Overview
Our team innovatively devised six distinct and unconventional strategies aimed at drawing in top-tier applicants for liberal arts programming in Ontario. In collaboration with Sherpa Marketing, a Canadian organization specializing in assisting businesses with diverse marketing strategies to achieve their objectives in addition to partnering with several large Ontario Universities to develop recruitment strategies to attract the best and brightest prospective students.
Recognizing that attracting the highest quality students is the first step to creating a sustainable model for academic institution success in Ontario, our efforts were directed towards crafting a minimum of five multi-platform information designs tailored to captivate and engage potential applicants.
Role
Branding
Poster Layout & Design
Website Layout & Design
Team
5 Total Members
Duration
January - April 2021
(4 Months)
Research
Problem
We currently live in a society that is highly focused on results-based, high-income careers. Liberal arts programs are currently faced with the challenge of communicating the value of an education that is not centred around STEM. A liberal arts education is seen as a gateway to a wide variety of disciplines, and it’s difficult to communicate a specific “end goal” to a market of students who are increasingly interested in understanding what specific career paths will be available to them at the completion of the program. We needed to answer the question of:
How might we develop non-traditional strategies to attract high-quality applicants to Liberal Arts programs in Ontario?
Target Audience
To quickly summarize what we found from our research in the early stages of the project, we identified four main target groups: students in Grade 10, 11, 12, and their parents/guardians.
We wanted to start as early as Grade 10 because at that age, students are just starting to explore their interests and are taking a variety of courses to see what they like. In Grades 11 and 12, students are refining their options and narrowing down their program and university options. These students are also likely experiencing pressure from friends and family to pick programs that are STEM-based. That being said, we also identified the parents/guardians as an important target group because they can be very influential in the child’s decision to choose a program.
Planning
My team did all of our planning within Miro.
We decided to create 6 artefacts in total:
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Website: Holds all deliverables including additional stats on the liberal arts program for prospective students and their parents.
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Poster: Would be distributed in target classrooms and career fairs, physically posted around, and can also be shared on social media to drive traffic to the website
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Video: Included a mixture of stats and real-life examples
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Wizard: Interactive user interface that will present users with a sequence of dialogue boxes comprised of questions aimed at painting a picture of a tangible outcome in liberal arts for users
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Instagram AR filter: Passive means to grow awareness of pathways and the university
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SMS Chatbot: Active way to draw people back to the website while maintaining constant awareness and engagement with the liberal arts program and university initiatives
​​First Iteration
Deliverables
Branding Guide
Poster
Website
View the website demo below.
Videos
University Promo
Alumni
Students
Wizard
View the demo for the wizard below.
Instagram AR Filter
View the demo for AR filter above.
SMS Chatbot
The SMS chatbot is a software tool that automatically responds and sends text messages to users. It develops an interactive marketing channel improving customer communication and awareness.
​Our goals with it are:
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Create software that delivers personalized content and updates to prospective students and their parents
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Maintain continuous engagement and communication with parents and students
Sample of what a student in grade 12 would see.
Sample of what a parent would see.
Conclusion
Limitations
A couple of our artefacts came with limitations which are:
Video
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Production can be time consuming and have high production overheads
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Difficult to alter and keep up to date
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Can be less accessible than other types of content
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Currently no hyperlink to website
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Does not promote itself
Instagram AR Filter
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Filter cannot link to external websites, but can link to SherpaU’s Instagram profile
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However, there are future opportunities to create more immersive 3D assets than the cards or 2-player interactive game
SMS Chatbot
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Limited responses by customers
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Cost and internal production (Require maintenance)
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Lack of emotional connection
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Made to handle first-level questions
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Can get “annoying” and “frustrating” to end users
Results
Our stakeholders were Professor Gordon Slethaug, and the two resource advisors from Sherpa Marketing, Deanna and Brian.
All three of them thoroughly enjoyed our presentation and our 6 artefacts. The grade we received was high and all of us were very satisfied with the outcome of our project.
Takeaways
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Having group members from different backgrounds and majors gave me a lot of new insight into designing an information campaign
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Have a better understanding of how crucial information design is when designing a campaign to attract students
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Liberal arts has many outcomes and is just as important as STEM programs