When communicating with people in emails and on webpages, ACU will usually use the prospective student's given name. If we capture the given name and surname together, this personalisation would not be possible.

In some cultures, it is common to refer to the first name as the surname and the last name as the given name. To avoid misunderstanding, we use the terms given name and surname. This approach caters for everybody.

Each piece of information we collect has a specific purpose. Contact details including given name, surname, personal email and mobile number allow MER to re-contact prospective students. Other fields such as campus, study areas, audience and year graduate(d) school enable MER to send prospective students information about important dates and events that are specific to their education stage and their interests.

For more information, please go to the main Form standards for prospective domestic students page.

It is best to ask for important details the first time, as not everyone is willing to fill in another form to provide additional details to ACU. To encourage our user to fill in the standard form, we offer a competition incentive. Also, a single standard form has a much higher completion rate than its predecessors demonstrating that this approach is effective.

ACU has hundreds of courses. During the initial consideration stage, prospective students often haven't chosen the course they are interested in. So ACU communicate with with prospective students about the study area they are most interested in.

Course preferences are captured at application stage and it is then more appropriate to communicate about specific courses. 

Direct mail is an expensive communication method and MER rarely uses it. Our standard forms are used at the early stages of our marketing cycle, so we don’t collect postal addresses through them.
Once a prospective student applies, we capture their mail address details at that stage. This is the best time to use direct mail, as there’s a smaller but more engaged audience and the potential for conversion is greater.

Also the longer a form is, the less people complete it so and ACU wants as many people to complete the form as possible.

ACU used to collect this, but it was not effective at targeting different groups of future students. So we changed to ask instead if the person has graduated school. These current audience categories align well with ACU events and marketing campaigns to provide information about relevant information and events during the year. These audience categories represent the current with the segments ACU uses to target different groups of future students and measure performance. 

ACU received high volumes of spam to all online forms in 2019. CAPTCHA is used to reduce the risk of your IT platform becoming unreliable due to the amount of spam, to avoid wasting time communicating with fake leads, and save a substantial amount of work in cleaning up spam submissions.

CAPTCHA was the only tactic that stopped the spam (a range were tried) so this should be added to every form

The year graduate(d) school field is used to identify what grade school students are in their studies. It is also used to find out how long it is been since recent school graduates have left school. This is a fundamental piece of information in our segmentation approach. Without it, we will not be able to segment by Year 12 school students, school leavers and non-school leavers.

It also allows ACU to capture some year 10 and 11 leads. They aren't eligible to apply to university yet, but they will be in future years, so we can store these for later use.