Eastern Nazarene College (ENC), located on Boston’s South Shore, is known for its strong religious affiliation and distinctive liberal arts core curriculum, including excellence in science and religion education. The College wanted to promote its message of quality academics, Boston-area location, and diverse student population all under the umbrella of strong Christian values.
Eastern Nazarene College wanted a unified brand identity consistent with its Christian values that would appeal to traditional-aged students as well as working adults. The brand messaging needed to appeal to the greater Christian community and to those who appreciate the values taught at a Christian college.
Bergeron Creative conducted staff and faculty interviews at every level of the College. We conducted a brand communications audit of both ENC and competitive colleges. We facilitated focus groups with traditional and nontraditional students to help guide the brand messaging and imagery creative process. We then utilized follow-up focus groups to test, validate and refine the branding concepts developed in the creative process.
We developed two award-winning brands using consistent imaging to unify both brands—maintaining a visual linkage to institutional identity, while employing very different messaging for each audience. The traditional student recruitment campaign, themed “Many Differences. One Faith.” was both hip and fresh, while the campaign targeting adults was themed “Designed for Working Adults.”
The integrated campaigns centered around the website and included direct mail, collateral and advertising. The new website utilized organic SEO targeted programming and attained top-ten ranking within weeks of the initial launch.
Bergeron Creative developed an award-winning traditional student recruitment campaign, themed “Many Differences. One Faith.” using a series of crosses that morphed to represent the College’s diverse population united by their Christian values. The campaign served to differentiate Eastern Nazarene College from other Nazarene and Christian colleges—as an urban college with a very diverse population.
The response to the campaign was overwhelming; the poster created for college fairs became so popular it needed to be reprinted several times. In addition to the college fair poster, Bergeron Creative developed a complete admissions marketing program that included a series of search pieces, a viewbook and an advertising program.
Bergeron Creative next created an enrollment package targeting adults themed “Designed for Working Adults,” which included a folder with program inserts and a pocket-sized college fair handout.
Eastern Nazarene College wanted a website that would embody the school’s branding developed by Bergeron Creative. The school wanted the website to be informative, interesting, and easy to navigate. The main Internet marketing objective was to increase admissions activity online, which meant the site needed to appeal to undergraduate, graduate and adult studies students alike.
The College also wanted the website to be found easily by qualified prospects conducting searches on major search engines like Google, directories like Yahoo and links from higher education portal websites like Peterson’s.
The website Bergeron Creative designed and developed brings the admissions process to life in the virtual world, encouraging campus visits, building a mailing list and increasing online applications. The homepage navigation prominently features the admissions offices by target audience—allowing prospective students to quickly access the appropriate admissions information.
Mirroring the look and feel of the admissions materials, the site was programmed using search engine friendly code and was further optimized to take full advantage of organic search algorithms. Only three months after the launch, prospect traffic increased due to exposure on search engines including two number-one rankings in Google for “accelerated degree programs” in both “Boston” and “Massachusetts.”
Eastern Nazarene College realized that Internet marketing provided a powerful opportunity to reach prospective students. After analyzing existing traffic to the website as well as the current competitive environment on the Internet, Bergeron Creative developed a website positioning strategy targeting high-value keywords. These findings were used to optimize the website to take full advantage of organic search algorithms.
Eastern Nazarene College had some of its best years ever in terms of applications and enrollments using Bergeron’s branding and enrollment strategies. The new branding differentiated the College by showcasing the uniqueness of its academic programs, its commitment to leadership development and its focus on Christian values. Bergeron’s branding strategy sparked renewed interest in the College from within the Nazarene church as well as the wider Christian population.
“Al Bergeron provided some of the most useful tools and insights for recruiting that we have had. His expertise and creativity are greatly enhanced by his ability to be professional and a pleasure to work with. The work Bergeron Creative did for us 10 years ago is still valuable today. I highly recommend Al and Bergeron Creative Studios,” said Sue Ramey, Art Director at Eastern Nazarene College.
Call us at 617-834-4840 | al@bergeroncreative.com