EducationUSA Weekly Update: New & Improved!

EducationUSA PDF format

As we all come to grips with how to reach our intended student audiences overseas, as international educators, at EducationUSA we've taken a huge step forward. Those who know our network of 400 advising centers in 170 countries, may have heard of our Weekly Update before. This newsletter goes out every week to all centers, and up until the last three months was a simple email, PDF or word document that then got parsed out by centers, or simply posted to their center's student contact, put up on their websites or in their centers.

While there was certainly value in this approach, it didn't always meet students where they were. After surveying our advisers earlier this year we learned that we needed to provide them greater control and choices over how they receive and distribute Weekly Update content. For those not familiar with Weekly Update (WU), it contains typically announcements of scholarship & financial aid assistance available for international students, and a "Campus News" section highlighting new academic programs that might be attractive to international students, or major events that would be relevant for international students to know. We collect these stories from U.S. institutions that submit information through the higher ed section of our EducationUSA site. The online form (for those institution representatives who have been approved for login access to our site) allows for a substantial amount of information including institutional logo, website, all social media links, related video url/embed code for the post, as well as specifics on the award or news story.

The end result allows us to maximize the effectiveness of this higher ed institutional content for our student audiences abroad. In so doing, when we publish our WU each week, our EducationUSA Advisers have the ability to choose how they wish to receive these announcements (in html email, PDF, and/or in pre-packaged social media-ready posts, all versions replete with bit.ly url shorteners that allow us to track globally how and where these posts are read. Since we launched this program in June, our WU posts have increased from about 10,000 click-throughs to currently 14,000 each week. That number will only increase as the academic year kicks into gear.

More importantly for U.S. representatives (and for students) the content from both of these sections of the WU are also fed automatically into two RSS feeds on our site for financial aid and for news. In addition to the posts, and RSS feed content formats, we also for the scholarship/financial aid announcements create individual pages for your WU submission on our site that feed into a growing financial aid database, that will also soon include national scholarships from various countries around the world that students can access to study in the U.S.

So, I invite all my U.S. higher ed colleagues at accredited institutions to:

1. Request your U.S. higher ed login access to our site if you haven't already 
2. Submit your institution's scholarship & financial information for international students into our Weekly Update
3. Stay tuned for more developments on how the financial aid database will become a great resource for you as well.

Until we meet again...