John F. Kennedy University was explicitly founded with the intent of carrying on its namesake's progressive legacy, to make a positive impact on society. At its heart, JFKU was a university founded by and for those seeking a rigorous education, with social justice and community equity at its heart. They wanted to serve their community and sought an education that enhanced this service.
Yet, there was a major disconnect between the university’s core values and how it communicated to the market prior to my arrival in 2015. In an attempt to compete with diploma mills, the true product was lost and the core value of the university was buried. The brand messaging put forward instead focused on a product position of convenience and affordability that did not align with the major drivers of its most successful students. This product positioning spoke to a very different segment than those attracted to the core university values of equity and community service the university lived by. The marketing simply wasn’t attracting people with a social justice mindset looking for a rigorous education. As a result, enrollment was dropping dramatically.
Rebranding as a transition
The rebranding began in 2015 with the “When did you know?” campaign began reestablishing the university’s voice with a focus on the core values of JFK University and the student’s journey.
Beyond this campaign the community of students and mentors became the center of our communication with the community. Community events became a large part of how we engaged with the community at larger. How we spoke to the student and presented information dramatically shifted.
In 2017, we completed our rebrand with a new and more vibrant visually representation. The university moved from its corporate color palette that appealed to those focused on economic value, to a one that better reflected the bright and optimistic outlook that came with our service-focused student body. However, this was more than just a palate change. With it a new website, and outreach collateral was launched that put the core values and story of JFK University front and center.
The new brand identity reflected the “student first” and social justice culture that existed at JFK University. Everything was recreated from the ground up with the idea of enhancing the student’s experience from the first interaction. This first contact generally happened in two ways, through the website or in-person outreach events.
New Vision for the Website
Before this shift, the website was, to put it kindly, institutionally focused. Organized by the internal structures of the university and gave no thought to the journey of the student or how they experience the university. With the new website design, I wanted to encourage exploration, in a way similar to how you would wander the campus of a university. Building interest and finding deeper relations as you explored.
The old site, with an inadequate menu structure, sparse, and uninteresting content spread across 5000 unnavigable pages, lead generation became the embodiment of student exercise in frustration that forced contact with the enrollment team to get deeper information. The new site shifted to a focus on people, highlighting the works of the mentor/faculty that they would be engaging with on a daily basis, the campus organizations they will engage with, and staff that are available to support their education. The website’s presentation became highly visual and dynamic. It became the visible representation of their path to success. With the new site, each page was filled with photographic images from around the campus and university activities, curated specifically for that page, and highlighted the unique experience of each program and its students. A visitor was always presented with a level of detail appropriate to where they were in their exploration. The detail of the text-based information increased as a potential student dived deeper into the site. This new site, now refined to approximately 10% of its former size had few repeating images at launch and a significantly higher number of visited pages. But most importantly, it also produced the highest rate of conversion in 8 years.
Program brochures and leave-behind collateral
JFK University has 2 main focuses, law and psychology. Each had multiple disciplines, with distinct cultural differences. It was important to the administration to illustrate that they understood the different needs of those students groups. My goal was to speak to this from a potential student’s first interaction with the university whether it is online or in person. The outreach leave-behinds were redesigned maintaining the core values of the university while better reflecting the perspective of each specific program and focus on aspects of the university that are most important to that student body segment. We rejected the idea of a standard university brochure and instead created a collection of information pages that could be assembled into a personalized brochure based on the interests and needs of each student. Brochures were designed to match the interest level of a student just being introduced to the university and encourage students to explore landing pages focused on the priorities of that student body segment or interest.
This also helped alleviate a point of discontinuity for programs and internal institutions that often reworked industry language due to shifts in understanding, digital and physical collateral could more easily remain in sync. By focusing the printed information on the university and program’s values students already knew they were aligned with the program before seeking deeper information on the website. This route gave the university its highest level of conversion.
Show don’t tell
Descriptive photography and video that focused on the student's journey became massively important as we moved to more visually illustrate the university’s core values and community. Surprisingly prior to my arrival both video and photography were used sparingly, essentially nonexistent outside of the websites homepage.
Video became an integral element in the University’s communication strategy to connect with students on a personal level. This important tool was key in illustrating the student’s journey, faculty expertise, and university successes and it was used heavily throughout the new site and on social media. Multiple series were produced to speak to the wide variety of experiences students had on campus. From student and faculty profiles, “TedTalks” style mini-lectures, event highlights, and program overviews. I produced over 150 university culture and curriculum videos that generated 820,000 organic views with a combined total of 375,800 minutes watched.
The new website was designed to be very visual in nature. It featured over 2000 new images, across 500 pages in addition to the new faculty expert guide with updated and relatable headshots and video introductions for key faculty. Campus images were shot to be dynamic and energetic.