Just before the country was plunged, yet again, into another lockdown, we had the opportunity to go out to a handful of private accommodation sites in Bristol. We wanted to get a raw, front line insight into what systems these sites were currently using and where our solution could fit in.

We discovered that these sites, naturally, had a lot of important information that they needed to share with their residents.
This creates a lot of noise which can be overwhelming for anyone, let alone someone with a buzzing virtual timetable to adhere to. The more we spoke to the receptionists and the other ‘on the ground’ staff, there was no sense of a centralised system where this communication could be shared simply, quickly and securely.

We managed to capture some incredibly useful
inside information about what their occupants want and how we could not only improve their residents experience with them, but also their internal
day-to-day management activities. By getting these internal champions onboard, it has really strengthened our proposal to secure an agreement with these sites in the hopefully, not so distant, future.

Even during an increasingly difficult time to enjoy the lighter side of the student experience, there are still a few helping hands out there.

One of these many hands is through our new partnership with Papa John’s who already have a stronghold in the student market but were very excited to learn of a brand-new way to reach students, at a fraction of a normal out-of-home advertising spend. 

Papa John’s have booked our first board at a large accommodation site, housing students from the University of Essex. We are excited to support their current student special offers in February 2021 and we look forward to seeing this relationship grow as our network continues to do so. 

Finally, we have been deep in the Target Student R&D department looking at ways to improve how our brand building medium can track, measure and analysis the student demographic that walks past our screens every day.

We have come up with a cost-effective solution working with our good friends over at Blino to re-develop an extremely lightweight depth sensor which will not only be able to track football, it will be able to measure dwell time whilst also sending all the data remotely to our data portal.

This will give our clients a cross section of the student demographic that they are targeting and therefore a much deeper understanding of who their customer is. This is an exciting first step in the long-term vision of Target Student and we cannot wait to see it in action later this year.