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Meeting Students ‘where they are at’: The Art of Insightful Outreach

Interested in educational research? Ever wondered what makes student outreach truly impactful? We went on a mission to find out & evaluate our clients’ past successes 🌟 Below I delve into the art of ‘Insightful Outreach’ and how to resonate with students on a deeper level….

We have worked with many clients over the years who have seen their access and outreach activities & programmes leave a lasting impression on students, whilst deeply engaging them. We’ve recently carried out an exercise to capture all we have seen over the years to encapsulate the very essence of this. We have recognised recurrent patterns over time and what they all had in common was delivering ‘Insightful Outreach’ as a strategic approach to activity/framework development.

I have recently been mulling over the idea of what it means to deliver ‘Insightful Outreach’ programmes/activities….💭

As a universal starting point, delivering programmes that resonate was achieved by understanding not only the broader characteristics of their target student groups, but also the sub-groups. That’s where the real magic lies… in my humble opinion! Then taking those insights and using them to develop out programmes/initiatives and messaging, based on those very characteristics, not an homogenous student group.

There is a very real power in addressing student’s needs in the moment, and meeting them where they are at in their educational journey, without them having to explicitly tell you. The commercialisation and infiltration of big data has meant that students actually come to expect a certain level of personalisation in their everyday interactions with external services both on and offline. Personalisation cuts through, leaving a mark, whilst deeply engaging students – as they feel understood, heard and seen.

The Student Outcomes Blueprint

There were also other key factors that fed into their success, which we observed along the way… so we decided to capture and share them in a pretty graph above 🤩

*When I say ‘insightful’ I mean all manner of data – qualitative and quantitative!

Thoughts, words, opinions on this welcome! 😄

…until next time.

Sarah

PS – If you’re interested in learning skills to adopt when working on research projects with young people, you can find our Lightning Skills Series on our YouTube channel, where we share lots of tips, tricks and more!