St Aloysius' College:
Virtual Tour Website & Films

St Aloysius’ College is a leading independent school based in Glasgow.

In 2019, Maguires created the highly successful ‘The Start of Something Great’ campaign to promote their annual open day (view the full case study here).

One year later, and with the world in the throes of a global pandemic, the likelihood of a traditional face-to-face open day was slim. Anticipating this, the school briefed us to explore an alternative solution which helped prospective parents and pupils learn about the school in advance of applying.

We knew that a virtual open day would clearly be a necessity. This would allow for direct communication between parents, staff members, and pupils – both current and prospective. To this end, we engaged our events partner (and client) Cameron to discuss the requirements for a live virtual event.

Our ambition was to bridge the gap between the experience of a physical event and that of a virtual one. This would allow prospective parents to tour through the campus at their leisure, getting a sense of the school environment and the beauty of the city centre location.

Our solution was a bespoke, informative and feature-rich microsite that would provide a range of multimedia content which could be explored in advance of the live virtual event. The main body of the microsite was a series of six films that would help to tell the story of St Aloysius in greater detail. Using a range of interviews with staff, pupils and parents, coupled with reportage footage of the campus, facilities and daily school life, the final films each focused on a different element and resulted in over 20 minutes of high-quality content for viewing.

Alongside this, we commissioned a bespoke 3D map of the campus, drone footage of the building exteriors and a 360-degree interactive tour which showcased the inside of the main school buildings.

Finally, the virtual tour website provided a prospectus download (also designed by Maguires) and an online application form for the open day.

The site acted as a vital companion to our digital advertising campaign, which pushed traffic to an online applications page. The virtual tour site was then served to interested applicants as well as being pushed out as part of a separate, targeted social media campaign.

The results for the 2 virtual open days (Senior School, and the Junior School) were hugely encouraging. Since the campaign commenced in November, there have been 26,851 link clicks to the microsite from social channels. Campaign content served on social channels has had a total reach of 65,551 with 28,995 video views by early December 2020.