Title	THE OPEN DIARIES
Brand	THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
Product/Service	HIGHER EDUCATION
Category	A07. Not-for-profit / Charity / Governemt
Entrant	RAPP London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	RAPP London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement	RAPP London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	RAPP London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Tom Kennedy	RAPP	Art Director
Suni Khan	RAPP	Account Director
Joe Hoppard	RAPP	Head of Content Strategy
Stephanie Hottlet	RAPP	Head of Production
Jess Geary	RAPP	Senior Channel Strategist
Simon Berry	RAPP	Account Director

Background

Economic prosperity is going into reverse but higher education can be a lifeline, opening the door to a whole new future. But the people it could make the biggest difference to, don’t realise it’s a possibility. They might be short on resources, whether that’s time, money, childcare or confidence. They think higher education is for other people. Introducing: The Open Diaries. Ten real stories, told over five short documentaries, each one tackling a different barrier to entry. Students just like our audience showed exactly what studying with the OU is like, showing how their lives have been transformed.

Describe the strategy

We were dealing with an audience who had been alienated by education and saw universities as inaccessible and unrelatable. We decided to leverage social proof: to pull focus away from the brand, stop trumpeting our own claims, and amplify those voices of the people proving our claims through lived experience – our students, people just like our prospect audience, who have achieved great things thanks to The OU. Full-length hero films were published in Facebook, Instagram and episodically on an SEO focused campaign landing page on the OU website. We created a range of smaller, snackable social pieces emphasising different characters and features of their OU experience, as well as harder-working response orientated social ads. A bespoke, waterfall retargeting model was created so we could serve different versions of our content based on the percentage watched before, to reach as many people as possible for as long as possible.

Describe the execution

We knew that to get the most powerful stories we needed a powerful storyteller. We added Mark Henderson to our team, who’d shown his talent at getting the best out of people on Channel 4’s First Dates. After filming, we analysed the detail behind the students’ stories – every motivation and obstacle, from earning potential to the places they prefer to study. We even analysed the specific ways our audience used language, so we could reflect it in the way the stories were told. Taking inspiration from this analysis, we transformed the footage into an emotionally resonant series told over five short documentaries on Facebook and Instagram, and episodically on an SEO-focused campaign landing page on the OU website. We created a range of smaller, snackable social pieces emphasising different characters and features of their OU experience, as well as harder-working response orientated social ads.

List the results

As a direct result of our campaign course enquiries went up 300% year on year. A whopping 34% of these converted into paying students, ready to commit serious time, money and effort to an OU course after watching our films. That’s 500 paying students, resulting in £925,000 revenue from this first round of acquisition. Projected revenue over the full length of these students’ tenure equals £9,000,000 for The Open University (average tenure spend of £18K per student). At a campaign cost of £167K that’s an incredible £54 return for every £1 spent! Our strategic approach has proved to be hugely engaging. Directly targeting our prospect audience, in the first ten weeks we had: • 17,374,874 impressions • 245,099 completed views • 24,818 reactions • an engagement rate 4.5 times higher than the Facebook average And so far, over 245,000 people watching the full five-minute video episodes.