Insurance tech
Lead generation for university partners
Team
Product designer
Product manager
3 x developers
1 x data engineer
My roles
UI design
UX design
User research
Industry
Edtech
Business
Overview
BridgeU is a university guidance platform for international schools and students. We help students make smarter, more informed decisions about their higher education and career pathways, while providing tools for their advisors to help facilitate this.
Our primary objective is to increase BridgeU’s value for current university partners and help attract new ones by allowing students to opt in to direct marketing emails from selected universities.
Problem
Universities want leads that will result in enrolments
Students want better access and richer information about universities
Meet the market: Our competitors already have similar solutions
Goals
Increase university customer retention
Deliver and launch a new university customer service to enhance the value proposition
Provide students with a way to get more information about universities
Outcome
Impact
Presented to the leadership team and successfully achieved buy-in
Got 10 high-value partners to enroll in a beta rollout of the feature
Positive feedback from university partners and our partnership team once the feature was live
Process
Research
Assumptions to validate
Our university partners prioritise the volume of leads
University partners will want to capture a lot of information from students, more than we currently have
We are entering a very competitive space
Student are happy to share their details in return for direct information/communication with universities
Students can legally give consent to share their data with our partners
Competitor analysis
We quickly noticed we are behind the market, as the majority of our competitors already have lead generation capabilities. Including feedback from our partnership team, we investigated these and mapped our assumptions and ideas of what prospective partners would want from this type of service.
Example of ways our competitors allow students to directly connect with universities
User research
I was responsible for setting up and facilitating a research plan. This consisted of mapping any assumptions and formulating key questions we would want to ask. This helps to focus our research to have the most impact and tie our questions and feedback back to our user and business goals. The next step was to create a discussion guide to help facilitate the interviews.
Example discussion guide
Facilitating and synthesis
I worked closely with the product manager to run a series of 45-minute user interviews, where we gathered recordings and transcripts to better understand user needs. I pull together the key insights into a clear, easy-to-digest report that played a big role in guiding our next product decisions.
It was clear that our best bet is to focus on quality leads rather than volume
Getting quality leads seems like a universal problem for universities
The US market is less targeted at international students. This could be a good theme to penetrate the US market
Some universities may see lead generation through a lens of the cost per lead
We are entering a pretty competitive market with solutions that have more established lead-gen capabilities
Research summary report
Define
As this feature would interact with multiple user types and internal processes, I created a service map that tracked the user journeys and any key interactions and processes.
This was crucial, as I needed to work with the product, partnership and engineering team to make sure the process would work within our technical architecture and uncover any constraints or blockers with our internal processes.
This was done through 3 amigo style cenrmonies and other cross functional team meetings to investigate constraints and blockers.
Service map
Student user journey
Problem statement
We need a secure and compliant way to share student leads with university partners that works within existing manual workflows. The solution must adhere to GDPR regulations, and account for users who are legally classified as minors. It should balance efficiency for the partnership team with trust, privacy, and legal integrity for our users.
Extra context
To deliver this feature in the desired time constraint (Q3), we need to consider more manual processes to share leads with our partners.
Due to legal and GDPR concerns, we decided not to capture any new data points that aren't covered in our current terms and conditions. We would only share what the student has already provided for this MVP.
As some of our users are classified as "minors", we needed to adapt the solution to cater to the necessary requirements. We need to cosult our legal team about what needed to implemented for compliance.
Ideation
Student view
With the core journeys and interaction defined I could now start ideating on the student facing user experience and interface. I personally like to start with sketches and drawing, which helps me move fast and quickly visualse my ideas. I often take a photos and share them for feedback or drop them into a collaboration space like Figjam. Moving rapidly and being collaborative is key to this stage of my process.
Design
With the user journeys and our constraints defined, I could then get started on the student experience. The key to generating leads is convincing students to connect with our partners.
We know that context is key to any decision, and students have consistently told us that they want to get more information about universities they are interested in. With this in mind and our commitment to generate quality leads, it made sense to present the student with the opportunity to “connect” with our patterns once they have shown interest.
Lo-fi mock-ups in Figjam
Hi-fi modal mock-ups in Figma
Context is everything!
This will enhance the value proposition for both student and partner, as it ensures the student will be receiving relevant information from the university, and our partners will be gaining leads from student who are genuinely interested in them.
Testing
The pool of customers and users we can access can be tricky due to their busy/seasonal schedules, so we also leverage our internal resources for testing and reviews.
We leveraged the vast knowledge of our internal partnerships team and their customer insights to determine what would be right for our partners
To get a more student-centric view, I ran some internal feedback sessions with our customer success team, who work with schools and students
Key outcomes
Asking the student to reconfirm their email address could cause a bit of confusion, as they would already have an active email saved to their BridgeU account
Having the option to edit their details ran the risk of breaking the user flow, as they would be taken to their account settings
Making the modal as clear and simple as possible would maximise conversion
Automatic pop-up/modal on viewing a profile would interrupt the user flow too much
Final design
With the learnings from testing, we arrived at a more frictionless experience for the student. They would only need to give consent to sharing the specific data points outlined to connect to a partner university.
We felt this was the best decision as we didn't want to reduce the risk of student opting out due to entering more information they might have already provided through onboarding. This would ensure we could also test the reaction to sharing data with universities without introducing more barriers.
Outcome
40% weekly average
conversion
Baseline comparison to a 30% conversion rate for our competitor Naviance
92% partner
retention rate
One of our key goals was to prevent partner churn.
Feedback from the partnership team
Changes perception of BridgeU - I feel people see more value from BridgeU with Lead Gen, that we're not just a listings website, that we have real value as a marketing partner.
Renewals and revenue retention - "I would say Lead Gen has had the single biggest impact on renewals for me, reducing churn massively compared to BridgeU of old. It's also easy to explain, well understood by the sector, and produces measurable outcomes with Looker reports. For example, Lancaster is a high contract value partner, and they had given me notice to churn before I put one year of Lead Gen on the table."
Upsell opportunity and revenue growth - We expect people will be hooked on the leads and keen to continue. We're aiming to generate around a sizeable amount from Lead Gen in new revenue.
Next steps
Due to the decision to take a more manual approach to processing and distributing leads, we would very much like to look at automating the whole process. This could take a couple of directions:
A partner portal where they can log in and self-serve to download/export their leads
Integrations with our partner's systems
Future improvements
Capturing more data points that partners have told us would be very useful, such as; Subject area/preferences, course/major name and citizenship.
Allowing partners to target specific audiences of students who might be interested in certain subjects or careers
Look at other places in the product we can highlight to students to “connect” with our partners
