How We Helped a Prominent Singapore School Attract Students from China

Knowledge is worldwide and education can have a much further reach than just in the city or country where an institution is based. Many schools and universities have looked to expand their student numbers in recent times and are affording students in other territories opportunities which were once unavailable.

The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, although already having many foreign students, was looking to join this trend of expansion and hoped to attract more students from the Chinese mainland using a variety of solutions. They needed someone to help them realise their goal for this and approached us for help.

Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

The LKY School, as the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy is also known, is a self-governing postgraduate school linked to the National University of Singapore (NUS), which is the top university in Asia and is ranked number 12 of all universities around the globe.

Lee Kuan Yew was the first Prime Minister of Singapore and was the country’s longest-serving head of government and the facility was named in his honour when it first opened its doors in 2004.

The LKY School has as its main goals to raise standards of governance throughout Asia and to enrich and improve the lives of citizens across the continent.

As well as offering four different Masters programmes and a PhD programme, the school also provides training for over 2,000 senior professionals of varying nationality. In 2014 the school had over 2,000 alumni from almost 80 different countries.

The need to boost student numbers

The school had very specific ideas in mind when they approached us.

In order to attract Chinese students they knew it was imperative to have a fully-functioning, Chinese-facing website and also wanted to utilise the platform WeChat in order to supplement the website.

They asked us here at Eggplant to realise a strategy and design, develop and deliver a comprehensive package to assist them in achieving their goal of increasing student numbers from China.

Communicating to ensure the best

Our mix of Western design and knowledge of Chinese systems is what sets us apart from other developers, but we also believe constant communication with our clients is the key to success. We worked very closely with the LKY School in order to establish exactly what they wanted from this project and our team cooperated with them to ensure that the end product would be exactly as they wished.

We involved them in every step of the process along the way, listening to their ideas and taking note of their feedback.

WeChat: The best tool for the job

Thanks to our team of experts, we know how to create a product for the Chinese market here at Eggplant which really gives us the march on our rivals from outside of the country.

The LKY School were aware of the WeChat platform and we helped them create an excellent product using it.

WeChat is an incredibly popular messaging platform that is used in China. It is like many other similar platforms and might well be the reason it is not so well known outside of the country where many others already fight it out within a crowded marketplace. That being said it has approximately 889 million active users in China and 90% of them are Chinese, so it would be correct to call it a Chinese success. Such is its popularity that almost everyone in China uses WeChat for one thing or another. It is definitely the best means to provide the greatest coverage within China.

Dedicated China web hosting

Our knowledge of web hosting also gave us a significant advantage on this project. For this we used Aliyun which is the most popular cloud-based web hosting service available in China. By using Aliyun we enabled the LKY School’s website to be more reliable and fast-working than websites which use other hosting services. We were aware that the website would be attracting a large volume of traffic and we knew that we needed to use web hosting that was up to the task. Nobody wants a website that crashes under the enormous volume of users and we weren’t about to let that happen.

Advanced solutions for the project

Many people outside of China would be unaware of WeChat and its effectiveness. At Eggplant we pride ourselves on developing cutting edge, tailor-made apps which work using the WeChat platform.

For this project we set up an official WeChat account for the school and helped them to utilise this for marketing purposes. We also assisted by:

• managing the account for them for the second half of 2016 in the lead up to registration day,
• regularly updating it with weekly content,
• and monthly reports in order to engage with potential students.

This in conjunction with a cross-platform website that was incredibly user-friendly provided the Lee Kuan Yew School with the tools they needed to help increase their number of Chinese students.

A success for the school

Following the launch of the website and the marketing campaign, the Lee Kuan Yew School saw a 200% increase in their number of followers and had many more enquiries about their courses than they had previously had.

Eggplant also helped the LKY School to maintain a strong relationship with their applicants.

The project was seen as a huge success by both parties.

Here at Eggplant we find solutions to clients’ problems and achieve this through a mixture of local knowledge, Western design and expert innovation. Our team can help any organisation achieve success through their website design and development skills and WeChat marketing.

If your business is looking to break into the Chinese market, or if you are already attempting to do so without success, contact us and we can help you achieve your goals.