mutual benefits with universities
In the Property Marketing Lounge, we discussed the topic of how to build mutually beneficial partnerships with universities, along with our brilliant panel Kate Owen (UPP), Amina Hofri (Kings College London), Robin Walsh (Bournemouth University), Jenny Shaw (Unite Students) and Michail Smirnov (StayKeepers).
You can catch the full recording of this session and all our sessions on our YouTube channel.
This topic is something that we are very passionate about at The Property Marketing Strategists. If you work in student accommodation; whether you are a university partner, have a nominations agreement or a secret nominations agreement, or whether you just want to provide the best possible service, having a great relationship with the University is really valuable and really powerful.
“Working collaboratively makes all of our lives easier as well. That's what we want, isn't it? We want to be able to deliver great services for our students and we can do that better together”. – Robin Walsh.
We wanted to find out how best to approach this and to get the best out for everyone in the partnership. Our first discussion point was to understand how each of our panellists individually approach partnerships within their organisations.
For Amina and Kings College London, it's important that when the student walk into a private providers accommodation such as Unite, where they have the bright and very vibrant United branding that they understand that although there in the Unite property they are KCL students.
For Bournemouth University they don’t freehold land which is why it’s so important for them to have those relationships with the private sector because they ultimately provide the rooms that they need to house some of their students. What Bournemouth University have been doing since 2015 is creating a sense of a BU portfolio. So rather than just sort of fielding our students out to the private sector, they bring the private sector into the BU community. They drive a collaborative approach towards providing a very diverse portfolio.
Both Kate and Jenny agree that partnership works at many levels, from the ground up to Vice Chancellors, and that a partnership should be a myriad across all of the different titles across the Universities that are worked with. UPP have got a long-term model, typically with 40–50-year relationships and so partnership is the lens through which UPP view all of their activities. They have a dedicated partnerships team that lead the formal data engagement with the universities, but would expect others across all of the business to be building relationships at all levels in order to make sure that it's not just senior levels who are talking in vacuums about these great concepts but actually putting in the structures and systems, filtered through to each level. This approach is fundamental to Unite Students DNA as an organisation so that there is a common purpose and common focus on the student and the student experience. Jenny adds that partnerships with universities are about understanding what insight and what good practice can be brought based on size and scale? What can be put back into the sector that will help everyone and ultimately will help students as well?
Examples:
State's team
Security team
Student support team
Procurement team
Legal team
Unite Students has a strong hybrid of a nominations programme and university partnership and Jenny says that in order to fill their direct let beds, they do need that strong consumer brand. It is a competitive market so that does tend to get a lot of focus, but one of the things that they are looking at the moment is what is their brand for their university partners? How do they give that really good value and that seamless service? How do they do it to scale? This can be challenging because Unite has approximately 60 university partners all working slightly differently. Therefore, how do we create systems and processes that will work on a national level, but can be tailored to each university partner?
Similar to UPP, organisations should have a monthly marketing and allocation forum which is a joint approach on any communications, crisis and student experience which should be there as a standard otherwise the partnership most likely won’t work. Michail explains that the easiest way to approach partnerships is to do it with 2 segregated teams. This is how they operate at StayKeepers.
In scenarios of silent partnerships, an organisation tends to sit below the brand of the University, which in most instances means the students aren’t even aware that the accommodation is being operated by a separate brand, but only perceive it as part of the University directly. Although these days students-to-be are increasingly researching accommodation on multiple sites rather than necessarily making university accommodation their first port of call, with Kate pointing out that from an account-based marketing perspective, brand really comes into it so that you're raising brand awareness for the institution to provide the right exposure.
According to Robin, what is also needed is the willingness from the University to want to work in collaboration, and in Robin’s experience, some want to be more so collaborative than others. This will depend on the university, the history of the university, their setup, what accommodation they've got, the competitive element of it all, the way that their particular accommodation service is set up, etc. Universities can offer a lot of rich content into marketing, what the PBSA’s are sending out to their residents about student welfare, the services that the university offer, etc.
So, what impact do the end customer/students have on the development of partnerships? Robin says the answer to this is Student Unions. It’s a combination of working closely with, having a good relationship with, regularly bringing into the meetings with accommodation providers and letting accommodation providers and having a dialogue with the Student Union. The development comes through a process of gaining feedback from students which is shared between University and PBSA and acted on together. Additionally, if you are in a nominations agreement, there's going to be a bit a bit of feedback there. That's going to help both parties to develop.
At Unite, Jenny had done a really interesting exercise with students and social psychologists around the use of common space, which was very influential in Unites partnerships. Although Jenny mentions that as with all things in terms of development, it may take a long time to filter its way through because of the long lead times and this is important to consider because Gen Alpha are coming up as the next set of students after Gen Z and they are going to want different things.
“The students at the heart of everything we do and every decision we make is about enhancing that experience, and there is sometimes a disconnect”. – Amina. Amina also believes that the partnership process should include students and that their feedback should be used as a basis for further discussions such as rent-setting, etc.
Kate says it is a missed opportunity when it takes as long as it does to develop the buildings as new builds are being designed while Generation Alpha is not being asked what they want and surveys and polls are only being completed with the students of now.
Finally, we discussed how operators, investors and universities can work together for better outcomes for customers and universities in the future? There can be the perfect systems and processes and platforms that gel together but if people aren't committed and passionate about actually working together it isn’t going to work. Data sharing is very important. Data sharing agreements, reports between the two parties, regular meetings, consistency of approach and consistency of process nationally would make so much difference to so many students. It is a constant process of re-evaluating and working together and showing that commitment.
If you want to discuss how to build a better relationship between your operations, marketing and sales departments, The Property Marketing Strategists can help. Get in touch…