Open Day Wayfinding: How to Stop Families Getting Lost on Campus

Every admissions team has the same story. The family that parked on the wrong side of the site and walked in through the kitchens. The father who missed the welcome talk because the sign said "Hall" and there are three. The guide who spent the whole morning walking people back to the car park. None of it is the family's fault. Campuses grow for a century and the signs are written by people who already know the way. Here is what goes wrong, and what fixes it, from the open days we have photographed and the visitor maps we have built since.

Where families actually get lost

It is rarely in the middle of the tour, where a guide is holding their hand. It is at the edges: the drive to the right car park, the walk from the car to the right door, and the moment the tour ends and they want to find the dining hall, the sports hall again, or the loo. Three transitions, three places to lose someone.

The fix for each is the same: directions from where the person is standing to a specific door, in their hand, before they ask. Not a PDF map of the whole site, which is a puzzle to orient, and not a list of postcodes, which get people to the gate and no further.

What to put in the letter

The confirmation email is the most-read thing you will send. Give it one link that opens a map on the family's phone with the open day already chosen: where to park, the entrance to use, the time of the welcome talk and the route from the car park to it. If the page knows the visitor is a prospective parent, it can show them that and nothing else. On a Signposted page that is a deep link to the audience, so the same page serves new starters and contractors the next day without confusing anyone.

The car park is the first impression

Marshals in hi-vis are a good start, but they are busy at the peak and gone by the second session. Mark the visitor car park, the overflow and the disabled bays as separate places with their own directions, and put the walking time to reception on each. Families with a nervous eleven-year-old want to know it is a four-minute walk, not just where it is.

Turn the tour into a trail

Your pupil guides walk the same route every open day: reception, the quad, the science block, the library, the sports hall, lunch. Write it down as an ordered trail with a photo and two sentences at each stop. Families who arrive between tours can follow it themselves, those who want to linger in the art rooms can catch up, and the guide has a prompt for every stop. In the Ridgeway College demo the trail is eight stops and takes about 45 minutes, which is what most families manage before the children need feeding.

Give them a list to tick

A visitor who has a to-do list behaves differently from one who is wandering. "Book an open day, find the visitor car park, see the science block and library, join us for lunch, ask about bursaries" is five ticks on a phone that keep a family moving and give them a reason to find the admissions desk. It also tells you, in the analytics, which stops people skip.

After the tour

The last transition is the one most schools forget. The tour ends, the family is full of questions, and the admissions office is somewhere behind them. Put the enquiry form on the same page they have been using all morning, with "I am a prospective parent" already filled in, and route it into the admissions system you already use. Our guide to connecting enquiries to your CRM covers iSAMS, Admissions+, OpenApply and the rest.

Do you need an app?

No, and families will not install one for a morning visit. A web page from a QR code or a link does everything above, works on any phone, and costs nothing to update when the science block moves to the new building. That is the whole idea behind Signposted: a campus map and guide the admissions team builds and keeps current themselves, with the open-day trail, the audiences, the events and the enquiry form built in, and your 360 tour embedded if you have one.