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
 * 3) * Lead at prospective partner (ideally in middle management to champion the decision to join locally) is identified through networks or referral.
 * 4) * Covering email is sent to prospective lead with letter of invitation as attachment. Email will include links to relevant pages on the OERu site.
 * 5) * 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.
 * 6) 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.
 * 7) 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.
 * 8) Issues
 * 9) * Current model doesn't scale well
 * 10) * Explaining the value proposition of open is a hard sell. It's not intuitive.
 * 11) * Sporting documentation is generated in-house - may not have professional appeal.
 * 12) * 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.