Northampton College: Boosting Applications with Creative Campaigns

The College was keen to showcase its success by attracting young people to visit its latest series of open events, held between November 2017 and March 2018, to inspire them to apply for a study programme.

The Marketing team approached PDS with a brief to create a new design concept based on its ‘Start your Story’ theme. The College was already using videos of its new recruits explaining why they had chosen the College and what steps they were taking on their journey towards meaningful careers.

The brief challenged PDS to develop the ‘Start your Story’ theme, placing students and their individual journeys at the centre of the concept.

They were tasked with creating collateral that set apart the open events campaign from the corporate brand style, adopting a more fun and contemporary theme, appropriate for the target audience.

The PDS design studio recommended an illustrative route to complement the existing geometric shapes and mono photography of the corporate brand. With the student as hero, line drawings and a script typeface sketched out the steps the student would take to achieve their career goals.

Illustrations included the College building, a laptop, books, and signposts directing the student towards their next steps including higher education, apprenticeships and employment. The treatment was signed off with the strapline ‘I’ve started my story – now it’s time to start yours’.

The new concept became a live video project for design and media students at the College who were asked to film models in their studio so that PDS could overlay an animated version of the illustrations.

PDS arranged for the final video to be projected onto the exterior walls of the College’s campus buildings on the dates of the open events to inspire visitors to find out more.

Once inside, attendees at the open events were invited to stand within life-size die-cut strut cards, illustrated in the same style, to pose for selfies which they were encouraged to share on social media.

As part of the same campaign, PDS reproduced the concept in a range of formats including 48 sheet billboards, bus street liners, all-weather fence banners, press advertisements and a range of web banners and thumbnails for social media.

The ‘Start your Story’ concept devised by the design team at PDS delivered a number of benefits and made a significant impact, generating a high level of engagement on social media and helping to drive traffic to the College’s website. The Marketing team was delighted to see 17% more online registrations overall compared with the same period in the previous year.

Registrations for the open events in November 2017 at the College’s Northampton campuses were up by 29%, and those in March 2018 benefited from an uplift of 39%. Significantly more visitors (71%) attended the event at the Daventry campus in January 2018.

The Marketing team was able to save costs on the whole campaign with re-usable collateral including the video and die-cut cards.

The development of the original brand style created a concept with longevity that the College can revisit over the course of its annual recruitment cycle. The new design refreshed the brand and created a great platform for the development of original content based on the ‘Start your Story’ theme.

Finally, the concept enabled budding design and media students to gain access to live work experience within commercial constraints of budget and time.