City Lit, Europe’s largest adult education college, has been highly commended for its recently redesigned website, created by digital specialist Underwired, in the Best Student Recruitment Website category at the 20th annual Heist awards. Dame Kelly Holmes DBE presented the award to Hannah Attwood, City Lit’s marketing co-ordinator, at the Palace Hotel in Manchester on 27 May.
The internationally recognised Heist Awards are the premier awards programme for marketing in the education sector, celebrating innovation and professionalism from the smallest regional college to global education brands.
City Lit’s website was launched in October 2008 to increase new and repeat student enrolment by providing easy access to engaging and informative content, reduce capacity on courses by highlighting late availability, publicise new products and offers, and capture enquiries for future targeting and tailored communications.
New features including the ‘last minute availability’ search, which reflects the time-poor status of adults nowadays and is one of the most popular pages on the site, has helped to increase online enrolment figures by 55%. Enhanced SEO has also increased the number of visitors to the site by 46% and the contact information captured for future targeted communications has increased overall by 458%.
Liora Ives, director of marketing and communications at City Lit, commented, “We are delighted that the site has been such a hit with students and played such a fundamental part in our strategy for growth. In a climate of public sector cuts, where adult education has been hit hard in the last few years, it is vital that we continue to innovate to attract more students, fill classes to capacity, capture data for future enrolment targeting and maintain high levels of repeat business. We were 100% focused on developing a site that supported these business objectives and so were Underwired. Winning an award is the icing on the cake.”
Felix Velarde, managing director at Underwired, commented, “City Lit is an important institution, and the biggest adult education college in Europe. Creating a website that makes it really easy to choose the right course from over 3,000 was a great challenge, and the results we’ve seen since launch have been fantastic. This win is well-deserved by the team at City Lit, who have put in a huge amount of time to get it exactly right.”
Simon Bracewell, Client Services Director at Heist, said, “These have been the best entered and attended Heist Awards ever. The entries were of a consistently high standard and the judges had many long deliberations over the eventual winners. The judges found the City Lit website thoroughly managed and implemented, and very easy to navigate with a useful summary of innovative features.”
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