A great interactive campus tour on the cheap with the help of YouTube and students for Saint Michael’s College

While nothing will ever replace campus visits for prospective students, online tours have become a sought-after web feature in the early college selection process.
Unfortunately most of the solutions out there don’t come cheap – and can be very, very expensive – especially if you want to embed some interactivity in your online campus tour.

The interactive campus tour designed and produced by Mallory Wood, assistant director of marketing at Saint Michael’s College (as well as a young alum), proves that it doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s actually possible to come up with a nice online interactive tour on a dime with the help of your student ambassadors, YouTube annotation feature, a bit of time and talent.

Just check it out!

Nice, isn’t it?

I asked Mallory a few questions about how she did it, so you can learn from her experience.

1) How did you come up with the idea?

The idea came from one of Seth Odell’s vlogs back in November 2009. That man is a genius! As soon as I heard his idea, I knew creating a video tour with YouTube annotations was something I had to do, especially because St. Mike’s didn’t have any sort of video-based virtual tour. At the time I was in Admissions and unable to devote enough time and energy to the project. When I transitioned into the Marketing Dept. this past June, the project rose to the top of my list!

2) What were your goals for this interactive tour?

First of all, we wanted to provide prospective students a way to “visit” our campus from their home. The campus visit is an important part of the recruitment process, but before a student decides to visit a
college they will most likely check out the website. I want to give prospects an authentic taste of what our campus is like during their initial search in hopes that they’ll be enticed to come to Burlington and learn more. Second, I wanted the tour to look well done and of high quality. but still very “real” and down to earth. I wanted to mimic a real campus tour by showing both the tour guide and the location in the video – as if you were there in person and looking back and forth between the two. Third, I wanted to use students who would come across as genuine and appealing as they truly are. The nice thing is that the 6 students are very different in their majors and extra curricular interests, but the one thing they have in common is their enthusiasm for the college. And finally, I wanted the tour
to be fun and interactive.

3) How did you put it together?

This summer when I transitioned into Marketing the project rose to the top of my priority list, especially with the website getting redesigned and feeling really behind on not having a better virtual tour.
Conversations started in June and filming started in July. There were four tour guides in Admissions (Christine, Dylan, Leah, and Caitlin) so originally the plan was to just use them and roll out the tour in August. Of course, doing this type of project in the summer when people aren’t around is tough for a lot of reasons – no athletes to film, dorms and townhouses are bare, etc. Having finished a lot of the editing by mid-August I realized that there were some I wanted to reshoot and others I needed better b-roll, and with students coming back soon I decided to just wait. That’s when Caroline and Michel were added – they reshot a few of the locations that I wasn’t 100% happy with.

In all, the filming process took about 2 weeks due to schedules, weather, so on and the editing/uploading process took about 4 “working from home” days spread out over the period of one month. I did all the filming and editing myself. There wasn’t really a budget, the students volunteered their time and I used a pretty simple Panasonic HD video camera that Admissions had previously purchased to do the
filming. I was given a lot of autonomy on this project, but I certainly requested feedback during the process from both the Marketing Department and Admissions.

4) What kind of feedback have you received up until now? How do you plan to measure the success of this tour?

The feedback has been overwhelming supportive – but we only made the tour live less than 24 hours ago! Everyone on campus seems to love it, Admissions is thrilled and even the President of the college sent me a nice note! Reactions from highered professionals, like Seth Odell and others that I respect have also been positive, and getting their seal of approval is very meaningful.

5) Any interesting lessons learned to share with anybody who would like to tackle this kind of interactive video tour?

You can’t make this happen overnight, editing takes longer than you think, and finding the right students at the beginning of the project is key to its success. I also learned that you don’t need a
huge budget or super fancy equipment to make a high quality tour.