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Paul Loftus, Founder & Chief, eduKUDU, UK

Sustainable marketing materials are the way forward, says Paul Loftus of higher ed solutions company, eduKUDU. A founding member of the Climate Action Network for International Education and with more than two decades experience across the international education marketplace, Loftus spoke to The PIE about the need for the sector to reduce its environmental impact, and how his latest publishing platform, theRACK, is helping to do just that.

 

"Unis aiming to educate the next generation, who will shoulder most of the burden of protecting our planet, are still producing millions of tons of waste print"

The PIE: What initially drew you to the international education sector?

Paul Loftus: I moved into international education in 1996, in advertising sales in London. I worked for Empire Publishing for five years, left for the US for two years and then back to the UK to start my own company – i-studentgroup – in 2003. We ran a series of magazines focused on counsellors and advisers in high schools, with enquiries coming in from prospective students, parents and so on.

“Most universities know that increased digital has to replace most of their hard-copy”

 The PIE: Which markets do you work in?

PL: Predominantly we work across the six main English-speaking markets: Australia and New Zealand, the UK and Ireland and Canada and the US. We also work within the EU where universities are increasingly offering English-taught degrees.

The PIE: When did eduKUDU come to fruition?

PL: So i-studentgroup grew and developed for years, running the website and producing e-magazines. In late 2018 it became clear that we needed to somehow move individual e-brochures from the status of an add-on into the mainstream of a university recruitment toolkit, looking at sustainability, variable content and the ability to streamline the huge costs of delivering content worldwide.

At that point, we stopped, reevaluated everything we did and all feedback we had and took a long hard look at the industry and the end-users. I rebranded us as eduKUDU as a fresh start, with a new product – ‘theRACK’ – and fresh websites.

The PIE: How do you describe what eduKUDU does?

PL: It is a digital agency that runs a number of websites focused on counsellors and advisors, alumni and current students, alongside its premier product, theRACK, a digital publishing platform.

The PIE: Sustainability is a huge focus for your company. Can you tell me more about that?

PL: I’m one of the founding members of the Climate Action Network for International Education, which is having its official launch very soon. We all travel a lot in our industry, and the environmental impact is massive.

In the years I’ve been in this business, the hundreds, probably millions, of prospectuses I’ve seen left at the end of exhibitions and education fairs that are being thrown away is just horrendous.

“A small proportion of the prospectus is, at the very best, single-use”

Educators say okay, I’m flying less now. But the prospectuses they are using have a massive impact – the trees are still grown, still milled and they’re still producing the paper and freighting heavy product around the world.

There’s a level of irony, too: the unis aiming to educate the next generation, who will shoulder most of the burden of protecting our planet, are still producing millions of tons of waste print. Almost every student with the potential to be an international student has a smartphone or tablet or has access to a computer.

So why are we producing paper prospectuses? Students are not going to keep their prospectus on their bookshelf for years to come. A small proportion of the prospectus is, at the very best, single-use.

The PIE: Why do you say that?

PL: If a student is interested in doing architecture, they’re not going to look at engineering or English or anything else in a prospectus. One student said to me, ‘I have a nice home, I’ve got a tablet, as do my parents. Why are you producing a book to try and get me to come to university? Moreover, if I was back home, why would you send it thousands of miles to me? Pointless’. And it really made me think.

“theRACK has the potential to make a huge difference very quickly”

So CANIE is all about what we do locally by cutting emissions and by being sustainable – it’s all the small things. And all these millions of students, they will do small things that make a big difference but theRACK has the potential to make a huge difference very quickly.

The PIE: How does theRACK work?

PL: A digital publishing platform, theRACK is front and centre of eduKUDU. theRACK houses all of the brochures we have done over the years in a new format, giving the client the ability to tailor a recruitment guide to individual regions, countries and even cities, to make them subject-specific and to add in different testimonials for each recruiter or agent. Simply put, you can have your central recruitment guide tailored to each recruiter or agent and how they promote you.

Getting agents to use digital media as a substitute for hard copy was a challenge. For years, agents had simply used stickers with their own details to cover the contact details on the back of marketing material. And we wanted a digital solution to that.

