How to Attract More Members to the International MBA Forum?

Alex and Raabend, thank you very much for your thoughts.
Agree with both of you about the reasons the International forum is lagging behind the US one.

However, I think we can improve from where we are today. In my mind there are 2 things we can tweak:
- Number of people visiting
- Percentage of those visitors that return

We can improve one of these numbers. Either one will help. Any ideas are welcome.

I feel one of the biggest drawbacks of the International forum is lack of information about the schools.

One of the things that can be done is have a write up of the Non-US schools split into the UE, E, NE, TE etc just like we have on the US side.

Also, maybe the our International members can suggest good admission consultants who can provide answers to questions about the local programs.

I was thinking about doing something like this. But any mention of rankings causes so much disagreement and arguements. Also we dont have Hjort anymore - the foremost authority in terms of rankings.

I was thinking of a split like :
UE
LBS, INSEAD
E
Oxford, Cambridge, IMD, HEC Paris, IESE, IE, ESADE
NE
Cranfield, Manchester, Cass, Imperial, St. Gallen, Lancaster, St. Gallen, SDA Bocconni, etc.

But honestly I dont have any data to support these rankings and I dont know enough about half of these schools to make this call. Let me start up a new thread around this.

I would give this time bb. Even within the main b-school app forum, our discussions so far focus on the top 15 schools and that drives the rest of the discussions.

I really like how this forum has grown this year, and '10 will hopefully be better.

1 - I "googled" it
2 - Is the definition of international MBA applicant people outside USA or those who are applying to schools outside the USA ? A big ad at the FT would be good
3 - As most of the people who apply to schools outside the USA are internationals , though we've seen interest growing among Americans, it is clear the target market here, though I'm not sure how to tackle it.

bsd - I believe that IMD would be a UUE, because of its class size

Thank you for the feedback.
About #2 - I think this International MBA forum's target audience is anyone applying/interested in Schools outside of the US. There are not many US students who do that, but there are some.

The only solution I came up so far is to clone BSD_Lover and get a few of them to run this thing.

P.S. I don't think FT ad is feasible in the next 30 years

I like the idea about the Admission Consultants - that's pretty good.
The write up is a definite yes, but that will take time and a knowledgeable person.

bb I think there is a large target audience in primarily in India and China (but also in several other countries), that apply to international schools, that we should aim at. Other forums such as pagalguy seem to get a lot of traffic from them. A good amount could come to gmat club instead.

I've posted a more exhaustive ranking thread and am bracing myself for the abuse ....

1. Heard about GMAT Club while preparing for the GMAT. It was about a year ago and honestly I don't remember the first site that led me here, but it may have been Necromonger's blog.

2. Attract more participants in the forum Now, how to do this is the real question. Clearly there is a huge pool of potential forum users - several thousand people apply each year to LBS, INSEAD, IMD, Oxbridge, and many other non-US schools. I don't know where these guys discuss MBA-related stuff online, my guess is mostly nowhere - the BW forums are not a cozy place and there are comparatively few of us on GMAT Club. So the trick is to attract those international applicants who are not regular participants in any MBA forum. IMHO GMAT Club does an excellent job in this respect at least with applicants to US schools, because people start looking for online resources and forums early on, when preparing for the GMAT, and after that they stick around.

3. I have a vague feeling that GMAT Club is primarily a US discussion board and this international forum is somehow secondary. When it comes to GMAT preparation this doesn't matter of course, but once you move on to the real application it is increasingly important to be able to discuss school-specific issues. Just my 2 (Euro) cents, please don't hang me

Perhaps it is this perception that we'd need to overcome to make the international board shine.


My situation was different. I applied to US schools AND just one international school (but will attend the international school) so my interest in the international schools grew over time.

For me, what separates the US MBA forum is not the number of participants, nor the number of school specific threads out there, but the quality of the information that is available only there. I still hang out there and without that forum and posts like "Rhyme's interview strategy", or kryzak's "Knowledge Vault" my MBA pursuit wouldn't have been the same. I continue to learn a lot. Now, we all know that these posts have nothing to do with US MBA programs, but are rather valuable resources for ANY MBA applicant.

So to increase traffic in this forum, we simply need to put "shortcuts" to these valued posts. Any future post that is generic needs to come across to this forum too.

As for me, I initially came to this forum when a current friend who is at Kellogg told me that it's a great GMAT specific site. Boy was she wrong, it's a great community for everything to do with MBA.

my £0.02

-buff


p.s cloning bsdlover??? are you sure this forum is big enough for more than 1?

I would recommend that you add Canadian MBA programs to this forum (in the forum header). In doing so, you will eliminate any uncertainty for members searching for information (albeit when already on the site) or from a search engine. Canadian programs are not "U.S." despite the close proximity of both countries.

Great point - thank you. I think the Canadian programs fell the through the cracks and that's not good.
Along the same lines, we don't have any South/Central American schools mentioned either. Though they don't have LBS's or INSEAD's, there are still a number of strong local MBA programs in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. That's an audience that we have not reached at all.

that's the point I was trying to make in the other post (one on rankings). Basically at the moment this forum attracts people who are applying to schools that claim to be international schools. Schools that cater to a strong regional market don't have a presence here.

Perhaps this is the case because most people join the community for the GMAT and GMAT is only used by the "international" schools to level the playing field.

To attract regional candidates perhaps we need to champion these candidate at the start of the MBA application process (i.e get them interested in staying for something other than the GMAT).

Exactly! School threads.
I was just going through BSD's post on Rankings (ranks-and-clusterings-of-various-international-b-schools-78320.html) and was going to link schools to respective discussion threads and realized that not many of them had a single central thread.
Not sure if there is any reason not to, but I think we have some improvement to do - merge and beef up school threads. I loved the Oxbridge one (but was not sure why Oxford and Cambridge were combined). Sorry, I am a newbie when it gets to International Schools - I am sure there is a good reason.

Not sure if it is related but Oxford is our second most searched term on the website. (internal search)

Let me know if I am off. Is there a post already that links to all school threads?

Fully agree - right now we assume that the international mba applicants will go and dig in the US thread to discover the Knowledge Vault or Interview Strategy. My guess is that the US forum will always dominate, but we could at least provide relevant links in this one as the US one is overwhelming if you are not applying to US Schools.




Good one!

To add to my previous comment (by the way, great thread and fantastic ideas), I think that the "B-School Application" sub-forum should be divided into, for example:
1) U.S.
2) Canada
3) South America
4) Europe
5) Asia
This will cater to a larger audience (regardless of weight per subcategory) and be more relevant for search/app ideas/networking. Members can always pool information from various subforums anyways (on the more general topic of "B-School Application"). Not quite sure if GMAT Club relies upon SEO (search engine optimization), but relevant link popularity from website/blogs might also help. A tool such as Google Analytics may also provide you with a geographic overlay of where members come from (thus providing insight into what locations are important, what browsers, etc.,...