour
-
A curated, pre-made tour is focused on one particular topic or geared towards a specific audience of students
-
They can also be centered on specific events (like an Admitted Student Event)
Converse University's curated tours outlined in green
1. Identify your core team.
- Who is leading the information collection?
- Who is putting the information into the tour content system?
2. Decide on which curated tour to launch with.
-
What tour topics will cast a wide net with your prospective students?
-
What materials already exist that can be made into a tour?
-
What tours are already being conducted for particular groups of students?
-
Where are common areas of attrition or challenges that you can provide resources for?
-
What demographic of students do you struggle to connect with?
Ideas of curated tours:
- General Campus Tour
- Spanish General Campus Tour
-
Student audiences:
-
Transfer Tour
-
Commuter Tour
-
International Student Tour
-
Part-Time Student Tour
-
Veterans Tour
-
-
Life on Campus Tour
-
Specific Colleges (ex: College of Engineering)
-
Wellness Tour
3. Remember what students want to learn about:
Curated Tour Idea Spotlight: Transfer Tours
Thinking about building a tour centered on transfer students? Take a look at these key insights from Niche's report on the Effectiveness of Recruiting Travel and Campus Visits in 2023:
- "Transfer students, unsurprisingly, needed fewer official campus visits but valued flexibility."
- "They were much less likely to visit campus through admissions and may not need as much of the “what” and “why” but more of the “how:” how to navigate credit transfer, how to work through financial aid, how to go through orientation and registration as a transfer student. Virtual events were their preferred method of research."
4. Identify where to crowd-source ideas from
5. Let the brainstorming begin! Use our planning sheet to guide you through your conversations. CVE curated tour planning sheet can be found here and is ready for your team to duplicate!
- Student ambassadors
- Assign specific tasks such as: filming student testimonials with their phones, picking the emojis to go with each content heading, asking them about key talking points that should be used in the tour, sending images for locations
- Social media
- Ask current and potential students what they want to learn about on campus using social media. Think: polls on your story, a post requesting student submissions to win a prize, posts in current and future student Facebook groups
- Department leads or offices
- Based on the specific tour topic selected, are there individuals or offices that can assist in crowd-sourcing information and content for you?
Use our CVE Playbook for a list of post-launch projects to make the most of your partnership.
- 🗣 Get the word out about your tour
- 📈 Collect and analyze impactful data
- 💡Solicit ideas for more curated tours from key stakeholders
- ✨ Expand into a personalized tour