The Online Campus Tour

As I’m sure I don’t need to remind the admissions professionals out there, the campus tour is one of the key components of the college visit. It gives students the opportunity to really experience your campus, to take in the flavor of the surroundings.

I remember taking many a campus tour when I was doing my college search. In this era before the web really took off (I started at Duquesne in the fall of 1994), going to campus and taking the tour, either alone or part of a group, was one of the main areas that influenced the decisions of myself and my friends.

Flash forward 15 years. Now, we’ve got phantom applicants – people who never requested information about our schools. They never came to an open house or stopped by a college fair. They never came to campus and took they tour. One day, their application showed up in a pile.

I can’t say I’m surprised. With all the resources we put online for them, they never have to let us know they want information. Any more, if they did, we’ll just inundate them with emails and printed brochures that mostly point them back to the web.

So, how do they get a feel for campus? How do we best show off our institutions? The “virtual” tour has been a staple of college and university websites for many years, but lately, they’re getting more and more technical and offering a deeper look at campus life.

We had an online campus tour on our site when I started my job as web person. It was basically a campus map with an image-map on top of it with points of interest across campus. Clicking on one would take you to a static page, a few small photos and some text. The text was my favorite part – it was light-hearted and full of interesting facts. When I was first looking at taking the job here, I took the tour and I learned a lot about the institution.

After several years of the same tour, we finally reached the time to re-do it. It had fallen woefully behind the times.

There are many ways to design your tour, and during our brainstorming phase, I think I looked at just about every college online tour out there. Some were great, some were awful. A few companies develop campus tours, and some vendors were better then others.

Our Public Affairs office and Admissions team brainstormed what we’d like to see in our tour and worked with New Perspective, an audio/video/interactive development agency based in Pittsburgh, to develop the tour.

Building the tour was a team effort. We selected all new photography (and shot new photos where needed), wrote new text and recorded and edited all the audio snippets. New Perspective built the Flash engine, shot new video where needed, and edited the video snippets. The process took a few months from start to finish, and last Spring, we launched the new tour.

I’d like to go into some detail about our tour, and hopefully give you some ideas if you’re thinking about re-doing your tour.

When taking the campus tour in person, you’re usually led by a guide, be it a student or admissions professional. They know how to efficiently lead you around campus and ensure you see all the important sights. We wanted to recreate that with our online tour, so if you’re new to Allegheny you can be guided. But, if you’ve already taken the guided tour and want to jump right to a specific place, you have that option as well.

If you choose the guided tour, you start, as you would on a regular campus tour, in our admissions office. After a brief introduction, you’re led building by building around campus. If you choose the “on-your-own” option, you’re given free reign of the map.

We’ve numbered and named just about every building, with each one being a stop of the tour. You can move around the map by clicking and dragging, like a Google Map, and we’ve also got a smaller navigation window if you want to move around faster. There are some surprises in there too – watch for little cars and even the occasional flock of birds.

Once you choose a building, you are taken to a screen about that building. You see a large photo, as well as the new copy we wrote. We’ve added audio narration and a media gallery, which includes photos and occasionally, video clips.

One of the problems with Flash-based tours is that it can be a bear to update or add a new photo. Usually, you have to go back to your developer and those changes take time and money. Our tour is built on several XML files, so adding a new photo or changing text or even swapping out a header photo is as easy as editing that XML file and republishing. It has made our lives much easier in maintaining the tour. For our end users, the tour is constantly changing and evolving, so hopefully if they come back they will see some new content.

In the end, there’s no substitute for the on-campus experience, but at least with our online tour, people can get a small taste of what life is like here. Hopefully, that will lead them to come visit, apply and matriculate.