From students to experts in students – Alumni stories, Oliver Harrison
We recently caught up with 2006 Film & TV alumnus, Oliver Harrison. Oliver is the Creative Director at Campuslife, an innovative company offering a unique range of digital solutions for universities including student engagement and communications. Campuslife, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, has worked with more than 80 universities and student accommodation providers across the UK.
After graduating Oliver and his flatmate, fellow York St John alumnus Simon Horniblow, moved to Leeds to look for jobs in the TV industry. It wasn’t long before they started developing an online service aimed at providing students with basic cooking skills. ‘From our experience we knew that university is the best time to learn how to cook, so we took TV production values we had learned from our degree and working in the industry and put them online. The first iPhone launched around then, so the concept of video on phone was still quite new.’
After shooting a taster tape and mocking up a website, Oliver and Simon took their idea to TV and IT companies. Initial feedback was mixed – the companies weren’t sure what to do with the idea and so the pair returned to their day jobs. Luck struck when, eight months later, Oliver’s father met a chef at Loughborough University and the conversation turned to the service Oliver and Simon had been working on. Loughborough wanted to find out more and commissioned a pilot. ‘We got a 16 week contract to develop a pilot,’ Oliver recalls. ‘They asked us to produce a ten minute show once a week to upload to their website. After the pilot we developed a Gold, Silver and Bronze pricing structure; excitingly they wanted the Gold package. We immediately quit our jobs and set up the business, working out of our flat in Leeds and doing most of the presenting ourselves. Essentially we took the production elements we developed at York St John and in industry in Leeds and brought them into a university campus environment. The first few months were really hard, but we absolutely loved creating Studentcooking.tv and wanted to do it again’.
Filming for Studentcooking.tv
Studentcooking.tv showed students how to cook great-tasting, nutritious meals on a budget, while understanding completely the limitations of a student kitchen and in 2008 the project won a Royal Television Society award for best new media. ‘A year later we rolled our service out to six more universities, taking on more staff to cope with the extra work. A year after that we were working with fifteen universities.’ Filming with students every week helped the ambitious pair build the up a better knowledge Higher Education sector. ‘Simon and I both loved what we were doing and wondered how we could develop our work, through our experiences working with universities we found that accommodation departments were finding it really difficult to get their messages out to students, which provided us with great opportunity to develop our service further, so we set up Browzer.co.uk to give accomodation departments a way to get information out as well as providing a space to host their videos.
Browzer was soon followed by a new platform ‘Welcome’, which enables universities to engage with their students as soon as they get their results, helping give them the best start to their university life. Campuslife now focusses primarily on its ‘Browzer’ and ‘Student Welcome’ products, with half the business dedicated to creating video content, and although the days of working out of their flat are long gone, they are still based in Leeds and now employ 20 people.
The team at Campuslife, with Oliver second from right
Oliver points out that the key to their success is the expertise they have developed around students. ‘Our key USP is the unrivalled access to students that we have through our work, which has allowed us to become industry leading experts in understanding and working with students. This has meant that we can really help our clients deliver the best possible experience to their students, and continues to be something we’re really passionate about. We’ve also been very quick to react to changes across the sector and in technology, allowing us to be fully adaptable to the individual needs of different universities.’
Campuslife also offers students internships and opportunities to gain work experience, helping them develop video production and content writing skills in an industry environment. ‘As York St John graduates we feel this is also a great way for us to give back to University. We have no doubt that we would not be where we are now without the experience we had as students as York St John, so it’s important for us that we’re able to give current students the chance to gain valuable experience that will help them find work once they’ve graduated, we actually have four current York St John students in with us for the next month.’
So what does the next ten years hold for Oliver, Simon and Campuslife? ‘We’re exploring the possibility of moving into the academic side of student communications, as well as adding more products to our service as technology develops. Although we’re predominantly focused on the UK higher education market at the moment, there is also scope looking forwards to explore branching out into international markets, it would be a big leap and right now we’re very much focussed on continuing our work in the UK, but never say never.’
Do you have a story to share about your career since leaving York St John? We’d love to hear from you, get in touch by e-mailing alumni@yorksj.ac.uk.
