Eastern Education Group creates digital prospectus as part of it’s mission to become one of the most sustainable colleges in the country

The Eastern Education Group (EEG) is furthering their commitment to sustainability by creating an online digital prospectus.

Bringing West Suffolk Sixth Form College, Abbeygate Sixth Form and One Sixth Form Colleges together, the online creation will have course information relating to these three further education colleges together in one place for the first time.

Carrie Edwards is the Head of Marketing and Brand for the EEG.

She helped oversee the project working with an organisation called Prospectus Plus.

Prospectus Plus create unique personalised, sustainable and trackable digital brochures.

Carrie joined forces with this organisation to see how best they could appeal to their predominant target market that is called Generation Alpha (Gen Alpha).

They - Gen Alpha - are the first group of people or digital natives to have grown up surrounded by technology.

According to data agency mccrindle, Gen Alpha were born in 2010, the year the iPad was launched, Instagram was created and App was ‘word of the year’.

It is claimed (by mccrindle) that Gen Alpha are the most technological savvy group in history.

Carrie and her team undertook focus groups and the feedback from these sessions showed that a digital and sustainable prospectus was the way to go for Gen Alpha and all potential EEG students.

She said: “We’ve moved away from the printed prospectus for many reasons. This year, we conducted a series of focus groups with various stakeholders that included students, staff, employers and careers advisors to gain feedback on their thoughts on the creation of a digital prospectus. We had a resounding 90% who said they would like to see a digital prospectus, with the other 10% supporting with a smaller course guide to supplement it.                                                                     

“Aligning with Sustainable organisations is very important to young people and we’ve made it part of our mission to become one of the most sustainable educational establishment in the country.

“We believe that will be one of the first further education colleges to adapt to the changing landscape of our young persons’ needs by having all the information they require to help them make their decision about where and what they would like to study via their smart phone or device.

“One other key advantage of the prospectus is that it allows the user to personalise their experience by only selecting information they are interested in, in terms of college life and courses.”

“My colleague calculated that we will be saving the equivalent of 347 trees by making this move and it is part of our ongoing mantra to transform education in this region and beyond.

Prospectus aside, Carrie also outlined other ways in which the ECG is becoming more sustainable. She said: “As an organisation, we have committed to embrace the 17 UNESCO sustainable development goals as a way of supporting a greener economy and world.

Principal and CEO of the ECG, Dr Nikkos Savvas said: “Whilst this is a small step, it is a statement of our intent to embed sustainability across everything we do.”

The prospectus will be released at the end of August 2023. Follow this link to find out more: https://www.wsc.ac.uk/find-a-course/digital-prospectus