OERu/Planning/Marketing and communications/Marketing capacity development project/Notes on current recruitment approaches

1. In the early years we attempted blind email invitations without much success - however, this was before we succeeded in recruiting a critical mass of partners.
2. Typical recruitment approach
   • Lead at prospective partner (ideally in middle management to champion the decision to join locally) is identified through networks or referral.
   • Covering email is sent to prospective lead with letter of invitation as attachment. Email will include links to relevant pages on the OERu site.
   • We invite prospective partners to schedule an online web conference to clarify any questions about membership. The OERF Director usually facilitates this call and is typically attended by a few middle management staff at the prospective partner. Once a web conference is scheduled we have a 85% conversion rate.
3. We have attempted to establish a Marketing and Communications working group with the idea of having a few of the marketing professionals from partner instutions help guide our marketing attempts without success. I suspect that marketing departments at public higher education institutions have too much on their plates to donate time to our marketing on top of existing jobs.
4. In the past, inviting local institions to join the OERu partner meetings as "observers" has resulted in about 50% - 60% of the obeservers converting to members.
5. Issues
   • Current model doesn't scale well
   • Explaining the value proposition of open is a hard sell. It's not intuitive.
   • Sporting documentation is generated in-house - may not have professional appeal.
   • Completing MVP demonstrating the end-to-end process of the OERu model will help with future recruitment - but this is work in progress targeting completion of a first year of study by September 2016. The OERF has been reticent to market product before it is completed.