Goal
Help build awareness and credibility of community college education in Virginia through an integrated, omni-channel marketing approach.
With another agency partner, The Hodges Partnership worked with the Office of Strategic Communications at Virginia’s Community Colleges on a statewide general population research endeavor to help better understand the higher education climate of community colleges in Virginia. Discovering an audience that thought of community college as “good for the community, but not for me,” and pairing it with a 27% decline in enrollment over the previous decade, Virginia’s Community Colleges needed to create a brand platform, and subsequently a campaign, to help shift the community college reputation and drive enrollment.
Earned Media. Leveraging a new chancellor of the community college system, the team developed a thought leadership strategy to not only elevate community colleges to industry and business leaders, but an appeal was made to legislators to support asks made during the General Assembly. OpEds ran in Cardinal News and Virginian Pilot, and the chancellor was featured on Virginia This Morning and WDBJ highlighting the system’s priorities.
Owned Media. Leaning into a new brand platform and a tagline, “Find Your Answer,” social media and video messaging was developed focusing primarily on storytelling from the perspective of faculty, staff and students. The marketing team joined the chancellor on his inaugural listening tour of all 23 community colleges, and interview footage and still photography were continuously captured over the campaign. Footage was used in testimonial content, like this, and for ad placements, like this.
Paid Media. The Find Your Answer campaign had a significant paid investment. A campaign landing page was built, and the request for information form used a person’s ZIP code to push them to their respective college website. Hundreds of assets were created for the paid media plan, which included TV, radio flights on both traditional and streaming channels, social media, search, display and banner advertising.
By December 2023, the data showed that Virginia’s Community Colleges increased enrollment by 4.3% from the previous year, which had no statewide, research-backed strategic advertising plan.
Our campaign had 45.3M digital impressions, 647,000 clicks to the campaign landing page, and over 11,000 conversion activities took place using the tool to find a college or clicking the Apply Now button.
As the campaign was live, we also redeployed the original survey that helped create the Find Your Answer brand platform. To measure the brand platform, the survey showed that advertising increased awareness and perceptions in Virginia’s Community Colleges, validating the “Find Your Answer” brand platform.
Results
- Enrollment increased 4.3% from the previous year.
- The Find Your Answer campaign generated 45.3M digital impressions.
- Brand surveying showed a 19-point increase in the general public’s likelihood of considering enrolling at one of Virginia’s Community Colleges