Antioch University Seattle
Founded over 165 years ago, Antioch University pioneered learning without walls and is dedicated to social justice and its students— challenging their limits and enriching their lives. I was the marketing manager of the Seattle campus from 2016-2018, and worked on campus- and university-wide initiatives and projects, and was especially involved with the content creation process.
The Challenge
When I joined the Seattle campus, Antioch University was undergoing a rebrand. Our campus was in the middle of moving to their swank new location near downtown Seattle, and our numbers for enrollment across many programs were down.
Our messaging wasn’t consistent university-wide, and our local messaging wasn’t utilizing our amazing history or the famous alums we produced.
The collateral we were producing was too reliant on program details, not outcomes, and wasn’t moving students down any funnel, as one hadn’t been defined yet. We were missing out on many messaging opportunities and were too focused on small events that weren’t upping enrollment.
We didn’t have a drip campaign for email marketing, nor defined personas to write an email campaign for.
The Solution
I had to quickly prioritize what needed doing on campus (promoting our new building and location, updating all our collateral with the new info and brand, etc.), and balance that with working with four other marketing managers on university-wide projects, as well as working with faculty.
I worked with another marketing manager on creating a styleguide for content, developing a social media strategy, pinpointing what ways we could improve our reach, which included teaching the faculty how they could contribute. I created a university-wide content calendar for managers to share with their faculty. I appealed to faculty by giving them presentations on how their expertise helped our marketing strategy.
My strength in storytelling and writing was applied university-wide to quickly creating dozens of GDN, print, and social media ads aimed at personas I helped develop. I then began working with paid contributors to increase our content output that adhered to our new styleguide, budget, and marketing strategy.
The results were higher enrollment across flagging programs, better brand awareness and ranking on search engines, and a much happier faculty.
Working at Antioch made me a better person, and every bit of collateral I made, or bit of content I wrote was directly inspired by, and dedicated to, the students.
