Wednesday 9 May 2007

Meeting the Marketing

Last week I had a meeting with the marketing department to find out what methods they are adopting in promoting the college courses and to get their views about the portal.

They are using the college website to promote courses to employers and do a small campaign in January of every year for Higher Education qualifications. Employers are also approached by external advertising with the local radio, newspapers, direct emails and in-house published brochures promoting Higher Education and Work-Based Learning courses.

The marketing team showed a satisfactory interest in the portal, but they were not sure how we are going to convince the employers to use the portal. However later in the conversation, after they recognised the additional functions the portal will support e.g. tracking students progress, they admitted that this is a new service in its kind which will be very useful to the employers.

They pointed out that employers will be interested in having web links to Chamber of Commerce, colleges, documents about the latest up-to-date legislation, government funding and other relevant regulations. They also highlighted the fact that the employers do not understand what is happening in education, because the literature from the government body contains too much jargon.

We agreed to show the prototype to employers who are the key players in this project to gather their feedback which will help our development team to customize the artifact as appropriate.

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