For several years, we had been looking into different opportunities to do some sort of video component to our website, and we felt like it was something that we were really missing and something that our students would relate to. And we knew students wanted to watch videos of other students to learn more about the college during their search process, and we knew it was an important piece for our out of state and international markets, so we had been looking at a number of different companies. We saw that StudentBridge had a number of ways for us to personalize our video experience to our campus to brand it to what we were really looking for and to really tell the student story. The University already had some video on YouTube, and while it was good stuff, you know, you go to YouTube, and you've got things that might mention Georgia Southern that we really didn't have a lot of control over. So we wanted to make sure that we were putting the right students out there sharing the right stories, to really make sure that our prospective students were getting a positive, correct image of Georgia Southern.

I feel like our Virtual Campus Experience, once complete, was really well received, both on campus and off campus. I was excited to share it with all of the students, faculty, and staff who had participated in the project as well as our administration. We also sent an email to all the prospective students that we had in our system. I think that first email went to over 100,000 students, and we were really excited to see how many people watched it in the first week. Analytics that StudentBridge provides us on a monthly basis shows us that students from across the world are clicking on and watching our videos.

Working to build the interactive campus map was really neat. The end product exceeded all of our expectations to see our campus really laid out. Just the other day we had a guidance counselor say that that was the best part of the whole experience, that the videos are great, but the map was what he was most excited about because it really gave him an idea of the scope of campus and where things are laid out, so students can really see what happens in certain buildings and how far they are from one another.

If I had to give advice to another institution who is looking to do a virtual campus experience, I would say definitely find a company who is going to do it all for you. You may think that you can take it on with some of your internal resources, but especially in working with StudentBridge, having them come down, maybe paying a little bit of extra money for them to do all the video, was well worth it. The end product was amazing. And it really took a lot of stress off of us knowing that they were going to put it together.

The best form of recruitment is word of mouth. And so having students tell stories in some sort of virtual video environment was really important to us when choosing a product, and this is exactly that. We have 28 videos of students, with some faculty and staff, sharing firsthand their experiences and their thoughts on Georgia Southern, and I can't think of anything that would be more impactful than that.