The UK IT Industry awards 2021: Times Higher Education (THE)

Nominated in both the IT Project Team of the Year and Best User Engagement Project of the Year categories for the 2021 UK IT Industry Awards, Times Higher Education (THE) brought a unique solution for students to the competition.

THE has over 30 million unique visitors to its website every year, around half of which are prospective students from around the world researching their study options. Despite historically not offering specific content aimed at students and their parents, they still come to THE looking for a trusted voice to make sense of the vast amount of information available.

Although there are many websites, portals and providers that offer a whole suite of services to students, we couldn’t find anyone that offered these services in one place. So, it was a no-brainer to provide a specific and focused solution for this audience. We received board approval on 30 June 2020 to proceed to build a brand new B2C business called THE Student, created during COVID in less than six months with a new team.

Tell us about your awards entry. What problems were you looking to solve; what were your KPIs?

THE Student provides one place where students can consume unrivalled editorially-led content about studying abroad aimed at them, learn about and compare institutions globally using our world-renowned data products, and opt in to connect with organisations that can provide them with outstanding products and services that will help them choose and make the most out of their study abroad experience. This in turn generates a captive audience willing and able to interact with organisations, opening the door for Times Higher Education Student to also become a powerful media partner to those looking to connect with this audience.

In the higher education sector’s eco-system, THE is creating a spine in support and providing lots of connection points for its partners and customers. It is a new digital platform that provides the higher education community with opportunities to engage with prospective international students in one place and acts as a powerful referral engine, connecting prospective students and parents to the universities, data and services they need to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives - who to trust with their education.

The Key KPIs were to achieve the following commercial priorities by building an MVP in six months (the team technically only had three months):

1. THE Student brand design - significantly differentiable from the main THE logo, but with enough similarities to be recognisable (partners want to be associated with the THE brand).
2. New homepage, navigation and page templates, featuring the required about of branding advertising space and CTAs for partners.
3. Updated registration process that collects key mandatory fields and allows students to ‘opt in’ to the services from our eight referral partners, with partners receiving an API feed of the information as soon as the student has opted in.
4. Soft ‘Guardian-style’ paywalls on all Rankings and THE Student pages outlining the benefits of registering for free.
5. Clear segmentation so student pages are easily discoverable by students coming to the main THE Homepage.
6. The storage of student registrations so that targeted / sponsored / THE emails can be sent to them.
7. CTAs on relevant university pages (on the Rankings pages) for our partners, in addition to the ‘Get Free Study Advice’ buttons currently there.
8. Reorientation of editorial content around advising prospective international students looking to study in the four main destination countries - the UK, US, Australia and Canada. This includes 20+ new variants of the ‘Best in’ pages focused on these four countries.

What user feedback have you had?

The best feedback is from how the student audience responded to this new service:

• Nearly 400,000 new student registrations between January and December 2021, compared to 58,339 in the whole of 2020 - an increase of 572%.
• Average daily traffic of over 20,000 users, with over 7.5 million since launch.
• Three virtual student recruitment Festivals for the UK, US and Canada generating over 25,000 student registrations.
• 600,000+ student enquiries generated for our partners to date, growing by 55k a month.
• A growing panel of 150,000+ prospective international students from around the world, from which we provide industry-leading research on our behalf and on behalf of our clients, and ensure the voice of the student is heard.

Our customers also include the board, the leadership team, internal stakeholders and external partners. Here are some quotes from our partners:

Meti Basiri, Co-Founder and CMO at ApplyBoard:

‘We’re delighted to be partnering with THE. ApplyBoard was created to make life easier for international students, simplifying their journey into higher education. In THE, we find a partner who shares that vision wholeheartedly, a partner that is also one of the most influential brands in global HE with a unique, rich dataset that’s trusted by millions of international students every year. Together we can support more undergraduates and postgraduates than ever, taking the pain out of everything from finding the right university and course to obtaining visas.’

Edwin van Rest, CEO and Co-founder of Studyportals:

‘THE’s university rankings are the most globally prominent for our students to judge institutional reputation - overall, across an increasing number of subjects and on their impact on sustainability. Users of the world’s best rankings deserve access to the world’s largest platform of detailed course information, fees, requirements, student experiences and our award winning ‘best fit’ algorithm to make informed choices. For our university partners, Studyportals is increasingly a hub to craft and track the full digital student journey - recruit the right students, for the right reasons - all of them will automatically benefit from prime exposure on THE properties beyond our other search, display and social network partners.’

Nik Higgins, Chief Growth Officer at TAP:

‘Partnering with Times Higher Education is absolutely wonderful news for The Ambassador Platform. We're so lucky to be working with another organisation that is, very genuinely, trying to do something new and exciting for institutions and for students.’

