Sunrise Speaks at ISTE and AIRC; Presents 5 Webinars on Post-COVID Chinese Digital Landscape, Recruitment Outlook, and Virtual Campus Tours
It’s been a busy month at Sunrise! In the past 2 weeks, our co-founders presented sessions at the ISTE and AIRC conferences as a strategic partner to both organizations, and also offered 3 webinars to our network. The five sessions included:
Recruitment in China Post 2020 (AIRC)
Opportunities for Global EdTech in China’s International School Space (ISTE)
Use cases of virtual campus tours in recruiting (with NJIT and SUNY Binghamton)
Trends in China’s digital landscape and how they might affect international admissions (offered twice)
Missed the sessions and want the recording or the slides? No problem! Please email contact@sieconnection.com, and we’d be happy to share.
At the American International Recruitment Council’s annual conference, Sunrise co-founders David Weeks and Gavin Newton-Tanzer presented a session “The View from China: Looking Forward After the Year We’d All Like to Forget” for US university recruiters and recruitment agents. Key takeaways included:
We expect a future surge of Chinese students who previously deferred or delayed study overseas (vaccine rollout times will influence the timing and size of the surge).
After a year of online-only college events, China’s students can’t wait to attend college fairs! Many universities are planning to send alumni or in-country representatives to overcome travel limitations.
New international schools continue to pop up across China, but some parents are “waiting and seeing” by enrolling students in public schools. We expect this will mean that agents helping public school students to apply abroad may find most customers in the next 2 years, while universities would do well to plan on recruiting gaokao track students starting in 2022.
In Chinese social media marketing, video content is quickly becoming king, as video content grows in popularity on Wechat and video-only platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili skyrocket in popularity.
A few days prior at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), we presented on new opportunities for global edtech companies in China’s rapidly growing international school space. Highlights included:
China continues to grow the number of international schools, with a 10% expansion this year in private international schools and a 69% increase in international schools since 2010.
The pandemic radically accelerated user growth for edtech companies in China, but the edtech space has largely returned to an altered “normal” state in China, with marketing and customer acquisition rising back to 2019 levels and with well-financed (and highly leveraged) edech giants battling for market share in the K12 after school tutoring and English training sectors.
Foreign edtech companies that have succeeded in China demonstrate that finding a unique niche that only a foriegn player can fill is vital, such as CodeCombat in coding education or Duolingo in alternative English assessments.
Finding a well-vetted partner or crafting a targeted and thoughtful direct digital marketing campaign is essential for success. Chinese social media, search, and knowledge platforms are great places to start once you’re sure your website and core product are a fit for the market and accessible behind the Great Firewall.
We also offered a webinar on innovative use cases of virtual campus tours for recruitment together with Jessica DePaul of NJIT and Douglas Harrington of SUNY Binghamton, where we shared best practices for producing virtual campus tours, ways to effectively use them to engage students, and storytelling in the 360 degree view format and what stories are best to include in the virtual format. Access the slides or the recording here!
We also offered two sessions of our own, featuring deep dives on China’s digital recruitment landscape, where we summarized key insights from our most recent white paper on recruiting through Chinese digital platforms. You can access the white paper and recording here.