Inside LovePG: University of Liverpool’s approach to meaningful hybrid engagement

We're excited to welcome Andrew Cooper from the University of Liverpool as a speaker at our LovePG Marketing Conference 2025, taking place October 2025! In this blog, they share insights from their work in hybrid postgraduate recruitment, focusing on student-first events that blend simplicity with impact.

Redefining hybrid engagement at the University of Liverpool

The term hybrid normally creates the picture of a talk being delivered online and in person simultaneously, but at the University of Liverpool, we created a Hybrid Delivery Team to explore how best to engage all students in various mediums. Ultimately, like with all good student recruitment and marketing role, our team’s ethos is about supporting students to reach the best destination via the right mode of delivery. For Postgraduate Students, on-campus events are important, but due to many reasons, online often is still the main form of engagement, so how do we ensure we service our potential student needs?

Bridging UK and international recruitment

My role is unique within the university, as I sit across both UK and International Recruitment. This enables me to share best practice between the two teams but also helps us to ensure that we support as many postgraduate students as possible in simplified events. When I say simplified events, we make them as simple as possible for the students, whilst creating more complicated ways of working for myself. This is by making the booking process and follow up communications as minimal and easy to understand.

Collaborative planning with a student focus

By collaborating with key colleagues across the recruitment teams, but also closely aligning with colleagues with CRM and Marketing, we ensure that the whole student experience is put at the centre of the activity we offer. By understanding our target audience (International, home or both) we can plan the format of our events accordingly, in person or online. If we run them on campus, do we make it hybrid. This then ultimately affects the booking form and comms we use.

Personalising the postgraduate student journey

Once this is decided we can plan how to make the student journey as personalised as possible. If we know a student is interested in just Postgraduate Taught or Postgraduate Research, lets show them the options. Do we need a long-complicated form or just ask a few simple questions.

Tailored communications for varied delivery modes

Then we need to consider what types of comms we are sending. How long are they? What content is in it. We need to consider different key messages depending on the target audiences but also on the delivery. Providing webinar links closer to the time so we can track attendance compared to being able to share a venue address from the start of the journey. If it is a hybrid event, how do we tailor the messaging, so we are providing information for the same event but also being different due to the delivery and thus making both attendee groups excited to attend, feel informed and that they aren’t missing out by attending in the way that they are.

Enhancing the student experience through strategic collaboration

Working closely with Marketing enables that we hit our key messages, and working with CRM enables us to provide a personalised service, time key communications as well as capture lead generation. By liaising with our academic and support colleagues, in addition to involving student ambassadors, we can insert additional event reminders, that add to the personalised experience, but without sounding like another corporate email. In addition, a simple video embedded in an email can be more impactful than a text-based email, so when should we use videos vs traditional emails.

The importance of adaptability and evaluation

Adapting is also key to running our hybrid events. This can be during an event (finding out a room is to small or the academics zoom link no longer works after it has been shared), but also adapting the approach for future events based on your evaluation. Again, planning earlier with your Marketing/Data Insight teams enables you get the key information you want that allows you to be self-critical, as well as learning what the strengths of the events are. How and when should we evaluate our events. How do we share with guests and how do we encourage people to complete them.

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