Andy Coxall, Chief Executive, Common Purpose Student Experiences:

‘We’re thrilled to partner with THE on what we believe is a hugely important initiative to give students critical employability skills for the 21st Century. We know this next generation are set to face unique, complex challenges - both at work and within society. That’s why, at Common Purpose, we’re devoted to developing the cross-boundary leadership skills students will need to bring different people together in order to solve common problems. This highly energising and experiential new programme will enable students to gain insight from inspiring leaders across the world and develop the skills they need to thrive in their life, studies and future careers.’

Yannis Ioannidis, Senior Manager, Global Strategic Partnerships at TikTok commented:

‘When we announced our #LearnOnTikTok initiative in June, we promised to begin seeding a whole new ecosystem of educational short-form content. Today, we extend this commitment to education through a partnership with a brand that commands one of the most expansive and international networks of academic and student audiences, Times Higher Education.’

How has the project delivered value within the business?

In its first four months since MVP launch on 18 December 2020, on top of the responses from our student audience mentioned above, the project has generated the following outcomes:

• signed 14 partnerships with companies including ApplyBoard, SIUK, The Ambassador Platform, Shorelight, AECC Global, BMI, Study Portals, Common Purpose, Sensations English, Virtual Internships and INTO
• delivered virtual student webinars with panels of industry leaders and sponsored by well-known brands including Amazon, TikTok and HSBC, covering topics as diverse as student accommodation, US vaccination rollout, women in higher education leadership and clearing - to name a few
• secured media deals with universities and educational institutions around the world to deliver activity such as events, on and off-site advertising and sponsored content to attract the right audiences for their brands

What wider benefit could your product / project have?

THE has ambitions to build a new digital foundation and platform that drives all of its products. This product / project was designed and implemented with this in mind as the start of its transformation journey. As the CTO, I created a tech strategy that is beyond just building the student MVP, and includes laying the digital foundation across the entire THE digital estate and products (migrating existing and building new). This strategy drives and underpins the implementation of THE’s four other products.

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On top of this, to truly drive value for the organisation and all products, we started establishing a number of new horizontal common capabilities: authentication service, authorisation service, user management system, content page API, etc. These were big ticket items that required lots of resources and time to build them - and it was a small team of just five or six people that achieved all of the above in three months!

It will enable the organisation to better serve its higher education community of both professionals and students, and will help them in their daily lives to get informed and better decisions that will also have implications for their impact on society.

What motivated you to enter for an award?

When I was with one of my previous company, my team won the IT Project Team of the Year award in 2013 and it was fantastic for the entire team to realise not only that they are great at what they do, that they now get recognised for what they have achieved within the organisation and their peers, but more importantly there are lessons learnt (both good and bad) that might benefit others.

As an IT leader in this profession for a long time, it is true that we don’t celebrate successes enough. On a daily basis, the teams continue to solve new problems in new ways and we don’t get to know much about this; yet, occasionally when there is a problem and the team does very well to address them, you only remember those incidents. So, it is important to celebrate successes, whether big or small.

Of course, nothing gets bigger than being recognised as the best in your industry, it is like the Oscars for the IT Industry.

What did being a finalist mean to you?

Being in this position before, I reminded my colleagues and team that it is a big deal to be a finalist, because it means that you are in the top 10 in the country for what you have achieved - and that, in itself, should be celebrated. Who gets a chance to say this? And also, if you have been through the process of submission and being judged, you know how tough it is, and the competition from your industry peers who are big names and brands.

How was the awards evening?

I have been attending the awards since 2013, first as a winner and in subsequent years as a judge - and I thoroughly enjoy the whole experience, from having to make the effort to dress up in suit and bow tie, to the food, the entertainment - and, most importantly, meeting up with old friends and making new ones.

On this occasion, I was not able to make it because I was attending an event in Scotland for COP26. I told my team as well my business partners who attended the dinner to enjoy themselves and that they were already winners, so anything else is a bonus. We were therefore extremely delighted to receive the Highly Commended award for the IT Project Team of the Year.

What are you working on for next year?

Last year was our MVP / start-up year, so lots more to do. But more importantly, this project also paved the way for me and my team to use it as a first mover in building a new digital foundation for THE and this will continue, such as taking all the learnings and initial foundation to rebuild our flagship website, and designing a better user experience to explore and discover the range of products and solutions that THE offers.

As a past winner, judge and an IT leader in this profession for the last 3 decades, I would urge everyone to find opportunities to celebrate successes. This is the biggest stage in the UK to do so.