We decided to get a virtual campus experience for LSU because we needed to extend our outreach to our out of state students and our international students. Before working with StudentBridge, we were struggling with getting our academic message out to prospective students and their families. A lot of what students knew about LSU was from football games on TV. We chose StudentBridge just because of the variety of offerings they had. StudentBridge provided a virtual campus tour, a virtual campus map, and some very engaging videos that helped us to showcase our campus to prospective students.

The Virtual Campus Experience has really helped us with our recruitment efforts. They were able to really capture the beauty of our campus, our students and their personalities, and the videos all came out so great. A lot of the questions we get from prospective students is "What's it like to be an LSU student?" For students who just can't come to campus or can't come to one of our recruitment events, it really helps them to see the campus and see what life is like on campus. It helps them to see what students do on a daily basis. For instance, if a student contacts us and wants to know about our College of Science, we can very easily send them the video talking about that college. And it's very helpful for students to see other students speaking about that topic, rather than just a phone conversation with a staff member in the Admissions Office.

We have gotten some great feedback from students. Many of them have said that they have come to either an event or a tour or even shown up at orientation because of some of the videos they've seen. One example of the success we've had with our Virtual Campus Experience is with our international population. We started sending out an email message to all of our international students, inviting them to look at the virtual tour and inviting them onto campus virtually. And from that email, that one email, we had 60 applications from international students. Students that had viewed that email, interacted with us through that email, and then ended up being students here on campus.

I would definitely recommend StudentBridge and the Virtual Campus Experience to any colleague on campus or at another university. We have had a great experience using it, developing it, updating it. We've had a lot of positive feedback from our campus colleagues, from our students, from our faculty and staff. So I would definitely recommend this to anybody looking to update their virtual tours or their virtual campus experience.