The PIE: If agents pushed back to begin with, how did you eventually get their buy-in? 

PL: We realised that the agents would buy into using interactive online digital publishing if they were assured that the enquiries coming through it – whoever the students and parents were sharing it with – was coming back to them. It had to be their brochure, with their tailored content, with their contact details. It was their recruitment tool on their individual URL.

“Getting agents to use digital media as a substitute for hard copy was a challenge”

The PIE: Can you tell me more about theRACK?

PL: The idea for theRACK evolved from discussions within my company, which is already an online business, and with Ailsa Lamont of CANIE, one of the co-founding members on whose panel I also sit. A lot of factors began to come together to waymark the route forward.

As I mentioned before, the issue of getting agents to embrace digital media was the problem that needed a solution. But from this grew the concept of enabling unis to create bespoke brochures covering every aspect of their marketing at speed and at low cost, but with huge environmental benefits.

The PIE: We’ve mentioned sustainability, what are the other benefits of theRACK?

PL: Greta Thunberg was doing an amazing job promoting the need for what we produced last year. And this year, because of coronavirus, we are in a good position to help institutions get the word out because we can produce theRACK for a client with all of the content produced interactively from the prospectus. Then as things change, clients simply log in and request the changes whether they are programs, images, text or links.

As an example of the speed and flexibility of this situation, let’s say a uni wants to make a change to their main international prospectus to publicise that they are now taking applications for January 2021 – once that change has been entered in the main brochure, it will then cascade to that exact same page in all variations of the brochure ensuring that all of those versions go up to date immediately – impossible with hard-copy without re-printing

It comes down to three things for us, three points on a triangle: one point is sustainability, another point content, another point budget.

I would say that at the end of last year our push was more sustainability and now I think the level of importance is on flexible, variable content. Then also budget: universities are being hit for millions and millions. Now, while we can’t stop that happening and we can’t solve that problem, what we can do is offer a solution which has a big impact on sustainability and has a huge impact on clients being in control of their content: what they’re delivering.

And of course budget – you’re not going to produce too much print, therefore you’ll not be shipping it. You’re now able to have your content produced differently for 10 or 15 or 20 markets, which would usually be prohibited by most university budgets.

The PIE: How has coronavirus impacted the business?

PL: The main way it has impacted us is in terms of the urgency felt by our clients to change the way they are doing things. What previously took months, is now being turned around in weeks and this reflects the way the crisis has jolted the market into changing its digital strategy almost overnight.

We hit some small bumps in the road last year, but then we got everything working spot-on around November. Then Australia, which is a big market for us, was hit by those terrible bushfires. And then the whole world stopped in March, including us. I thought, ‘oh my God, I’ve invested years on this, we’ve got this absolutely perfect only for this to happen’.

“It comes down to three points for us…sustainability, content and budget”

But then the phone started ringing, the emails started happening. And the realisation of, ‘yeah, we are right, what we are offering is perfect for the marketplace as it is now’ came.

The PIE: Do you get much pushback from universities who are reluctant to move to electronic versions of their brochures?

PL: Well some people say we could just have a different pdf for different countries. Yes, you can do that, but then you’re going to need a team checking hundreds of pages within hundreds of pdfs to make sure they’re all up to date. And our system does all that work for you.

What we’re delivering is a fully interactive digital brochure. If you’re asking a Gen Z student using the latest smartphone to download a nine megabyte pdf, you’re in the wrong world. Not to mention all of your lovely content is fast asleep as far as Google is concerned. They want live, fresh data.

If you’re trying to appeal to 16 and 17-year-old students in South Korea or Taiwan, are you really going to send them an A4 prospectus? We don’t have fax machines anymore, so why are you talking to a 17-year-old about your cutting edge university through a paper brochure?

So, no, we are not getting any pushback – most universities know that increased digital has to replace most of their hard-copy. The main difference, partly caused by the current pandemic, is that there is an ever-increasing demand to expedite this change.

We are delighted to be part of this change and we are in a position to push it forward at speed.

Find out more about EduKUDU and theRACK here

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