Established by Flinders’ Student Experience team in week one this year, Ping! is the new e-newsletter, sent every Wednesday during the semester to all current Flinders students.

This new initiative is already seeing positive changes to student communication and staff are encouraged to use Ping! when communicating with all students, or with large student cohorts.

Publication guidelines are available here, with articles sent through the easy to use submission form – bookmark the page for easy future access.

How is Ping! enhancing student communication?

1. It’s created a more consistent approach

Ping! is creating consistency in all-student email communication in three ways.

First, students have said they receive too many emails from the University. Ping! provides a channel for staff to regularly communicate important information to students. This is reducing the number of emails sent to students.

Second, the format for Ping! is small, conversational paragraphs of content with links to more detail if needed. This makes it easy for students to read at a glance and ensures consistency in messaging sent from Flinders.

And finally, Ping! is distributed on the same day each week. This has created consistency in when students can expect to receive information from the University.

2. It’s created more relevance

Ping! is tailored by College, so students only see information relating to the College(s) in which they are admitted to a course.

It’s also tailored by international or domestic student status. For example this means the ‘international news’ section only displays in the version sent to international students.

Ensuring the information students receive is relevant to them increases the likelihood they will read the content.

3. It’s trackable, which helps foster continuous improvement

Ping! is sent using the University’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This means open rates, top-read articles and click rates are all trackable. The Student Experience team uses this data to help tailor future content and identify trends.

As always, the proof is in the data, and already the Student Experience team have observed excellent engagement, with the newsletter achieving an average open rate of 34.5 per cent in the first half of the semester (across six editions). This is well above industry standard of 21.8 per cent.

4. It encourages the student voice

Until now, there hasn’t been a way for students to share information easily with the wider student community. Ping! allows students the opportunity to do this.

For any questions about Ping! please contact Student Experience at student.experience@flinders.edu.au or on 722 18943.