The Elf on the Shelf visits Wrexham Glyndwr University

If you have kids or know anyone who does, then you're probably aware of the festive Elf on the Shelf concept...and the creative destruction and general naughtiness it brings to households across the world.

This year, the elves have been making their mischief beyond our homes and one such Elf, named Owain, has been on a new mission visiting areas of the campus at Wrexham Glyndŵr University.

Social media is more competitive and noisy than ever before, but the winter period and Christmas holidays offer a great opportunity to cut through and get attention for your institution. With this in mind, the university thought about using an Elf to leverage the popularity of the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon, with a feeling that most audiences could relate to this and enjoy watching Owain cause chaos on campus.

"We planned the campaign because we wanted to boost engagement as well as create a buzz on campus and to highlight our great courses and facilities to prospective students, " says Antonia Jones, a Digital Manager at the University.

"We planned out the locations to showcase many of our new facilities to prospective students. These form part of our £60m Campus 2025 re-development strategy, which is designed to enhance all of our campuses and ensure students have access to the best facilities and learning environments.

We have been selecting areas so we can show off our great facilities like our state of the art Merlin flight simulator, used by our aeronautical engineering students. We are doing a big push at the moment to highlight our Campus 2025 strategy and all the new facilities that will be created across our campuses so thought this would be a good opportunity to do it in a fun way."

The campaign is playing out well. Pictures and videos of Owain are being liked and shared across Twitter and Facebook, and in the first week, the reach was 41,000, with over 1600 engagements.

"And staff are also genuinely interested where Owain the Elf will appear next and have been requesting his presence at charity events on campus," added Antonia.

Traveling back and forth to the North Pole each night to report to Santa can be exhausting. The same might be said about delivering campaigns for your institution. And much like you, we're continually feeding the machine - planning, testing, measuring and looking for new creative opportunities.

Will your university teams be on the naughty list or good list this year?

Whichever list you're on, we wish you a Merry Christmas, a well-earned rest, and a happy New Year from everyone at TerminalFour!