University of Newcastle Brings Students From 65 Countries to One Virtual Open Day on vFairs

Reaching Students a World Away

Newcastle’s prospective students are spread across dozens of countries and time zones. A physical open day can only reach the people who can travel to it, which rules out almost the entire international audience the university most wanted to connect with. To reach them all, the event had to come to them, wherever in the world they were.

Safeguarding a Young Audience

Many of Newcastle’s prospective undergraduate students are young, which raised the bar for security and moderation at an online event. They needed to explore, chat, and ask questions freely, but inside a space built to look after them. For Newcastle, safeguarding wasn’t a feature to add at the end. It was a condition the whole experience had to meet from the very start.

Turning Interest Into Enrolment

For a university, an open day is the top of a long funnel. Newcastle needed the event to do real work: build awareness among prospective students, reassure offer holders who had already accepted, and answer the questions that stand between an offer and an enrolment, all without a face-to-face conversation.

A Global Open Day, Open to Everyone

Delivering the Open Day virtually erased distance entirely. A prospective student anywhere in the world could register and join from a laptop or a phone, with no travel required. That reach pulled in more than 1,800 registrations from 65 countries, a global audience no single-venue open day could ever gather.

A Space Built to Keep Students Safe

With a young audience in mind, vFairs configured the platform for extra care. Conversations ran through moderated group chatrooms and help-desk channels, and attendee profiles were restricted to first names or initials.

Booth Q&A was moderated too, so staff could review questions before they appeared. Students could still explore and ask freely, with a little extra care built into the experience.

Live Sessions & Real Conversations

The day was built to move students closer to a decision. Seven webinars ran in a virtual auditorium with over 2,300 total views, letting academic and professional staff speak to questions directly.

Student Connect sessions let prospective students hear from current students firsthand about university life on campus. Virtual campus tours showcased the campuses to students who may never have seen Australia.

Two things made vFairs the right fit. The first was safeguarding. With a young, international audience, Newcastle needed assurance that student safety would sit at the heart of every interaction on the platform, and vFairs could build the event around that from the start.

The second was the team. Newcastle had easy access to the right people across vFairs throughout, from design to coding to the automated emails and notifications. That hands-on support turned a big undertaking into a smooth one, and the university came away describing it as the start of a new partnership.

The heart of the Open Day was an exhibition students could actually walk through, split into two halls: a University hall and a Careers hall. The University hall held program-specific content and support services, while the Careers hall looked ahead to life after study.

Each exhibitor built and stocked their own booth, so every space reflected the team behind it. Inside, a student could:

• Read about a discipline of study, college, or service and what it offers
• Watch videos and download brochures and guides to keep
• Follow links out to the courses and pages that caught their eye
• Ask questions through the booth’s moderated Q&A

Across 16 booths, students made 1,883 visits, viewed 869 documents, and watched booth videos 594 times, turning a flat list of programs into something interactive.