BU Research Blog

Bournemouth University students, Georgia Robertson and Jordan Ezra, will be presenting their research in Westminster as part of the annual ‘Posters in Parliament’ event.  Around 40 undergraduates from universities all over the UK will be presenting their research to politicians, policy makers and fellow students.

As a country, we face a number of big challenges – energy provision, health and wellbeing, as well as issues such as sustainability – all of which research can help solve.  Posters in Parliament is designed celebrate the research of some of the UK’s undergraduates, as well as highlighting the achievements of the next generation of researchers, some of whom may well go on to tackle some of our biggest challenges.

Georgia Robertson, an Events & Leisure Marketing student, will be presenting her research into business-to-business marketing, which she began while on her placement year.

“Over the years, email marketing has developed a negative stigma, perhaps because of an increase in unsolicited contact in an attempt to generate businesses leads.  These are known as lead generation emails.  This stigma has led to a dramatic drop in engagement in business-to-business email marketing campaigns, which means it’s important for those involved in the campaigns to know how to optimise their success,” explains Georgia.

“I analysed data from over 500 lead generation email campaigns from my placement to see which variables influenced the success of those campaigns.  These included the subject line, email content and the links in the email.  By exploring these variables, I was able to identify the factors that led to success in email marketing campaigns, which I hope will be useful to businesses trying convert email contacts into customers.”

Jordan Ezra is a Digital Media Design student.  For his final year dissertation, he chose to explore the gradual dissolution of human rights by different world governments and intelligence agencies.

“I’m interested in current world events and particularly how the erosion of human rights has been justified by events of the last 20 years.  My research has shown that it’s becoming more difficult to tell the truth – an interesting conclusion, given the rise of ‘fake news’ stories,” says Jordan.

“By analysing events of the last 20 years, I found that legislation across the world is limiting our human rights through increased surveillance and co-operation with corporations, among other issues.  My analysis showed that the justification for this dissolution is related to events such as September 11 Twin Towers attacks and subsequent war on terror.  There’s an increasingly blurred line between privacy and security, which is beginning to spark debates around the need for more transparent democracies.”

Georgia and Jordan will be presenting their research in Parliament on 14 March.  Posters in Parliament is part of the British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR), which Bournemouth University will be hosting in April.  If you’d like to attend and support some of the BU students presenting their research at BCUR, please register on Eventbrite here.